Romancing the Liberals
Penetrating partisan force fields
Ironically enough, I learned how to date liberals from the one app that promised them the tools to screen me out. OKCupid was supposed to be the safe haven for people who wanted to filter out anyone who didn’t pass a political vibe check. I’d used plenty of dating sites over the years and even managed to pull a few relatively un-trashy women off Craigslist personals back when that was an option, but until OKC showed up I never spent much time thinking about how I came across politically. I was focused on being attractive and interesting, not ideologically compliant.
The pre app days really were pretty good. You used whatever digital photos you already had, wrote a short and snappy bio, and demonstrated the ability to string together a few sentences without glaring spelling or grammar errors. If you could manage that and avoid opening every message with a crude sexual line, you were off to the races. Pictures mattered, since they were the bait on the hook, but the old desktop sites still encouraged a bit of writing where you could show off your wit and creative chops. Swiping hadn’t been invented yet, so you weren’t competing with a wall of professional glamour shots and filtered to death images.
Then OKC arrived, marketed as the dating site for nerds. I was already interested since I count as a nerd myself, albeit not for the stereotypical subjects. I have always had a weakness for nerdettes, and Seattle provided an ample supply. OKC offered granularity in a way no one else did. Users could answer questions generated by other users, choose how they wanted their matches to answer, and assign each answer an importance rating on a five point scale. You could filter by any combination of gender, race, location, and relationship preferences, and slice your potential matches incredibly thin. The site even had a forum welded onto the side where people discussed the meta, how they were reading the data the site provided, and what they believed the numbers said about their prospects.
Up to that point, I knew Seattle was a liberal town and I knew I wasn’t a liberal, but it had never really mattered when it came to dating. Politics rarely came up, and if they did it was after the other person had already decided whether they liked me, so it never changed anything. OKC shifted that completely. The site encouraged long, detailed profiles, and plenty of people took the opportunity to turn theirs into political essays about what they believed and who they refused to date. Some of these writeups read more like manifestos than attempts to meet another human being.
This taught me a few things. First, I needed to scrub any hint of politics from my own profile. Second, and more useful, I realized I could look at the questions people were answering and the ones they marked as important or non-negotiable. Once I saw the patterns, I could reverse engineer a profile that maximized my match percentage with as many women as possible. I wasn’t hunting for liberals specifically. I was looking for women my age who lived nearby, and in Seattle that group happened to be largely liberal. This was not me being a masochist. It was me trying to tilt the odds in my favor in an environment where the default settings were stacked against me.
It was surprisingly easy. All I had to do was answer every question about religion in the most strongly atheist way possible and mark those answers as very important. That part was not even dishonest, since I had no interest in dating a holy roller either. Then I skipped anything that might be incriminating, in my case guns and fiscal policy, and made sure to stack plenty of answers about how I had no problem with gay people and how racism was bad. Those were not lies for me, so they were simple enough to check off. Everything non political could be answered honestly and rated according to actual preferences, since the real goal was to find someone compatible. The trick was in dodging the political landmines. The option to answer a question privately was an absolute gift for anything borderline, so I could hone my potential match percentage without potentially giving myself away.
Now I want to get ahead of a few obvious objections, because the truth is that even though I stayed quiet about my politics and dated women who often said outright that they would never date a man like me, I never had a single relationship fall apart because of political disagreement. I also never had anyone accuse me of being deceptive. The reality is much simpler. Even the people who presented themselves as the most intense and ideological were usually far less informed about their own stated beliefs than I was. Whether the topic was niche sexual identities, socialist economic theories, or postmodern philosophy, I knew more about it than they did. I had learned about these subjects so I could argue against them on the forums I frequented, and that knowledge ended up being surprisingly useful.
This created a lot of funny situations. Women who claimed to hate me and everything I stood for would start to loosen up once they realized I could actually follow the conversation. If they dropped a name, I knew the reference. If they cited an idea, I had read the source. It turns out that being politically literate and socially competent goes a long way, especially when you keep your real opinions to yourself and let the other person talk.
Eventually you would think the jig would be up. They would come back to my place and immediately notice that there were no Che posters on the walls and no Foucault on the bookshelf. Instead they were greeted by an appliance sized gun safe bolted to the floor in the foyer, since that was the only spot where I could anchor it to a joist. The bookshelves held Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman. One entire room had been converted into a mechanical workshop, complete with gaskets on the doors and vents so I could smoke cigars in there without the rest of the place smelling like it. None of this matched the image of the arch progressive they claimed to be exclusively interested in. And none of it ever mattered.
Once I got past their filters and actually met them, all the political issues they claimed were deal breakers turned out to be completely negotiable. It was not only the political stuff that evaporated. The identity based demands fell apart just as easily. If someone insisted they did not date cis het straight white men, it was always interesting to wonder why I matched with them the moment I clicked the heart. If someone identified as gray ace or demi sexual, it never seemed to interfere with wanting to go back to my place on the first date. The revealed preferences were startling, and they showed up with incredible consistency.
I do not think these women’s politics were fake. I think they simply mattered less in practice than they believed. Genuine chemistry and attraction overrode their stated priorities far more easily than they would ever admit. I am (ahem) a smart and good looking guy who cooked professionally and treated my dates well. Once that part was locked in, it became very easy for them to rationalize the arsenal in the foyer by telling themselves I was just prepared, like a Boy Scout. The supposedly problematic books on the shelves became signs that I was well read.
If I am being honest, I suspect the gun thing was a secret turn on for more than a few of them. All it took was one sketchy situation and a whispered question asking if I was carrying, and I knew I had gained a new convert on at least that topic. A trip to the range and a few pointers, and a few of them discovered that they actually liked shooting, and the whole being able to protect themselves if the police were more than a few minutes away part was pretty cool too.
Anyway, I’m not Walt Bismarck so I’ll spare you the torrid details of what I got up to with the tender young liberal ladies after I lured them back to my lair, and I’m not looking to join in on the gender wars so I’ll leave my thoughts on the stated preferences vs the revealed ones and what that says about women for another day. I might still write a full guide laying out what worked for me doing online dating in a hostile environment, for now I just wanted to get the story down because I enjoy telling it, and I thought some of you might enjoy reading it.
Ha! Had some similar experiences in Seattle myself. On one first date, she told me all about her dissertation on Walter Benjamin and NFTs. Naturally, I had strong opinions on the value of each. I gave my usual genealogy of the social degradation wrought by the Frankfurt school, and she leaned right into the playful disagreement. Needless to say, it was a late night.
Conceptual competence and comfort with confrontation shows not only that you can keep up, but also that you can lead — and that's attractive. So later when I'd give her a ride home in my lifted truck or she'd see the wall of tools in my hallway or my crosses and icons on the wall, these became proof points of autonomy and confidence rather than salient markers of incompatibility or difference.
My advice for young men who aren't leftists who want to date in cities that are full of them. When you find yourself seated across from one, lean in, smile, and engage with modesty but conviction. Take an interest, don't be threatened, and be clear about what you believe. Most of all, demonstrate that you can chart the differences between the two of you so that she doesn't have to worry about doing all that herself, or worse, getting lost in the process.
I should go back and read that piece on hick libs. I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm a fourth generation Seattlite. These people ruined the city IMO. Not intentionally, of course, but they did.
Seattle has always been mostly democratic, but it used to be fairly normal with a healthy conservative working class contingent up until the 90s when the Southern Californians, then hicklibs, started flooding in.
Now it's a political joke with a transplant Marxist mayor basically run according to the sensibilities of silly millennial single women.