"My Boyfriend and I Are Buying a House. I Worry About What He’ll Put on the Flagpole."

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Ma href="https://slate.com/advice/2024/08/relationship-advice-political-beliefs-american-red-flags.html"> We have … very different political beliefs.

Dear Wedge Issues,

My boyfriend and I are on the verge of buying a house together. I love him so much, and we are on the whole extremely compatible; I have no reservations about this move at all. But we do have very different political beliefs. We agree on some things, have conversations with gentle pushback on others, and kind of just agree not to talk about a few other things. He generally abhors all politicians, so I am not concerned about him putting up yard signs for a candidate I despise or anything like that, but I do live in fear of the dreaded flagpole.

If we buy a home with one or he decides to put a flagpole up, what say do I have in what he chooses to fly? I would certainly draw the line at a Confederate flag, which I consider a hate symbol, but what if he wants to put up a Gadsden flag or something else that on its face communicates “freedom” but in reality has been co-opted by a certain subset of the right? Do I hold that same line? Passive-aggressively fly a Pride flag beneath it? Honestly, even choosing to fly an American flag kind of feels like right-wing posturing to me, but of course I will end up looking like the un-American asshole if I were to ask for one not to be flown.


At the moment this is merely a hypothetical, but I’m attempting to stake out how I feel about this now. I generally try to be vocal about my progressive views in an area where that sometimes leaves me in the minority, and I don’t want to lose that as we become homeowners.

—Liberal Samuel Alito

I’m going to address the practical aspect of your question first, which I think is very solvable. For starters: I don’t know where you’re house hunting, but flagpoles just aren’t that common these days. Chances are, most of the places you tour won’t even have one. If your luck runs out and your dream home comes with a pole attached, back-channel with the sellers and see if you can strike a deal for them to remove the pole for a few hundred extra dollars before they move out. The price would be well worth it to head off any arguments in your future, as would the light subterfuge at your boyfriend’s expense. It’ll be an unorthodox request, so if the sellers say no, ask for their permission to do it on your own prior to closing and tell your significant other that the pole, in real-estate parlance, “did not convey.”


If none of that works and there’s a pole in the ground come move-in day—or your boyfriend simply insists on installing one himself—you still have options. Flags are corny, and you’d be well within your rights to veto their display on aesthetic grounds alone. Alternatively, you could lean into the tackiness. Convince your boyfriend that your priority should be avoiding uncomfortable conversations with neighbors: Does he really want to be the Martha-Ann Alito in this scenario, being called the c-word by passersby on a stroll around the cul-de-sac? No, he does not—so you should steer clear of political iconography and stick to kitschy flags celebrating the seasons, secular nonpatriotic holidays, and cutesy miscellany. Even though flagpoles are generally scarce in the modern neighborhood, it feels as if every small town in America has at least one house with a flag depicting kittens playing in a garden. I’m not sure how this became a standard flag theme, but it could be fruitful territory for your relationship! If cats aren’t your thing, there’s always puppies in Adirondack chairs or bunnies on fences. Become the neighborhood twee-irdo and install a gnome garden to match.

At the very least, your boyfriend should agree that both of you need to be on board with whatever flag hangs near your doorstep. The outside of your home is your face to the neighborhood, the first thing your guests see when they arrive. With a flag, it also becomes a statement of your household’s values. (Even if those values are “lamb lying under daffodils.”) Neither one of you gets to override the other in how you present yourselves to the world. You don’t need to convince him that the Gadsden flag has troubling cultural connotations or try to cancel out the Jan. 6 vibes with an “In This House” sign. You need him only to respect that owning a home together means sharing decisionmaking power, and most choices about the several-hundred-thousand-dollar purchase you’re about to make must be undertaken on the basis of consensus. Sure, maybe everyone gets to decorate their man cave or she shed or nonbinary nook in their own hideous, idiosyncratic style without regard for their partner’s wishes. But flags, on the other hand, are a group project.

So, Liberal Sam, if your primary goal is keeping the peace in your relationship without promoting right-wing ideologies in your front yard, that should do it. But could there be a deeper worry at the heart of this hypothetical?

Before you tie yourself to this man with a legally binding contract and a monthly mortgage payment, I’d invite you to consider what you might learn about your relationship from this thought experiment. Most house hunters don’t “live in fear” of ending up with a flagpole that their partner might commandeer with symbols found in a Southern Poverty Law Center database. If your politics diverge enough to make this a reasonable concern for you, it’s possible that you’re not as “extremely compatible” as your day-to-day interactions may make it seem.


I know that many successful couples make do with political differences. I can appreciate how hard it might be, in an area with few progressive dating prospects, to find someone you generally agree with. But politics are not just matters of opinion or taste, like whether you prefer your flags to depict a hedgehog with mushrooms or a hamster with flowers. They’re expressions of deeply held values that extend far beyond any given election or legislative vote. Politics are about the way we believe that people should be treated, what we think they deserve, and what we owe to one another and future generations as fellow travelers on this bewildering, beautiful planet. They’re about our varying levels of tolerance for the suffering of other human beings and what the hell we should be doing with ourselves as we muddle through an increasingly alienating era together.


That’s extremely clear in our current political climate. Today one side of American politics is careering toward punitive authoritarianism, motivated by retribution and greed, sowing distrust and grievance and nihilism to produce an ever more antisocial public. It’s hard for me to imagine how “very different” political beliefs—not just a minor policy disagreement here and there—can be reconciled into a shared set of values, the likes of which are the bedrock of solid, long-standing relationships.

You mention that your boyfriend hates politicians, which I take as an encouraging sign that he’s not in thrall to, say, the toxic messiah complex of Donald Trump. You merely worry that he might want to celebrate broader ideas of freedom or America in ways that would offend your sensibilities. But when you boil it down, what does freedom mean to him? What does he love about America, and when, if ever, does he think it should come in for criticism? I suspect that his answers will reveal deeper, fundamental differences in your respective worldviews, ones that affect much more than surface-level political leanings. It’s worth reexamining whether you want to live your life in tandem with someone who doesn’t share your accounting of what’s defensible vs. indefensible, just vs. unjust, helpful vs. harmful, and—not to put too fine a point on it, but—good vs. evil.

It also stands out to me that you’re worried about appearing to your boyfriend as an “un-American asshole” for not wanting to fly an American flag. If you’re still concerned that your political beliefs—in this case, your aversion to “right-wing posturing” and gratuitous displays of nationalism—will tarnish his opinion of you, perhaps you two don’t have as much mutual respect for your diverging viewpoints as you’d hoped. And the fact that you’ve even considered the possibility that he might want to display a Confederate flag in front of your home should raise a giant red … well, you know.

Before you start spending your evenings trawling Zillow together, I hope you take a moment alone to think about what your politics say about your morals and what his politics say about his. Do you have any qualms about his character? Can you imagine growing tired of sharing a life with someone whose basic values conflict with yours? If so, it might be time to look for a place of your own.