Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Once upon a time, couples could meet, fall in love, get married, and raise a family together despite differences in political opinions like stances on gun control, climate change, or any of a thousand different issues.
Those days are, I’m afraid, over.
Seriously, I’m glad I’m married. I’d hate to be trying to date in this current environment, especially when you’re someone who is easily googleable.
Yet it seems that many subjects are more fraught than others, according to one dating app.
Opinions surrounding climate change are the biggest “dealbreaker” out of several topics when it comes to finding a match on the popular dating app OKCupid, new data from the company shows.
Among 250,000 users surveyed worldwide over the past year, OKCupid found that 90 percent of daters said that it’s “important” for their match to care about climate change.
Meanwhile, among 6 million users surveyed over the past three years, 81 percent of daters said they were “concerned” about climate change — topping other potential dealbreaker issues like gender equality and gun control.
That’s good news for gun folks, right?
Well, maybe. It’s a matter of degrees, really.
Looking at other top dating dealbreakers for OKCupid users, the data scientists found that 76 percent of 650,000 worldwide daters said that their partners must support gender equality over the past year. Meanwhile, 66 percent of 2 million U.S.-based daters said that they were in favor of stricter gun control laws over the past three years.
Of course, this kind of flies in the face of other data we’ve seen of late. So what gives?
Well, it’s important to remember that OKCupid isn’t a polling service looking a random sample of the American population. They’re looking at members of the site.
Rather than reflecting the American population as a whole, they’re reflecting the kind of people who go to OKCupid looking for love.
A lot of people who already have families may view gun ownership differently. Rather than it just being them they need to worry about, they realize they have people they love and want to defend. That can change one’s opinion on guns in a hurry.
However, all that said, the fact that this is a thing at all is troubling. While most people have always had a few things that were dealbreakers for them–smoking, not being religious, and so on–the idea that political views can be that high for so many people really does reflect one of the problems with our society, namely that people can’t have a personal life devoid of politics anymore.
It used to be that you could be close friends with someone and never know their politics. It just didn’t matter and no one cared.
These days, it’s such a factor that no one is allowed to exist without their political views being described almost 24/7.
And if you don’t talk about your views, views will be ascribed to you, so you might as well jump in with both feet.
And for single folks, that might cause some problems.
Ultimately, though, in this day and age, that’s probably for the best. My friends who married before politics mattered that much often complain about their leftist wife or husband being an idiot, so maybe this isn’t such a bad thing.
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2022/03/13/guns-dating-apps-n56298