Ethics Relationships

Nobody Warns You About This Part of Going Vegan

By THRASOS ·
Couple at restaurant dinner table - vegan dating

Photo by Valentin Ilas via Pexels

Three months in. You like this person. Really like them. They're funny and present and they remember how you take your coffee. Then the waiter comes, and they order the ribeye without a second of hesitation, and something in your chest does this weird, hollow thing you weren't expecting.

Nobody warned you about that moment.

Vegan dating gets covered like it's a quirky lifestyle obstacle — something between "finding a good oat latte" and "showing up to a barbecue with Impossible Burgers." A niche problem for a niche group. Relatable content. But it's not that. For anyone who went vegan for ethical reasons — which is most of us who stuck with it — dating touches the exact same nerve that drove the decision in the first place.

So let's stop being polite about it.

The Dissonance Is Real. Stop Explaining It Away.

The "love conquers all dietary differences" take sounds reasonable until you actually think about what veganism is. It's not a diet. It's a moral position. A line drawn because you decided that causing unnecessary suffering to sentient animals is something you won't participate in anymore. When the person across the table from you does it three times a day, cheerfully, without thought — that's not a lifestyle difference. That's a values gap.

One vegan told VICE exactly what this feels like: "My ex could see that veganism was so meaningful to me, and then they were on the other side contributing to the problem I was fighting against. It felt really icky inside."

"Icky" is doing a lot of lifting there. But anyone who's been in that situation knows the word fits.

The data is split in a revealing way. Artefact Magazine reported that 82% of vegans say they're open to dating meat-eaters. But Veggly — the vegan dating app that now has over 600,000 users — found that 52% say they wouldn't do it. Those numbers look contradictory. They're not. Most vegans start open. Then reality arrives. The daily friction, the dinner negotiations, the moral weight of watching someone you love fund an industry you think is doing serious harm in the world. If you want to understand why vegans struggle to stay quiet about it, read The Endless Excuses: How Meat-Eaters Justify the Unjustifiable.

Some people can compartmentalize that. Many can't. Both responses are honest.

The Word They Invented to Mock Us

VICE ran a piece in 2016 on "vegansexualism" — their word, not ours — for vegans who only date other vegans. The framing was amused. Look at these idealists drawing romantic lines around their lunch.

What got missed in the coverage: the vegans they interviewed weren't being precious. They were being honest about their daily experience. "I don't want to spend energy negotiating my ethics at every shared meal" is not an unreasonable position. It's the same logic as not wanting to date someone whose political values are completely incompatible with yours, or someone who handles money in ways that terrify you. We don't call that "conservativesexualism." We call it knowing what you can live with.

The mockery is interesting, though. It reveals how veganism gets framed — as a preference, a phase, a quirk — rather than as a considered ethical commitment. Label it "vegansexual" and you can laugh at it without engaging the actual argument.

Vegan Men Get an Extra Layer of This

A 2023 study published on ResearchGate — "Gender, Masculinity, and the Perception of Vegetarians and Vegans: A Mixed-Methods Investigation" — confirmed what vegan men already knew from experience. We get read as less masculine. Consistently. The act of caring about animal suffering, of eating plants, of not performing the cultural ritual of meat — it gets coded as soft. (See also: Debunking the "Soy Boy" Myth — where I dig into what the actual science says about phytoestrogens and masculinity.)

This affects dating before the conversation even gets to values. A vegan man walks in already fighting a perception. That he's somehow incomplete. That his choices are a flag for other things about him — sensitivity, maybe, or unwillingness to participate in certain performances of toughness.

I'll just say: any culture that defines masculinity by your willingness to pay for factory farming deserves the scrutiny it's getting.

What Actually Works (When It Does)

I'm not saying you can only be with a vegan. That would be false, and I know couples who've made it work for years. But the ones that work have one thing in common — and it's not "tolerance." It's respect. The non-vegan partner genuinely understands why the other person's position is not a phase or a preference. They don't make jokes at every meal. They don't ask "but don't you miss chicken?" for the forty-eighth time. They say "let's find somewhere that works for both of us" before anybody has to ask.

GenV spoke to one couple who figured it out: communication from the start, separate cooking when needed, a real conversation about raising children with mostly plant-based food and exceptions for family visits. That's not sacrifice. That's two people who take each other seriously.

And honestly? Using Veggly or a similar app isn't a retreat. It's just skipping five exhausting conversations upfront. Sometimes that's the right call.

The Question Worth Asking

Not "can vegans date non-vegans." That's the boring question. The one worth sitting with is: how much of your daily life does your ethics actually occupy?

If veganism lives mostly in your grocery cart, date whoever you want. If it shapes how you process news, how you feel at restaurants, how you look at the world — then it will come up. At the table, at family dinners, in quiet moments when the gap between you and someone you love becomes visible.

That's not a problem to fix. It's information. Use it.

Figure out what you can actually live with. Be straight about it. And stop calling it being difficult.

And if you want to understand what the ethical stakes actually feel like — not as a philosophical exercise but as a gut punch — read If I Barf, You'll Let Me Live? It's the piece I'm most proud of on this blog.

Share this with someone navigating the same thing. They'll thank you — or they'll argue with you over dinner, which is honestly just as good.

References

Ethics Relationships
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