Top Highlights

• The impact of this poisonous political climate on our bonds with spouses, lovers, family, and friends—abetted by the ranting 24/7 news outlets—is disastrous and tragic, and it is continuing to escalate with no end in sight. Our social circles have become so insulated and homogeneous that many people, particularly younger people, rarely venture outs...
• Wakefield Research found that 20 percent of couples are now fighting more ferociously and frequently over Trump’s policies than about money, the most contentious marital issue of all time.
• The key to lasting change, I believe, is realizing that political fights in intimate relationships are not really about politics. They stem from our compulsion to change other people’s minds so that they will feel and think as we do. Even if they do not and cannot, we keep desperately trying to transform them.
• There is a pernicious assumption that transcends party lines, ideology, gender, and age. It is responsible for the most bitter, persistent, and interminable fights—the kind that destroy relationships with people who love each other. This is the unshakable conviction that it is not only possible but imperative to change another person’s political op...
• People do change their minds about politics and many other things, but never because we make them do so.