Airing Your Social Stances Can Make Or Break How Many Dates You Get, According To Tinder

Hey, I get it! If you’re passionate about something, it’s hard to keep that enthusiasm concealed – especially if you’re opening up your heart to a stranger with the intention of dating and maybe even marriage eventually. Last I recalled, however, the taboos you typically don’t speak of at the dinner table are politics and religion, so it was intriguing to see that, in Tinder’s recent “Year in Swipe” review, the dating app company revealed that going public with your social stances can either make or break your match. 

75% of singles reported wanting a match who is either respectful of their social issues or they themselves are personally invested in social issues. Tinder also found that 53% of respondents thought regular voting makes their match more attractive, and 47% even went as far as to say that if their match doesn’t vote, it’s a deal breaker. Furthermore, Tinder bios are now more representative of social activism, with the appearance of the topic in bios increasing by 84% this year alone! But has this always been the case, or are politics seeping further into every aspect of our lives, including our romantic relationships?

This Shouldn’t Take You by Surprise, but It’s Getting Worse

Researchers have been analyzing how voting dissimilarity can impact a romantic relationship for quite some time now, but with Tinder’s newly released data, it appears that the trend toward polarization is only getting worse. Data from Pew Research in 2018 demonstrated that 77% of married or cohabiting partners were politically aligned. The term tossed around in academia is “political homophily,” meaning that people form relationships with people who have similar political characteristics, and has actually been found just as impactful as educational homophily.

Simply belonging to a particular political party isn’t always the deciding factor, however, as research suggests that a shared level of political engagement is more meaningful in dating than ideological predispositions. Think about it, if you’re civically engaged and it really gets under your skin when people are quick to complain yet choose not to vote, you might inadvertently feel like that person is failing a duty of their citizenship. Now, with political engagement hitting the mainstream (I mean, what other time in history could you tweet at a Senator? And then they tweet back at you?), it’s near impossible to avoid politics, no matter how hard a person tries.