Modern Love: Across the Great Divide

I used to have a sound-bite I’d drop into conversation amongst my like-minded group of liberal friends. I’d say, with more or less disdain, “I don’t date Republicans. I think it’s bad policy.” This would elicit some amusement from my friends and a pang of foreboding in the recesses of my brain, like a foreshadowing that someday I would grow up enough not to make comments like that. Or that someday I would fall in love with a Republican.

I did exactly that, though when we first met, politics were not really an issue. John and I met in Rome five years ago this spring, while we were both studying abroad. As if that weren’t enough, I saw him out of my window, sitting on the balcony below my apartment. A recklessness I have yet to fully outgrow made me call out to say hello, and a self-consciousness I will never outgrow made me duck back into my room shortly thereafter. When he came up to say hello later, and as we got to know each other over the next couple of weeks, the only debate we ever came close to having had nothing to do with politics.

“Who’s your favorite -ini?” he asked me, as we were standing in Santa Maria Maggiore.

I thought I had heard him wrong. “My favorite what?”

“Boromini or Bernini?” He nodded down at the floor, where the latter –ini was buried. I fell for him in a series of moments just like that. As it happened, we each chose a different –ini, but we decided to get gelato instead of argue about it.

We went back to our respective colleges about a month later and fell out of touch, until last winter, when I found him again. He had been, in many ways, the one that got away: the first guy who had ever made me feel like my entire self was entirely fine just as she was. It was a miraculous feeling, one that kept me poking around for him online every now and then. On one of those occasions, I actually found him and—with no small amount of anxiety—sent him an email. He answered quickly, and a few months of emails became a few months of phone calls became meeting in Washington, DC one Sunday in August.

In another city of columns and marble, he interlaced our fingers and told me with a grin, “You know, I’m really glad you didn’t get married in the last five years.”

And I fell in love with him all over again.

We got to know each other again more thoroughly this time, filling in gaps we had forgotten or never really gotten around to filling when we were in Rome. I learned about his time in the ROTC; he learned about my sometimes contentious relationship with my sisters. We figured out that in spite of his not liking cocoanut, my cocoanut-oatmeal cookies are his favorite. Some knowledge came more by osmosis than outright conversation, so I guess it was not all that surprising when his tone changed noticeably one night over the phone.

“I want to talk to you about something.” He spoke with the tone of someone gingerly stepping out onto a frozen pond, not sure if the ice is solid yet.

I became cautious. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Healthcare.”

“Ah.”

The time had come at last.

John was raised Republican in Virginia, in a Roman Catholic family. It is worth noting that my mother would correct me with her time-honored admonition: “One raises hawgs. One brings up children.” This reproach is an excellent example of an odd element of my Northern upbringing, which made me very receptive to my sweetheart’s Southern charms: for as long as I can remember, my mother’s best friends have all been Southern. Therefore, with help from my father of course, I was brought up by a pack of Southern women. And I mean Southern with a capital S. As a result, where many of my friends have a more or less dim view of the South, I have no problem with it. Actually, I think they do a lot of things better down there—not the least of which is to bring up somebody like John. My mother likes to claim that I was “bow-un” (rough linguistic approximation of “born”) south of the Mason-Dixon, but I never felt that Fort Lauderdale really counted.

Therefore, for maternal reason, upbringing did not separate us as it might have, in terms of geographical prejudice. It did, however, separate us in terms of politics.

I myself was brought up Democrat, through and through, in one of the most conservative counties in Illinois. I had thought I was fairly radical, until my family moved to northern California and I enrolled in a high school on the Berkeley border. I had to add a few darker shades of blue on my political color wheel after that experience. Nevertheless, I was as much a “cradle Democrat” as I was a “cradle Episcopalian.”

John brought up the question of healthcare as the first step into an arena where we were both fairly certain we wouldn’t agree on much. During that first conversation, I was more on the defensive than anything else: when in doubt, defend Obama. John was not on the offensive by any means, but I had become so cemented in my party’s line that I hadn’t bothered to get many details. As my beloved Republican respectfully began to ask me for specifics to back up my arguments, I found I had few, if any. The next day I did some research on the healthcare reform and figured out why exactly I thought what I thought.

It was a miracle: my Republican boyfriend was making me a better Democrat.

We agreed after that conversation, in tones of relief because there had been no yelling, that we should bring up a contentious issue maybe once every couple of weeks, to keep things honest and interesting.

A few months later, we had our first fight in earnest while he was visiting me in Boston. In the intervening months, John had picked up the sometimes annoying habit of pressing political issues when I had no particular interest in their being pressed. The evening of our fight, I was making dinner for us and some friends, and he brought up tax breaks.

In retrospect, the most dangerous part of our conversation was not the fight itself but the fact that we were fighting with blunt ideological instruments. We never used any specifics—no percentages, no actual statutes. As the fight progressed (or rather, devolved), we essentially became caricatures: Blue and Red yelling at each other from opposite sides of the aisle or, as it happened, my kitchen.

We made up later, but the fight still bothered me. I realized that we hadn’t actually been discussing anything; we hadn’t been trying to accomplish any understanding. We were just yelling at each other. I stepped back from the fight and thought about what I believed, and why I believed it. When I called him and delicately brought it up, I found he had been having similar worries.

As we talked about it, really talked, we found out that we could understand where the other was coming from. He told me he wants to believe that he can be wealthy: that he can work hard, earn a good living and not have the government take more than half. I told him that I didn’t believe the super-rich should receive tax cuts simply because they were super-rich, because I don’t believe the trickledown effect works. We talked about the Citizens United decision and discovered that we had some common-ground on disagreeing with the decision. Miraculously, we found that when we weren’t yelling, we could actually hear each other.

The greatest challenge I have observed, in politics and relationships, is an all or nothing mentality. How can anything work when “give and take” becomes a spiteful form of “you didn’t give me this, so I won’t give you that”? If you think you’re always right, then the other side can’t be anything but wrong. These ideas seem so obvious, but watching any political coverage—or my most recent argument with my boyfriend—would prove otherwise.

After we had fought, but before our real conversation, I went back into my living room where John had stationed himself on the couch. We had, in effect, gone to our separate corners, as much as one can do that in a studio apartment. I nudged his leg down from where he’d propped it on the coffee table and sat down on his lap. I looked him square in the eye.

“I’d rather fight with you about things that are important to us than fight about things that aren’t.”

He smiled at me, the same smile that made me weak in the knees five years ago and still does, and said, “Me too.”

As I was giving my best friend the rundown of the weekend John visited, I told her we had fought, and she asked what about.

I told her: “Tax law.”