Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race this week is being rightly celebrated as a triumph for progressives, immigrants, and Muslims across the country, and a sharp rebuke of American conservatism. Between his grassroots campaign, no-brainer manifesto, and community-driven stance, he’s been a beacon of hope for the left, yet he won a majority vote. But to single straight women—including those outside of America—it’s not just political hope that Mamdani represents.
When Mamdani and his wife Rama Duwaji move into Gracie Mansion, they will become the highest-profile (and possibly the only) couple in public office to have met on a dating app. Mamdani, now 34, and Duwaji, a 28-year-old artist and illustrator, swiped right on Hinge in 2021 and married earlier this year. Together, they make up a highly enviable, decidedly modern-day power couple—and a hopeful example to counter the prevailing mood of “heteropessimism” and widespread negativity about the possibility of finding love.
At 34, Mamdani is the youngest mayor of New York in over a century, and the first Muslim person ever to take the office. His relationship with Duwaji has featured prominently in his campaign, affirming him as a modern man who gets it—not just the existential struggles that people are grappling with, like how to pay for rent or childcare on stagnant or non-existent salaries, but also the quieter ones, like how to stay optimistic while navigating the dating hellscape. “There is still hope in those dating apps,” Mamdani joked on The Bulwark Podcast earlier this year.
It’s not just that he found love and a lasting relationship on Hinge. It’s that Mamdani represents the kind of man many of us would like to find there ourselves—and had perhaps started to give up on. He’s principled, passionate, at ease with himself, and a seemingly devoted partner. When trolls came for Duwaji during his campaign, Mamdani came to her defence on Instagram: “Rama isn’t just my wife, she’s an incredible artist who deserves to be known on her own terms… You can critique my views but not my family.” And after being asked whether he was “more of a Carrie Bradshaw or a Hannah Horvath,” Mamdani responded: “I’m a Miranda.” (Probably the one you’d be best off marrying, And Just Like That notwithstanding.)
Duwaji, meanwhile, has very much remained her own individual throughout the campaign, appearing alongside Mamdani at events and being a supportive presence without ever really positioning herself as a political “first lady.” (They’ve not done a TV interview together, for example, or a glossy magazine profile.) When she and Mamdani met, they were both established in their own fields, making tracks along very different paths towards their own goals.
Yet despite the pressure of the campaign trail and the scrutiny it’s presumably put on them both, Duwaji has been a steady but low-key presence, an individual with her own ambitions, not auxiliary to his. As a pairing (albeit from our limited view, as outsiders with no inside knowledge), they seem not just in love, but well-balanced.
It’s no surprise that their relationship has sparked hope among the single and cynical. Unlike so many couples in public life, Mamdani and Duwaji’s love story is not just aspirational but relatable. They didn’t meet at private school, through an elite matchmaking agency, or via any of the other routes that are closed to most of us: they connected using the same deeply flawed technology we’re all having to navigate in these fast-paced and distractible modern times. That Duwaji and Mamdani found each other by swiping right makes them a rare modern dating success story—and gives those of us in the trenches hope that love is possible.
But more than just giving us a reason to keep swiping or return to “the apps,” the couple model the actual point of the endeavor—the reason that we put ourselves through it and hang on to hope. It’s easy to feel ground down or disillusioned by dating, or to buy into the widespread pessimism about the possibility of finding love, if only to protect ourselves. It helps to have a couple in the public eye to root for.
On Liz Plank’s Boy Problems podcast, Mamdani was asked whether he agreed with Chanté Joseph’s much-shared take that “having a boyfriend is embarrassing.”
“If you’re worried that your boyfriend is embarrassing, you should probably get a new boyfriend,” he retorted. Thanks to the first couple of New York, maybe some of us are starting to believe that such a thing is possible.