I'm 36 years old and been vegan for over a year now. When I went vegetarian 3 years ago, I was still married. Now after being single for 2 years, I've noticed that being a vegan makes dating harder. Most people just don't understand my lifestyle, or deride me for it. I've learned to just live with it and let things be. But dating seems to be SO hard now.

I've yet to meet a vegetarian woman since giving up meat. I think it's somewhat ironic since it was a very attractive vegan girl that actually got me into this lifestyle in the first place. It just seems like people don't know how to be around me. Almost like drinking around an recovering alcoholic. But there's no need to be. I don't preach about my beliefs. Actually a lot of people don't even realize I'm vegan until they've known me for a while. I'm savvy enough to order correctly when I go out to eat so it doesn't bring attention to me. But when they do learn, it invariably changes their behaviour towards me, like all of sudden they think I'm some kind of intellectual, hippie tree-hugger. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

There's other aspects of me that don't sit right with people. I practice Zen Buddhism, major in philosophy, and live a very minimal lifestyle. Believe it or not, they are all tied to being vegan for me, so I don't know if it's the vegan thing, or combination of these things. Sometimes I feel like if I lived in a college town or a big city, I'd meet more like minded people, but as it is, I live in a suburb of Detroit, and outside of a few MeetUps, I don't come across very many vegetarians, let alone vegans.