conservative, moderate, liberal, other

this isn't really a political post

When Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, I was 24 and living with my then-boyfriend in an overpriced apartment in downtown Manhattan. I got home from work on election night and smoked cigarettes and cried and posted something on my instagram stories that if I saw now, would likely render me catatonic with cringe—something ascribing racism and misogyny to Trump voters in myopic terms like IF U VOTED 4 TR*MP U HATE ME BECAUSE I AM A WHITE WOMAN AND THIS IS ALL ABOUT ME SO JUST PLS UNFOLLOW ME BECAUSE U HATE EVERYTHING I LOVE AND U R EVIL. It wasn’t exactly that but you can imagine the horrendous vibes this gal must’ve published from her iPhone 5c:

pretty sure this pic was facetuned btw

My then-boyfriend woke me up the morning after the election, angry not at the results, but at me. He showed me his family group chat celebrating Trump’s win. One of his siblings wrote, “don’t look at Devin’s instagram stories” and a conversation about my “offensive” words ensued. My boyfriend expained that he woke me up so I could delete the instagram stories immediately. This wasn’t the first time he’d asked me to delete or change my posts. We met in a mutual community from which he drew a lot of clients for his business, and he often expressed concern that my online presence might reflect badly on him.

I would call out the hypocrisy in dating a 24-year-old and then complaining about having a partner with impulsive and often irrational social media habits, but the first time we hooked up was after a party he threw, for which the theme was “America”. It was not the fourth of July. In retrospect, we both chose each other despite our values.

After I broke up with this man, he wrote to me in a plea to get back together and apologized for not supporting my “passion for politics” and for taking a “bullshit middle ground approach”. He wrote, “I have already started to read about politics, feminism, travel and other things…just out of curiosity…and it is all very interesting…”

Indeed…it…is………

Three years and one and a half boyfriends later, I fell in love with a twitter influencer who built his following on condemning the cruelty of republicans and the hypocrisy of the political media landscape. He had progressive views and went to journalism school and won awards for writing about mass shootings and the spread of dangerous misinformation. We agreed on all the right policy points and I was never nervous about what he might say in conversation at a party, though, in retrospect, he often made cruel jokes at the expense of my friends, family, and (most often) me.

One night in 2020, he asked me how I could morally justify still talking to some of my family members who voted for Trump. He insisted that if any of his family members did, they would be cut out of his life. I tried to explain how it felt more complicated and nuanced than that, but he dismissed my opinion, claiming that Trump’s policies and beliefs did not directly impact me the way they did him, so I must not have a true understanding of the administration’s evil. I thought about watching the confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh a couple of years prior to this conversation.

That night in my parents’ kitchen, in the height of the pandemic, arguing again about how politics should play into family relations, I felt the same activation of fight-or-flight defense mechanisms that arose in me with my other ex the morning after the election. In both relationships, there only seemed to be room for one point of view, and it was rarely my own. I’d chosen two very different men who both consistently reaffirmed my lack of self-confidence by using opposite language to convey that their love and respect was something I could earn, but didn’t inherently deserve.

The couple of years I spent involuntarily single in my early thirties are a haze of arrested development, eyelash extensions, and social gatherings spent staring down at my own instagram story views. I was on all the apps and I was on them a lot. I went on a date with an ethically non-monogomous couple in Clinton Hill who quoted Dan Savage at me. I paid for Hinge premium and constantly rewrote my answers to prompts about my dating goals and personality, intent on distinguishing myself from all the girls who “could be found petting the dog at the party”.

During those years, I read hundreds if not thousands of profiles written by Brooklyn’s millenial men. They had tiny tattoos and group photos at Jacob Riis beach with their platonic female friends and they told me to “keep swiping” if I wasn’t in therapy or educating myself on capitalism’s many evils. The most common political preference I came across on the apps at the time was not liberal or conservative, but “other”, which inferred some form of socialism or anarchism or combination of the two I hadn’t yet heard of.

The presence of the older men I dated in my twenties filled me with an urge to be in on the American Pie reference without questioning its inherent prejudices. Not laughing at the joke felt like a threat, like it would instantly position me outside the realm of desire, as a living reminder of the feelings they didn’t want to feel—vulnerability and accountability. In 2023, the men I met within a few mile radius of my Brooklyn apartment seemed equally intent on avoidance of self-reflection, but through the alternate mechanism of schooling me on the systems of oppression they’d read enough about to ensure they weren’t complicit in.

On a late summer sunday in 2023, I stood up and excused myself ten minutes into a coffee date with a tattoo-sleeved cartoonist in East Williamsburg. His response to my mention of attending The Eras Tour was a spoken manifesto on why he couldn’t personally justify listening to Taylor Swift. “She literally has the power to end the conflict between Israel and Palestine” he said into his oat milk cortado, “but she chooses not to.” I asked him who he listens to that meets his standard of political activism. He mumbled for a beat before uttering, “Bjork”. I cut the date short, not because I don’t like Bjork, but because I had finally been through enough therapy to prioritize self-respect over the fragile feelings of terrified men, regardless of whether they follow Barstool Sports or can quote Angela Davis.