Despite 60.5% of respondents previously having been or currently in a relationship with a meat eater, 45% of vegans stated that they’ve experienced suffering due to their spouses’ meat consumption.
The research, conducted by German Online-Dating-Agency, www.gleichklang.de, and the German spoken vegan lifestyle portal www.vegan.eu, was carried out to discover the romantic attitudes between vegans and meat eaters, and is the largest survey worldwide of its kind.
Over 5,000 vegans between the age of 18 and 83 took part in the survey, which also discovered that 74% always hoped that their meat eating spouse would become a vegan. 51% of respondents admitted that they’d actively tried to convince their partner to stop eating non-vegan food.
In terms of the quality of the relationships, vegan-vegan relationships came out on top, followed by vegan-vegetarian relationships, with vegan-meat-eater relationships reporting the lowest relationship quality.
It seems that meat eaters in a relationship with a vegan do take steps to improve relationship satisfaction, with 78% stating that they’ve reduced their meat consumption, and 53% admitting they’ve stop eating meat completely when at home.
It was also revealed that female vegans are more likely to enter into a romantic relationship with a meat eating spouse than male vegans (64% versus 41%). However, the main reasons for these findings appear to be that there are far more female vegans than male vegans. In this survey, 83% of the participants were female. This conforms to similar findings in other surveys and studies on vegans.
When it comes to attitudes towards meat consumption, vegans who chose the vegan diet because of health reasons had less of an issue with a spouse who eats meat than vegans who chose the vegan diet out of a concern for animals. The highest rate of problems was reported by ethical vegans who were actively involved in the propagation of the vegan lifestyle to reduce animal suffering.
When discussing the results of the study, Psychologist Dr Guido F. Gebauer, commented: “It can be helpful for vegans to seek a vegan spouse. The choice of a vegan spouse can improve relationship satisfaction and reduce conflicts, especially if the vegan lifestyle is deeply related to the moral conviction that it is wrong to kill and eat animals.
“However, when a spouse that eats meat shows the willingness to reduce meat consumption, a romantic relationship between a vegan and a person who eats meat can be satisfactory as well.”
Dr. Gebauer presents his results including detailed information on the sample in detail on vegan.eu: http://www.vegan.eu/kurz/liebeveganfleischesser.html
Recruitment of participants
84,7 % of the participants were recruited by paid advertisement on Facebook targeting people who were vegans. The rest were mainly readers from vegan.eu. Results were virtually identical in both sub-groups which increase confidence in the general validity of the results.