If you’re navigating the plant-plentiful waters of dating a vegan, here are suggestions to keep you afloat:
Embrace their passion as you hope they will embrace yours. Perhaps you love history or photography or hiking or anime. Demonstrating that you care about their vegan values is a surefire way to get them to reciprocate by learning more about your passion in life.
Compassion and understanding go both ways. It can often be difficult to understand a vegan’s choices if you are not vegan. Focus on understanding their perspective, their beliefs, and their values. You may both find ways to grow and learn from each other. And isn’t that what great partnerships are all about?
If you’ve made it over the initial hurdles and you’re ready to talk about a future together: Will you have silk sheets, will you have pets, will you have children? Focus on what is most important to you, and the small stuff will be easy. There may be ethical dilemmas when dating a vegan, such as whether to wear leather shoes or own feather pillows. But the truth is most vegans themselves had these dilemmas once upon a time, if they gradually became vegan.
The book Dating Vegans: Recipes for Relationships by Anne Dinshah provides lots of examples of how real mixed-lifestyle couples worked it out, each finding different solutions that worked for them. In this book, Kim Johnson says, “Respect is absolutely essential for any relationship to work.” Kim went vegan after she married Rusty, and he supports her choice. “Love changes you, but you change because these are things you want to change in yourself.” Respect their values and hold true to your own.
Falling for a vegan’s compassionate nature isn’t hard to do. Veganism is about love after all: love for the animals, love for the earth, and love for the human body. Enjoy the adventure.
