Watching the Election with My Republican Boyfriend

It's like this, often.

Until it doesn't.

I usually cope with our differences the only way I really know how: By ignoring him. Or, occasionally, backing down. Changing an opinion is the kind of painful process neither of us choose to endure. Instead, we pretend to listen, and make lazy attempts to consider the other's stance. But in the end, there's no meeting of the minds. There's a moving of the feet, as in, we walk away from tender subjects.

Pro-choice, it turns out. Sweet relief. We're still standing.

Election night, though, presents another problem entirely. The morning before, I point out that we need to find a bi-partisan or unaffiliated bar to watch the election in tomorrow. He had other ideas. “I honestly don’t think I want to watch it with you," he explained. "Whoever wins, we both lose. If Barack wins, I'll be furious and inconsolable. If you're around, smiling and happy, I'll literally hate you.”

He barely backs down when I protest, and then offers a solution, maybe the first political peace offering we've ever really had: “We have to set up rules."

"Regardless of the outcome, no cheering or rubbing it in one another’s faces. Fair? I’m dead serious about this." He describes election night as “fifty times more intense” than watching his football team—the Texas Longhorns—lose a game.

[Yeah, he’s from Texas. And yes: I've been told his parents are the definition of capital-C Conservative, and have been fairly warned to not talk politics when I meet them for the first time this Thanksgiving.]

Come election night, we're unable to find a bar we can agree on, so we settle for watching the results trickle in, together, in our living room. He's unwavering: We have to watch Fox News. So I deal with Shepard Smith's blithe optimism for Romney's prospects. Even as Obama snags several battleground states, Smith's grin is unwavering. Then Obama wins Pennsylvania. I glance at my boyfriend over the top of my laptop, and watch as his smile slides off his face. He is gritting his teeth, and a grimace slowly envelops his face.

I do an awkward victory dance before skipping off to the bedroom. I feel his angry eyes on me. I revel in Obama's domination with co-workers, and fire off overzealous tweets. I watch Obama's speech on how the nation fell in love with Michelle like he did.

I'm alone, in bed, in tears.

Eventually, he joins me under the covers. He's upset. He's half of this country. And—get this shit— I console him. I wrap my arms around him, even as he tells me he's mad at America, and me, by proxy. I remember something Obama said during his speech earlier: "Each of us... pursue our own individual dreams. We rise or fall together...as one."

The two of us have many shared dreams, but some of his beliefs cut far right from my own. What's it mean for us moving forward?

Maybe he's right, about my heart controlling my politics, instead of pragmatic sense. Maybe I'm right, about his mind interfering with his compassion for other humans.

But, hey, that's America, right? We're lucky enough to be able to assert our opinions in safety, separately but together. If we lived in a country fraught with perils for trying to cross ideological lines—and there are plenty—either our beliefs would be silenced or they'd create the kind of social barriers that'd prevent us from ever sharing an apartment to begin with. I've got the right to love who I want, on my own terms. Even if he's an unsympathetic, compassion-lacking monster (in the voting booth), I still find something to love about him, something that goes beyond any of that. And it begins to show itself as the key to any of it working in the first place: At the end of the day, it's the respecting of one another's opinions (and the ability to separate our own from the other person) that matters. It's ending the day, despite our differences, sleeping in the same bed.

In many ways, there are fewer things more American.