Apropos of Valentine’s Day, and of my recent engagement to a life-long Arkansas Democrat, relationships have been on the brain a lot lately. My new Facebook friend Carrie Sheffield recently published an interesting column at TIME‘s Ideas vertical about why she can’t date a liberal. The whole thing is worth your time, but this part jumped out at me (emphasis mine):

I’ve dated guys from a smorgasbord of racial and ethnic backgrounds, but that’s a separate matter. Unlike race, being liberal is a choice, just like being conservative is a choice. No baby pops out a liberal or conservative; it’s a state of mind he adopts later on. He may be conditioned from birth, but there comes a time when he chooses Chomsky over Hayek.

My political beliefs stem from data analysis, academic pursuits and travels abroad. Plenty of my close liberal friends who have similar backgrounds come to polar-opposite conclusions, and that’s dandy. But it doesn’t mean I want that cognitive processing around me 24/7 in the most intimate of unions. Tolerance does not equal tenderness. Romance is a union of body, mind and soul, and when we’re out of sync on politics, it’s a huge mental obstacle.

Indeed, there came a time when Emily chose to manage a superfund site in Memphis, Tennessee during graduate school, just as there came a time when I laid down my copy of the New York Times and picked up the Wall Street Journal editorial page for the first time. To boot, I’m a policy wonk for all intents and purposes first, and a campaign hack second; Emily is a dyed-in-the-wool campaign hack first, and what helps get a candidate elected seems to inform her policy preferences. Distance between us, too, exists on whether or not to be partisans. She’s a party-first Democrat, and I’m a “small-L” libertarian; I’ve voted for both Republicans and Democrats in my lifetime (and may or may not have written in “Mickey Mouse” a time or two), and Emily is what I would call a “yellow dog Democrat” — she’d vote for a yellow dog before she ever voted for a non-Democrat. Not for nothing, though, there’s not so much daylight between us on some policy issues, as she’s more of a blue dog than a progressive, and I’m much more socially tolerant than a lot of ostensibly small government types.

My differences with Sheffield are two-fold.

First, I either want cognitive processing around me at least as often as possible, if not 24/7, or I’m not troubled, at any rate, by it being there. Subjectivity, for better or for worse, is part of a larger objective order. All of our very human experiences, including our relationships, are part and parcel of a network of intersubjectivity, that metaphysical space in which personal preferences overlap and clash. Add to these metaphysics of consciousness John Stuart Mill’s work on truth, freedom of thought and expression, and the tyranny of censorship (refusing to date someone is a form of prior restraint, although certainly someone’s morally permissible prerogative since it is a softer form of censorship than jailing someone for not kowtowing to a party or ideological line), and you have a formula in which it’s not only impossible to find someone who agrees with you on everything, but it’s actually a very high political virtue to engage someone from “the other side.” In my own experience, routinely exposing my mind to people with whom I disagree has made me a more effective political actor. If that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right!

Second, just as it was my choice to reject the neoliberal progressivism that was presented to me by some of my educators in favor of embracing the classical liberalism that was presented to me by some of my other educators, so too has it also been my choice at various points in my life to make politics the sole focus. Living in Washington for over four years and taking on six figures of debt for a graduate education in public policy have at least so far paid handsome dividends in my life. But at the end of the day, politics are what I do to put food on my table, and making politics or policy debates the largest focus of my life has sometimes been a mistake. The political skills I have rest in a toolbox filled with many other skills that otherwise lay dormant until I need them, and that’s where they should be. To me there are far many more things that matter in life than mere politics. Not making everything about politics is what permits Emily and me to work. Caring for our dogs, cooking and traveling together, taking in movies, making financial decisions together . . . these are the things that make our life together worth living, not our politics. Sheffield is right to say that romance is a union of body, mind, and soul. That Emily is (a) attractive, (b) intelligent, and (c) kind/giving/charitable/supportive/a-whole-host-of-other-adjectives is more important to me than how any of the particular characteristics necessarily manifests.

The bottom line is that my instincts tell me that it’s not people’s specific politics that make them compatible or incompatible, but how they prioritize their politics within the order of the rest of their lives. But my instincts are based on a whopping sample of me, so I’m curious: what’s your experience?