“Vegansexuals,” vegans who are only attracted to other vegans, are congregating together on vegan-only dating apps, such as Veggly.
“Vegansexual” was coined in 2007 by Annie Potts, a researcher from the University of Canterbury, after surveying 157 vegans and vegetarians on the topic of “cruelty-free living,” including the subject of dating, or not dating, meat-eaters. “I couldn’t think of kissing lips that allow dead animal pieces to pass between them,” one responder said at the time.
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In a blog post for The Vegan Resource UK, Sean Brennan said that “without even realising it,” he had been “vegansexual for a long time now”:
I can see someone and notice their beauty, I can talk to someone and lose myself in their passion or kindness, but as soon as I find out they’re not vegan then all lust is gone. How could I possibly fall for someone who treats animals in such an abhorrent way? I can’t.
Within the past decade, veganism has seen its popularity sky-rocket, and with that, the opportunity for vegans to close themselves off from the rest of the icky, omnivorous society. According to The Vegan Society, the number of British vegans has quadrupled since 2014, and now stands at around 600,000 – 0.8% of the British population.
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Veggly, one of the dating-apps that has sprung up for vegans and vegetarians, like HuneyBee, Grazer, and VeggieRomance, has, not surprisingly, seen a huge boost in its membership over the past six months, from 3,300 to 12,100.
https://twitter.com/AppVeggly/status/1205871583883079680
On their website, they explain why Veggly was set up:
There is no better way to dating than going into it knowing the other person thinks and eats like you.You can share meals in peace and have a good time, knowing that you agree on such important things, such as saving the animals, your health and the planet.Relationships with non-herbivorous tend to always hit some obstacles that we believe can be avoided altogether, if you find the right plant-based match.
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Karen Ridgers runs Veggie Vision, a series of date nights for vegans. “There is a very special connection when a vegan meets another vegan,” she told The Times. “When I met a fellow vegan 25 years ago, I was jumping up and down. But these days it’s far more common.”
Adam Shaw is trying to get Tinder to allow him to search for only other vegans.
I became single recently and found it’s actually quite difficult. I live in Merseyside, but all the single vegans seem to live in Brighton and London. You have to swipe through something like a hundred people until you see someone who’s vegan. Vegans have a joke that when you’ve been single for too long, you might have to say OK, I’ll date a vegetarian.
Karl Beaumont, a 26-year-old self-idenitified vegansexual said that “dating a non-vegan would be like a socialist dating a Tory… Ultimately, you want someone who has compassion that goes beyond the bedroom, for all living beings.”
