I called Jeanne Safer to talk about her new book, I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics, because I needed advice.
Safer, who is a liberal psychotherapist, has been married to conservative National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser for almost 40 years. I’m not facing such a strong clash of ideologies, but I have unfollowed my grandmother on Facebook.
No, I haven’t unfriended her. And that’s an important distinction. Because when I tell Safer, she gets a little concerned.
“Uh oh. Do you want to know my advice about Facebook? Avoid it like the plague,” she says. “Unfriending cannot be fixed very often. It’s too great a wound. Why risk a loving relationship because of something like that? … This unfriending thing I think is the scourge of our time.”
I clarify to her that I still love my grandmother, and we are still friends on Facebook. I just don’t want to see her political posts.
“Oh,” she concedes. “Well, that’s not a bad idea.”
In case I ever do change my mind, she warns me that she’s heard of many relationships destroyed by politics on social media. Two brothers unfriended each other over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. An almost 80-year-old man lost his friend of 60 years after the guy unfriended him over President Trump.
These kinds of rifts happen all the time, but people don’t often talk about how to keep politics from ruining our closest relationships.
“They don’t talk about it at all,” Safer says, laughing. “Really. You know? People are so busy fighting with each other that they never think, wait a minute, why are we doing this and how can we stop?”
Safer interviewed 50 people to get that conversation going. In I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics: How to Protect Your Intimate Relationships in a Poisonous Partisan World, she shares tips for addressing a universal problem, one that has only grown since 2016.
The reason people do fight with each other about issues like abortion and gun control and the person in the Oval Office, she explains, is that we’re all believing the same delusion: that we can change other people’s minds.
“The thing that I discovered that was the most important mistake that people make — can’t even say it’s a mistake; it’s an attitude — is that we go into these fights with the agenda of changing the other person’s mind to feel like we do,” she says. “Even if they disagree profoundly with you, they can have reasons that are moral reasons for their positions.”
And social media isn’t the only problem. If you love someone whose politics you hate, Safer says, don’t drink and argue. Don’t raise your voice. Never start a sentence with “How could you possibly think … ?” Don’t send someone a partisan article out of the blue when you know they’ll disagree with it. And do remember that having the right political views won’t make you a good person.
How do you know which relationships are worth maintaining? Consider what the other person would do if you were in the hospital.
“My criteria for core values is very simple and very specific. I call it the chemotherapy test. And actually, this was coined by my husband,” she says. “When you’re lying in the hospital bed, having chemotherapy, you do not ask the political affiliation of the person standing by your side getting you through it. That’s what counts. That’s love.”
She would know: Safer and Brookhiser have both overcome cancer. They may not agree on social policy, but they have agreed to support each other.
But if you do find yourself away from the hospital bed, wondering why in the world that person could say such a thing, remember that politics isn’t everything.
“You don’t have to be stuck forever in these awful fights. By thinking about this, by realizing it’s a psychological issue … and looking at your own behavior, you can really shift this,” Safer says. “And you can save almost all of these relationships, if there’s something really there. I think that’s wonderful news. Because we’re ready to be living in two different countries. But we really don’t have to.”
When I call my grandmother to tell her I’m writing about unfollowing her on Facebook, she laughs.
“Having a loving family is much more important,” she says. “If that’s what it takes, yeah, it’s okay. Tell them that your granny loves you more than she loves politics.”
