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BRUSSELS — On Tinder, Daphne made a point of letting potential partners know she was a liberal. But it was while using a different dating app — the Inner Circle, which doesn’t allow you to display your political beliefs — that she eventually met her now ex-boyfriend.
Not that she cared much at the time. In the wake of the pandemic, Daphne, who asked not to use her real name for privacy reasons, decided not to worry too much about political differences.
As we’ll discover, it didn’t work out.
Daphne is one of thousands of single people working in the Brussels bubble and looking for love. But within that bubble are people from across the political spectrum, and — shock horror! — they don’t always get along. And with two wars raging and a predicted surge in support for the far right in the EU election, that divide could become even greater.
Marjorie Libourel, a Brussels-based matchmaker and relationship expert, said she has noticed growing political intolerance. One recent client, she said, was a right-leaning man, who explicitly asked not to be matched with a leftist woman.
“There is definitely a tendency to have almost a mirror effect — a narcissism when people want to sort of date themselves,” said Libourel, who has spent the past six years helping people find their soulmate.
“I would never match a Tory with a vegan Marxist who doesn’t believe in capitalism — there’s no way it’s going to work,” explained Libourel.
Back to Daphne and her ex-boyfriend (who we aren’t naming for obvious reasons). He’s conservative, she’s a progressive feminist — but at first it didn’t matter. By the time things started to go sour, they had moved in together.
Despite always holding views on the right side of the political spectrum, Daphne says her boyfriend started delving into anti-woke literature and “expressing more and more strong sentiments in favor of the Israeli government, often echoing narratives that I found very troubling.”
As the political chasm between the two widened, Daphne found herself increasingly uncomfortable at family gatherings filled with right-wing ideology and sprinkled with anti-Palestinian rhetoric. “They just assumed that I agreed with them,” she said.
Then came the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Our debates grew more and more fervent,” she said. “It wasn’t a matter anymore of agreeing to disagree — our values were at stake.”
They broke up a few weeks later.
Europe’s polarization problem
In the world of dating apps, filtering out those with opposing views is very much a thing.
According to Micheal Kaye, associate director of global communications at OkCupid, a dating app that matches profiles based on a large set of questions: “Some [European] countries have a higher rate of people looking for daters with the same political views than the United States.”
Kaye said that in France, over the past three years, a whopping 75 percent of OKCupid respondents said they would prefer to date someone who shares their political outlook, compared to 56 percent in the U.S. Elsewhere in Europe, the figures were 73 percent in Spain and 67 in Germany.
That could also explain why France, where the legacy center parties have been all but wiped off the political map, is the only EU country with a dating app targeting supporters of a single camp. The pitch of Droite au coeur, a right-wing dating platform, is to “connect women and men proud of our country, and sharing the same values.”
It’s not just the apps highlighting and promoting a separation between romance and politics. In Brussels, the NGO Fossil Free Politics held a Valentine’s Day event called “Never Kissed a Lobbyist” based on the British slogan “Never kissed a Tory,” used by politicians and opponents of the Conservative Party.
Easier said than done
Can you keep politics out of the bedroom?
That’s what Georgia, a Brussels-based professional in her twenties, tried to do in her previous long-term relationship. Georgia (not her real name) went as far as to call for a moratorium during the 2020 U.S. presidential election that saw Joe Biden take on Donald Trump.
That’s because there would be tension or arguments each time her then-boyfriend, who at the time was working for a far-right member of the European Parliament, would say something in support of the right-wing firebrand. “For me it was so personal, whereas he only saw it from a distance,” explained Georgia, who’s half-American.
The call to separate the personal and the political didn’t work and the couple split up not long afterwards.
“I was very unsure about raising children with having such different political views in terms of what you impart to the next generation. Like, what are the values that are important to you?” said Georgia, who added that she returned to cycling after splitting from her car-loving boyfriend who had made clear his dislike for cyclists.
If some couples appear more successful at keeping their political misalignments at bay, it’s often because the divide isn’t that great anyway.
Miguel, who aligns with Renew’s liberal stance, said that the ideological divide with his Danish girlfriend, who works for the Greens, allows for “really heated debates, but never to the point of breaking up.”
For instance, when it comes to climate change, he said, “we both agree on the fact that that’s a life-or-death situation.”
“Where we disagree,” he added,” is the role that governments and the private sector have to play — who has to pay for it.”
Yet Miguel admitted that they have been staying clear of potentially more divisive topics, such as the war in the Middle East. “It’s very touchy … we have avoided discussions and we just look at the facts,” he said.
As for Daphne, whose ex’s views became more right-wing, she said: “It’s impossible to leave our politics [behind] because the way that our lives are built is because of politics.”
“Politics is in everything — whether we like it or not, so we can’t just say let’s get politics out of it.”
