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Notes -
You focus on the gender dynamics, but I think phenomenon is not primarily about gender.
The two main drivers are, IMO:
When two people like each other and spend significant time together, they build trust. This means they will tend to be more charitable toward one another and less dismissive of one another's beliefs. This reduces confirmation bias by making it harder to dismiss the other partner's politics on flimsy grounds, e.g. "they only believe that because they're ignorant/evil."
When a person with orthodox politics spends significant time with a person with heterodox politics, on average the person with orthodox politics is more likely to change their views than the person with heterodox politics. This is because it is easy to hold orthodox politics without considering carefully (or even encountering) arguments against those politics, whereas it is impossible to hold heterodox politics without constantly encountering counterarguments. Thus, heterodox beliefs will tend to come into the relationship more "battle hardened" and "stress tested" than orthodox beliefs.
Where gender might play into the dynamic above:
Women tend to be more agreeable and thus more likely to hold orthodox beliefs.
Women tend to be more agreeable and thus less likely to have engaged in "stress testing" (e.g. vigorous debate) of their political beliefs.
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