The XX Factor: What women really think.

RU Ready? That Depends: How Voting Is Like Dating

Just a year ago, the burning questions before us were whether we as a nation were ready to elect a black president, and whether we were ready for a woman in the White House. And in a sense, what we learned since then was yes and yes. Because even though Hillary Clinton didn't win the election, her supporters so clearly saw her gender as a plus that it would be hard to argue that she would have won had she been a man.

But in a larger sense, I think what we learned is that these weren't ever the right questions, because it's only when the right person shows up, at the right time, that we're ever ready to elect him or her. Just like that's when we're ready to marry. (And yes, I do see everything relationally; you were expecting maybe a sports analogy?) You know that guy you dated for 8 years who just wasn't ready to commit -- until three minutes after you broke up? On paper, Americans were never going to be ready for a Democrat without a hint of a southern accent whose middle name was Hussein. But then we met him, got to know him, and found to our own surprise that we felt differently; it was a go after all.

That's how it will happen with a woman, and an Indian-American, and any other person of hyphenated heritage. (Maybe someday, we will even fall for one of those Godless Americans Elizabeth Dole referred to in her final campaign ad.) We prefer to look at candidates as the sum of their policy priorities; to do otherwise would be to suggest that voters are what Rachel Maddow would call ‘post-rational.' But voting for president is a decision of the heart as much as the head - a reality that Republicans seized on long ago, and that Democrats - or one Democrat, anyway -- now seem to understand, too.