Arthur Ellis is an independent writer with a strong interest in UK politics, public affairs and accountability. He writes about how political decisions, public debate and government policy shape communities across the country.

Dating in a big British city as a millennial is already difficult enough.

You spend a week exchanging messages on an app, asking the other person if they have any pets and so forth. Eventually, you find an evening when neither of you are working late, exhausted or already busy. You pay 8 quid for a glass of wine and sit opposite a stranger hoping that, just maybe, something might click.

Then, 25 minutes in, someone mentions Trump, or Palestine, or Brexit, or Transgenderism, or Immigration, or Reform, or climate change. Take your pick, the list goes on.

Suddenly, you’re no longer two single people trying to work out whether you fancy each other. You’re Question Time panellists who happen to have ordered cocktails.

I’ve had this happen more times than I’d like, and there is now a new complication: young British men and women increasingly don’t seem to be moving in the same political direction.

Young women have become an important constituency for progressive politics, particularly around issues such as Gaza and trans rights. Meanwhile, a noticeable group of young men – and, to a lesser extent women -are moving rightwards, with Reform and Restore attracting those concerned about immigration, safety, taxation and national identity.

This creates an awkward question for dating: what happens when the people we’re attracted to are increasingly likely to disagree with us politically?

For anyone right-of-centre, it can sometimes feel as though certain opinions disqualify you before you’ve even had the chance to show yourself off. Especially as a woman, may I add.

Let’s say that you think immigration is too high, or don’t think that men can become women. Perhaps you voted Tory in the past and are now considering Reform. Maybe you think Britain should spend more time worrying about housing, wages and public services at home, rather than airports in Pakistan.

None of this tells someone whether you’re kind, funny, loyal or capable of maintaining a healthy relationship. But, on a date, political opinions can suddenly become character references.

Mention Reform and suddenly you’re “the Reform girl”. Question the latest protest and you’re a “ ”. Express frustration at Gaza dominating every political conversation and assumptions quickly follow about everything else you believe.

The stereotyping works both ways. A man can hear that a woman attended a Palestine march or votes Green and construct an entire personality around her. Yet neither is particularly conducive to romance.

Researchers use the term “” to describe our tendency to form relationships with people who share our political outlook. So perhaps we’ve always wanted someone who broadly sees the world as we do.

What feels different now, however, is how quickly we’re expected to establish it.

Dating apps have transformed romantic compatibility into a checklist: How tall are you?; What do you do for work?; Do you drink?; Do you smoke?; Do you have children?; Do you believe in God?; But now, one’s political opinions are also important.

A major 2025 international study involving more than 13,000 single women across 144 countries found that political orientation was associated with preferences for political similarity in a long-term partner, particularly among those with stronger political views.

I understand why values matter. If you desperately want children and someone else doesn’t, that’s probably worth discovering before date 14. But do we really need complete geopolitical alignment before the starters arrive?

What concerns me is that political opinions increasingly seem to have become shorthand for someone’s entire character. Instead of disagreeing with an opinion, we decide what that opinion tells us about the person expressing it, irrelevant of other factors. And once politics becomes a proxy for character, compromise becomes considerably harder.

There is some reassuring evidence, however. Research into politically different couples suggests that disagreement itself isn’t necessarily the relationship killer. The intensity and quality of political conflict matters too.

In other words, perhaps we disagree is more important than we disagree. And that’s what worries me about modern dating. We’re becoming so accustomed to sorting people politically online that we risk bringing the same mentality into real life.

Swipe left. Unfollow. Block. Next.

Dating surely requires the opposite instinct. It requires curiosity.

I don’t need someone to have voted exactly as I did in every election. I’d rather discover whether they’re kind to waiters, whether they make me laugh, whether they love as much as I do, whether we actually want similar things from life or whether conversation still feels effortless three hours after we were supposed to leave.

Values matter, but values are bigger than politics.

Kindness is a value. Loyalty is a value. Family is a value. Generosity and honesty tell me considerably more about whether I could build a life with someone than their opinion of Nigel Farage.

We’re already surrounded by politics every time we open our phones. We argue about these issues online, hear about them on television and discuss them at work. Must they dominate our dates as well?

Perhaps Britain’s growing political gender divide really will make relationships more complicated. But relationships might also be one of the few places where we can discover that somebody on the other side isn’t quite the caricature we’ve constructed online. There was something rather nice about meeting somebody and discovering that you liked the same films, went to the same gigs and both had an inexplicable obsession with !

Maybe that sounds superficial, but I don’t think it is.

Those seemingly insignificant shared interests are often how people begin discovering something much more important: that they enjoy being around each other.

Maybe the most rebellious thing two politically divided millennials can do in 2026 is sit in a pub, put their phones away and discover they both love the same terrible film.

He can find out that she voted Reform later, and they can leave solving the Middle East until at least the third date.