CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — As Americans prepare for another high-stakes election cycle and the 2026 midterms, a new book reveals how political polarization is reshaping family life. Drawing on interviews with 125 people in politically divided relationships and a national survey of nearly 1,000 Americans, the book explores how some couples develop strategies for navigating disagreement, while others experience political differences as moral conflicts that threaten their closest relationships.
Couples in cross-cutting relationships — those in which romantic partners have dissimilar politics — may tell us a lot more about the current state of democracy in the U.S. and how to address our social and political divides than couples who are in lockstep politically, says Emily Van Duyn , the author of the forthcoming book “Hearts Divided: How Politics Shape Our Closest Connections” (Oxford University Press).
Van Duyn, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said that how these couples navigate tensions such as negotiating which TV news programs to watch and whether they do it together or alone, and how they manage contentious discussions with one another or family members reflect the challenges in broader society. As concern grows about the corrosive impact of political polarization, misinformation and declining trust in democratic institutions, Van Duyn argues that many of these challenges are first experienced in the intimate sphere of family life.
“Our relationships are showing symptoms of a systemic problem,” she said. “Many of the people I interviewed were grappling with whether and how to hold onto their relationships and what they believed was right. We need to get good at having hard conversations — politics included.”
Van Duyn said her hunch going into the research was that the nation’s increasing political divisiveness was changing Americans’ personal relationships as well. While some scholars advocate promoting interaction with people of differing political beliefs as a way of attenuating polarization — or perhaps making people from opposing camps dislike one another a little less — “we don’t know what that looks like in practice,” she said. “What if this Democrat or Republican is someone with whom we share a home, a family or a life?”
Equally important, these couples’ approaches to or avoidance of political communication are part of their socialization of their children, influencing whether future generations will view voting, activism and engaging in amicable discussions with others who have differing beliefs as essential to democratic processes, she said.
The book explores the relational impacts of trends such as people adopting their political affiliation as their core identity, the corrosive effects of political disinformation and propaganda, and perceptions that romantic partners are living in separate realities when one person embraces partisan conspiracy theories and ideologies.
Van Duyn’s first book, “Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics Secret” (Oxford University Press, 2022), focused on a group of progressive women in rural Texas who met in secret to discuss politics and engage in activism after Donald Trump became president in 2016.
“I was curious about the extent to which this was a broader phenomenon, that people would have different political beliefs from their partner and what that meant for how engaged they were in politics and their experience of politics in their everyday life,” the author said.
For the current book, Van Duyn, interviewed 125 people across the country who were in cross-cutting relationships. She also surveyed 502 people in politically similar relationships and 491 people in politically dissimilar relationships. Her research spanned 2020-2024, a tumultuous period that included a global pandemic, a contested presidential election, an armed insurrection and an attempted presidential assassination.
The sample included people with mixed-sex, mixed-race and mixed-gender relationships; those who were getting married the next day and some who had been married for decades. Sometimes couples’ political differences existed from the start, while in other instances one partner changed parties or beliefs later. “There are many who have found themselves in relationships with people who they don't agree with because of those circumstantial changes,” Van Duyn said.
Some interviewees were eager to stress that it was possible to have a happy relationship with a partner with differing political views, including one person who relished having “a sparring partner” in-house. Other individuals were adamant about the impossibility of maintaining any type of connection with an out-partisan partner “because what it represents to me isn’t just politics; it’s their thinking; it’s their morals,” one interviewee said.
Another individual disclosed that she and her spouse had created a “cue word” that they used to signal when their discussions were getting too heated and they needed to disengage, and also when their interactions with extended family members who had differing political views were escalating and the couple needed to leave.
“Although my focus was romantic relationships, there were other relationships that were implicated in how they experienced political difference within their family,” Van Duyn said. A surprising finding for the author was the ways in which romantic partners’ political differences affected their children — and how children’s politics had a reciprocal effect on their parents. Such families included a pastor’s wife who discussed the challenges of having a husband who was a Trump voter and a daughter who recently came out as gay.
“Prior research has overlooked the varied outcomes in experiencing political differences with our partners, and one of those can be media consumption — how much news we’re consuming, which media outlets or commentators, whether we believe in a QAnon conspiracy or not — and that can be a huge dividing factor in a relationship,” Van Duyn said.
The author followed some interviewees over multiple years, allowing her to observe how relationships evolved over time. Some of those interviewed remained with their partners, while other couples were torn apart by their political differences.
Along the way, the author explores unequal power dynamics between romantic partners and whether these may lead to political suppression. Similar periods of social and political turbulence in the nation’s history catalyzed change, and Van Duyn ponders whether it’s time for the U.S. to reimagine its system for elected representation, as the nation did many times in the past when it reached comparable inflection points.
“Rather than turning on each other, we need to look at the people we’re electing and the system that we are helping to support, the democratic structure in our institutions and how we can make those better rather than saying, ‘My neighbor who voted for Trump,’ or ‘My husband or wife who voted for Kamala Harris, they’re the problem.’”
“I don’t think we can just talk our way to healing, although talking is a great start,” she said.