Love Grows as We See the Person, Not the Politics
When my group of Queens baby boomers reconnected on Facebook around 2010, it was electric. After forty years apart, people who shared the same childhood blocks were suddenly swapping stories, organizing meetups, and rediscovering a sense of community. For a while, the warmth felt effortless.
Then came 2016. Politics landed like a grenade. Arguments escalated. People unfriended each other. Affection that had seemed indestructible evaporated in real time.
Recently, I met one of my closest childhood friends for lunch. He’s politically blue. My current Orthodox community skews red. Before we met, both of us heard the same whisper from our respective camps: “How can you sit with someone who votes that way?”
We ignored it. No topic was off-limits. Some conversations were heated. We also shared personal stories and frustrations. The meal began with a hug and ended with explicit expressions of love. What surprised me was that the difficult discussions didn’t weaken the affection. They strengthened it.
This led me to a more sober look at why that happened. Not a feel-good explanation, but the underlying mechanics.
Love and dislike are not mysterious forces. They follow patterns. Every person has traits we appreciate and traits we don’t. Love grows when we connect to the human goodness in someone. Dislike grows when we lock onto their flaws, opinions, or behaviors that irritate us.
Hot topic conversations only increase love when three conditions are present.
1. The conversation feels safe.
Curiosity does not appear because people suddenly value it. Curiosity appears when people do not feel attacked. A warm tone, a humanizing question, or even a calm presence lowers the emotional temperature enough for curiosity to surface. Without this sense of safety, political conversations turn defensive immediately.
2. Respect becomes a behavior, not an internal belief.
Recognizing the G-dliness of another person is an abstract idea. It only matters when it turns into concrete behaviors: slowing down, listening before rebutting, softening language, assuming sincerity, and refusing to reduce the other person to a political label. These behaviors communicate dignity, which stabilizes the relationship even when opinions clash.
3. The focus shifts from positions to the sources of values.
When disagreements touch moral foundations, arguing positions goes nowhere. But tracing the values back to the experiences that shaped them humanizes the person. You stop seeing “the other side” and start seeing a story. Understanding does not erase disagreement, but it dismantles caricatures. And dismantling caricatures increases affection because it restores the full humanity of the person in front of you.
When these conditions are in place, even heated discussions can reduce the instinctive dislike that normally accompanies political conflict. The disagreement doesn’t disappear. But the person becomes larger than their opinion. That shift alone increases love.
Real connection doesn’t grow by avoiding the hardest conversations. It grows when people create enough safety and dignity to explore their differences without reducing each other to caricatures. My lunch was not a grand solution to polarization. It was simply proof that the mechanics of humanization work when they are actually applied.
