BUT HOW DO I LOVE A NAZI?

When Politics Invades The Bedroom

Last week, a man messaged me asking about my journey from progressive-leaning ideas to more conservative Christian values. Once one of the Woke, he felt that in the last three years, he had moved towards a more Orthodox view, and his wife, who works with trauma patients, had become more progressive, which was causing some tension in their relationship. He asked me if I had any advice.

Me? I thought. What the heck do I know?

But then I thought again. I have been living in an intercultural romance which began when I identified as a progressive, socialist, feminist, and my now husband was (and still is) a conservative Catholic, bullfighting fan.

Maybe I did know something that might help this couple love each other in a world of ideologies tearing itself apart.

And this topic has become a growing concern of mine. I was once (and still am) extremely concerned about the planet we are handing over to our children…but now, looking at the divorce rate and birth rate in the West, I wonder if we will have enough children to hand anything over to.

We need children, we need a legacy to care enough to invest in the future.

You can learn more about the the real concern of population collapse here in this amazing talk by expert Stephen J. Shaw.

We now have a growing increase in ethical non-monogamy, dog strollers, and stars like Emma Watson offering us ideas of self-partnering, but no one is teaching us how to stand by each other long enough to reproduce and parent humans who aren’t as emotionally resilient as we had all imagined.

As Gen Z Freya India details in her work, divorce and broken families have had a bigger psychological impact than we first thought when proudly proclaiming that Mum and Dad being happy is what matters most.

When I see child-free people list their freedoms, I feel so far away from these people that I don’t know what to say, even though…I used to be one of them. So let’s just start with this reminder that these people who seem so different from us…are us.

I have moved from left-leaning ideas to more middle-of-the-road/conservative Christian ideas, and I detail this change in my piece A Closet Christian Comes Out.

Now, my husband and I share political views that are remarkably aligned. Some might even say I’m more conservative than my better half; I’ve heard of this happening. But when we met, so dramatically misaligned on paper …what on earth made the relationship work?

How could I love a Nazi?

And how on earth could he have time for a Lefty Looney?

If I had to put it into a nutshell, which is what posts like this force one to do…I would say that it was because we were from two worlds. I was an exotic Australian woman from the outback, and he was a dashing Spanish man. There was curiosity. There was interest. There was room to listen. There was not so much of a rush to fill in each other’s gaps, and there was space to say, “Well, this person is different. This person was raised in a completely different culture. They are human…and that’s the most interesting part. That’s where we truly connect.”

I learned that a conservative man felt more “feminist” and respectful of women than many of the feminist males I’d dated, and my husband learned that caring about money just for money’s sake would leave one with a dead life.

And from these ten years together, we have changed each other. I’m now the one who drags us to church, and he is the one who convinces me to think twice and from both sides before coming to any old school, concrete conclusions about what’s right and what’s not.

In many ways, I understand Charlie Kirk saying that we should find a spouse who matches us perfectly on paper, but life and love don’t always work that way.

And maybe being open to loving something outside of our culture of ideas could help round us out and heal.

I do agree that you do need a few fundamental things that hold the union together, but I don’t believe they have to be the words or ideas that the modern world uses to divide things into. Even though we were very different, my husband and I still agreed we were focused on family, creativity, open-mindedness, being socially-minded, and spiritual. We even did a parent course that helped us find these words to help our family remember what it is creating and how it is united.

So when I went to reply to this person asking my advice on how to deal with a union in which modern ideologies seemed to be pulling us apart, all of these thoughts came up, and I remembered this long journey to finding myself on the exact same page as my soulmate.

This was my response: We used to disagree on many topics, and he was actually amazing. If things got heated, he would just say, “You’re not ready for this conversation, “ and even though I found this infuriating at the time…he was right. You cannot speak to a progressive about some topics because they refuse to put down their emotions and refuse to truly hold another idea in their head. In general, they are far more volatile and resistant to ideas than conservatives because they feel certain but at the same time very uncertain in their correctness. It’s an uncomfortable cocktail. But my husband put peace, respect, and unity before getting worked up about how “wrong” I was. He was just a good, solid man, and I think over time, hearing him and hearing some of our friends, I just had to admit that these people with different views were intelligent, great people, so then the views themselves must not be evil. I told my husband about your question and he said the most important thing is to accept someone’s views and not be intent on always trying to change them. It’s true - he has these views, but never tried to convince me. I could see he felt it wasn’t his job. And then one day, of my own accord, I went to church - he wasn’t even going regularly. So I feel like I’ve made this change myself, and it’s important for your wife to feel that. She might want to listen to the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast or read The Case Against The Sexual Revolution.”

And this was another thing my husband added when he heard of this man’s query.

“The problem with people is that they keep putting themselves in other people’s shoes, but they keep their own head. And they are walking around in someone else’s shoes, confused. You need to put yourself in someone else’s head AND someone else’s shoes. And that is not an easy thing to do. And another thing, I never thought “I can’t love my socialist, feminist wife!” It was more like I thought…my wife has a toe I don’t like so much and I’ll just deal with it.”

He didn’t define me by my political beliefs; he saw me as bigger than that…even if I didn’t. And we all need to see each other as bigger and more beautiful than these two very narrow and ever-maddening political teams.

He does famously have the patience of a priest, but that doesn’t mean he is a pushover either.

I’m worried that as young women go Woke-Left and young men go Ultra-Right …we will miss what we really want, which is a warm human heart, a soft mortal body, which to lie our soft mortal body next to…in which to create a soft and tender baby.

Fury and division will have us on our screens, angry but pacified with porn and AI girlfriends, or self-partnering or ethical non-monogamy and dog strollers, and no ability to create a family that means more than the mad political forces needling us all with The Nothing.

The world is asking you…

How you could love a Nazi?!

Or a lefty loony, but the true question is, how do you dissolve an ego?

How do you remember the sweet and unique scent of a man or a woman? How do you remember the fire and magic that comes from two worlds colliding?

How can you not love an imperfect, wondrous human?

And I want to take this last moment to offer permission to women, to those women who seem to be moving to the Left and cancelling friends and possible love interests because…how could I love a Nazi?!

Don’t let politics get in the way of the human. My mother, who was a fierce feminist and had a deep rage at what she saw as the mistreatment of women and the poor, she offered me a very important, magical moment of permission…permission I would like to pass on to you…so ready to cancel love, marriage, family, and babies for the sake of an idea that might not work.

When I met my husband and learned his views, I said to my mother, “Well, I guess that’s that. Even though he is a DREAM and treats me in a way that no man has ever treated me…it will never work.”

She winced a moment and said, “You’re not going to find someone you completely agrees with. Abi. I don’t agree with a lot of what your father thinks.”

It was a small moment, but one that changed the course of my life and mind.

It was permission from a very hard-line feminist whom I had modelled myself on.

It was permission to chill out. And how welcome it was.

What a relief to my all-consuming and soul-destroying righteousness.

You can and must and should… love a “Nazi”.

And you do that by getting your self out of the way.

And you will see the good that comes.

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