Green Dating refers to a form of partner search and friendship search where ecological responsibility, sustainability, and solidarity-based values are at the center. Consonance (Gleichklang) is part of the Green Dating movement.

Green Dating in Theory and Practice – Our Approach at Consonance (Gleichklang)

The Will to Change as a Starting Point

Green Dating (ecological partner search and friendship search) emerges in a world where environmental destruction, the climate crisis, factory farming, and turning a blind eye to suffering have become the norm.

In mainstream society, people talk about climate, sustainability, or animal suffering. What is said, however, are ultimately empty phrases. Changes fail to materialize. The majority goes along with it and sticks to its habits. Consumption and convenience ensure that the course is not changed.

This creates a concrete problem:

• Anyone who takes ecological responsibility seriously finds hardly any people in conventional online dating whose life compass is compatible with theirs.

Green Dating as a Community Process

Green Dating brings together people who see ecological responsibility and sustainable living as a central part of their lives. It concerns partner search and friendship search, projects, and communities.

Anyone who wants to live differently from the mainstream on a permanent basis needs social proximity to people who share this priority. Otherwise, one’s own commitment remains isolated, we wear ourselves down, or our engagement breaks off. We adapt and blend in with mainstream society, like the 68ers who today walk on red carpets, sit in governments, or advise fossil fuel industries.

Generalized Empathy and Solidarity

Green Dating encompasses more than just the environmental sphere:

• At the core of Green Dating are solidarity, a stance against racism and antisemitism, gender and gender justice, recognition of diverse sexual orientations, and genuine inclusion that recognizes disabilities, chronic illnesses, neurodiversity, and special life circumstances as part of normality.

The 6 Cores of the Green Dating Movement

1. Ecological Responsibility and Climate Protection as a Shared Life Compass

Green Dating means that the environment and climate play a central role in partner choice and life planning. The ecological crisis is present. It shapes decisions and everyday life. Ecological responsibility is not shared by mainstream society. Those who want to build relationships need places where this fundamental attitude does not constantly have to be downplayed or excused.

Linked to this is a critique of ritualized declarations:

Climate protection is cultivated as language, while behavior and structures do the opposite or lead to the opposite. Green Dating is the attempt to counteract this by forming relationships that live sustainable values and actively represent them in society. These can be partnerships, friendships, or communities.

2. Sustainability in Everyday Life: Changing Consumption, Minimalism, Breaking Habits

Sustainability in everyday life means that a large part of daily consumption is unnecessary. It consists of conditioned needs built up over years and socially maintained.

Those who want to change that face an individual task and at the same time a social problem:

• Habits are supported by the environment, even when those habits harm the environment or burden one’s own life.

Relationships and friendships shape our routines and have already driven many into the arms of consumer society. In a suitable social environment, however, it is possible to reduce consumption and implement a simpler lifestyle.

Intentional minimalism, renunciation of hyperconsumption, and mindful use of resources are therefore at the core of Green Dating. For every individual consumption decision, we can first ask ourselves this question:

• Is this absolutely necessary for maintaining our life connections or our life happiness?

Green Dating means bringing together precisely those people in partner search or friendship search who take this question seriously. But Green Dating not only brings together people who already ask themselves this question, but also people who want to ask themselves this question in partnerships, friendships, or communities in the future and live according to it.

Green Dating aims in this sense to bring suitable people together through matchmaking or friendship matching. Beyond that, Green Dating also aims to win people over to a sustainable lifestyle.

3. Animal Ethics and Vegan Nutrition

Living vegan is the path to a more sustainable world, away from animal exploitation, away from a normalized cruelty that continues in everyday life through meat, milk, eggs, and the industry behind them.

Veganism is also an expression of social responsibility:

• Veganism connects animal ethics with food security and global justice. When resources become scarce, when soils, water, and climate tip, when harvests fail, the question of how we produce food is central. Living vegan means: reducing animal suffering, conserving resources, and stabilizing the basic conditions under which people can be provided for at all.

Vegetarianism is an intermediate stage or transition in the Green Dating movement:

• The focus is on vegan because that is where the dividing line is drawn most sharply. Out of animal exploitation. Out of the everyday normalization of killing and using for consumption.

Once again, Green Dating relies on the transformative character of relationships:

In matchmaking or friendship matching, as well as in the search for communities, vegans are not always only brought together with vegans. Vegan, vegetarian, or even currently meat-eating people are also brought together who will live vegan in their relationship.

A partnership or close friendship can be the framework in which the switch to vegan succeeds and becomes permanent.

However, users of Green Dating platforms decide whether they want to give space to this change process of partners:

• Some set hard boundaries here (must already be vegan) because they understand this question as central to value compatibility and fear that an intention to become vegan may not be realized.

4. Alienation from the Mainstream of Indifference

Indifference to environmental destruction and animal suffering is societal normality. This necessarily also creates subjectively experienced alienation among those who care about the environment.

In this context, a “neutral” platform is impossible:

• Whoever is neutral stabilizes environmental destruction. Because neutrality, when injustice exists, means that everything is treated with indifference and a “business as usual” is practically stabilized. Neutrality in the environmental crisis is what those who want to sacrifice the last remnants of our planet’s natural resources to short-term profit-seeking promote.

Anyone who recognizes the environmental crisis and resists it cannot help but feel a distance from mainstream society.

But social bonds are central to our psychological balance as well as to our ability to act:

Green Dating therefore attempts to bring environmentally conscious people out of isolation and connect them with each other, in order to stabilize their psychological well-being and at the same time maximize their capacity to act.

5. Political-Societal Dimension: Global Justice, Activism, and Systemic Critique

The climate crisis is a question of justice:

• Poor countries are more severely affected, while rich countries consume resources disproportionately.

This leads to the political dimension:

• It concerns private consumption decisions as well as political and economic structures, fossil expansion, missed targets, and greenwashing.

Climate protest belongs in this line. Fridays for Future or the “Last Generation” are examples of a movement that makes climate protection public as a question of justice.

It also becomes clear among the vast majority of activists that climate protection, human rights, animal rights, and solidarity belong together.

Societal hostility toward climate movements, state reactions, criminalization, and harsh sentences show that mainstream society lacks the willingness to truly address causes.

Climate migration is also part of this:

• Exclusion, camps, border policies, and the attempt to keep the consequences of one’s own lifestyle at a distance.

The Green Dating movement unites these people in the private processes of partner search, friendship building, and community building. It relies on a private framework that, however, becomes public and is thus also political.

6. Ecology as a Relationship Feature

Those who stand against a destructive normality need relationships that support that. Green Dating therefore encompasses all processes and levels of interpersonal relationships, from romantic relationships to friendships, projects, and communities.

Internally, processes of care, willingness to commit, and long-term orientation are activated as sustainability. This also includes critique and replacement of dating patterns that promote short-termism, role stereotypes, and ruthlessness. It is about mechanisms that influence capacity for attachment, relationship culture, and willingness to take ecological responsibility.

Relationships can provide meaning, maintain capacity to act, and prevent ecological orientation from ending in withdrawal or resignation. Such meaning structures simultaneously increase life satisfaction and relationship satisfaction. Together, we succeed in acting in consistency with our values.

Correlated Areas of Green Dating

Anti-Discrimination and Emancipatory Fundamental Attitudes

Green Dating is connected to emancipatory attitudes. These include a clear rejection of racism and antisemitism, commitment to refugees, support for LGBTQ+ rights, and a consistent no to right-wing extremist positions. In this context is also the discussion led by right-wing circles about whether sustainability is actually “self-righteousness” – Sahra Wagenknecht advocates this self-righteousness thesis. However, the empirically verifiable counter-position is that a “business as usual” hits the socially weaker hardest. Deflecting individual responsibility (“The governments should do something”) psychologically relieves, but paralyzes actual social change. Consumption and production belong together; they cannot be played off against each other. Action must be taken at all levels.

Inclusion and Diversity

Inclusion is central. It is a fundamental principle of a community that does not force people to adapt to a society that is in the process of setting our entire planet on fire. Diversity includes sexual orientations, gender identities and gender, different disabilities, chronic illnesses, psychological burdens, neurodiversity, high sensitivity, special family situations, precarious financial circumstances, and lack of relationship experience. Alternative relationship and life models also belong to this: monogamy, open relationships, polyamory, or platonic life partnerships.

Solidarity-Based Instead of Neoliberal Self-Optimization

Another correlated area is the critique of neoliberal self-optimization, hyperconsumption, and competitive logic. The Green Dating movement opposes this with a different understanding of development. A materialistic and consumption-oriented lifestyle burdens not only all of us, but also our relationships. Care should be generalized. In our relationships, we increasingly succeed in acting sustainably and in solidarity.

Differences Within the Green Dating Community

Spirituality and Religion

Green Dating is often connected to spiritual beliefs that focus on the human connection to nature or the animal world as a spiritual-emotional process. At the same time, however, there are atheistic counter-positions among those who want to make their partner search and friendship search successful within Green Dating platforms. In matchmaking, matching logic, or self-selection, it is possible to take these positions into account and accordingly enable suitable or compatible constellations.

Within the Green Dating movement, there is broad agreement that diversity is legitimate here as well. Boundaries exist where homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, or other exclusionary positions become incompatible with an inclusive and solidarity-based fundamental attitude.

Meditation, Yoga, Contemplation

There is statistically a close affinity of members of Green Dating platforms to meditation, yoga, or other forms of self-experience. This affinity is often, but not always, embedded in spiritual fundamental beliefs and the desire for self-experience and self-expansion beyond the immediately experienceable.

Again, however, it applies here that within the Green Dating movement there is no consensus regarding such practices, but rather agreement, rejection, and lack of interest can coexist casually. Again, matchmaking, friendship matching, or personal search can start here to connect suitable people with each other.

Connection to Nature and Love of Nature

Connection to nature is understood here not only as a conviction (we must preserve the environment), but as a feeling, as genuine love for nature, and thus as an emotional structure. Such a love for nature or the feeling of a connection to it can become motives for commitment and willingness to act.

Again, the Green Dating movement is diverse here, and alongside such an emotional connection, there are also voices that argue purely rationally and do not want to tie Green Dating to an emotional connection to nature.

Critique of Dating Apps: The Precarious Logic of Modern Online Dating

It requires a look at the structure of modern dating systems and dating apps. In this online dating, a market logic dominates, whose effectiveness we also see in the destruction of climate and environment. This market logic expands into the dating sector and extends to our relationships.

A central pattern is the displacement of other meeting places. Dating increasingly takes place in apps. At the same time, other spaces are practically devalued: circles of friends, “third places” such as cafés, clubs, workplaces, religious communities, social milieus. People no longer expect to meet others outside of apps. What one does not expect, one is not prepared for. This creates a lack of alternatives. The apps are not “one possibility,” they become the standard space. This standard space determines how desire, expectations, and self-image are organized.

Added to this is the algorithm as an inscrutable instance. Users do not know how it works, but experience that it evaluates, sorts, and decides. This leads to attempts at control. Users expect to be deliberately “pulled up” at the beginning. The statement “I immediately had this dopamine rush” captures exactly this dynamic. Anyone who expects manipulation builds counter-strategies. This puts the algorithm at the center of inner experience.

In this structure, dating tips into a game logic. Reward and punishment alternate quickly. Match, ego-boost, silence, ghosting, humiliation, next round. “It feels like a game” describes what happens when attachment is replaced by short-term stimuli. The consequence is interchangeability. People become swipeable, and people experience themselves as swipeable.

With this gamification, self-relationship also shifts. Online dating is used for self-affirmation, but this affirmation is unstable. Today “market value,” tomorrow devaluation. Part of the adjustment is feeling less. “When you’re colder, you protect yourself.” is a sober survival strategy in a system that otherwise constantly hurts.

Another strand describes a precarious reality of digitally mediated relationships: contacts feel real and are emotionally effective, but remain structurally breakable at any time. This creates a precarious desire. Desire is not stably directed at a person, it wanders between images, possibilities, promises, and attention. Ghosting, catfishing, and body commodification become typical forms of this precariousness. Abrupt break-off without explanation. Desire for constructions. One’s own body as a market object.

This logic is the opposite of sustainability and authenticity. It generates short-term stimuli, comparison pressure, multi-tracking, and the permanent option to drop out instead of working through conflicts.

In such a structure, “staying together in good and bad times” is an imposition. In bad times, the app is the easy reach.

Green Dating takes different paths:

• Meeting each other early in real life. Agreeing on commitment. Focusing on one person. Actively limiting multi-tracking. Taking getting to know each other outside of formalized dating systems seriously again. Platforms make their algorithms transparent. Getting to know each other is oriented toward solidarity-based values that are to be jointly pursued as life projects.

Consonance (Gleichklang) as Part of the Green Dating Movement

Ecological Orientation, Veganism, Relationship as Ecological Everyday Practice

Consonance (Gleichklang) is part of the Green Dating movement. Ecological responsibility, social justice, inclusion, and compassion guide our platform. Anyone who takes ecological and emancipatory values seriously finds hardly any compatible contacts in conventional online dating.

Consonance (Gleichklang) strives to increase vegan visibility, which is a central core of the path to a sustainable and compassion-based world. We see friendship, partner search, and projects simultaneously as an incentive and framework in which changes can succeed and actually do. Through our self-description option “would like to become vegan,” we capture attitudes and at the same time activate the motivation to implement them, before or at the latest in newly found relationships.

Solidarity, Emancipation, Inclusion as Community Structure

Consonance (Gleichklang) supports the indissoluble unity of Green Dating under an emancipatory umbrella. This includes ecological orientation, animal welfare and animal ethics, as well as positions against racism, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. Right-wing populist and right-wing extremist positions are marked as incompatible with the community orientation. The idea of “neutrality” is rejected because in practice it means that misanthropy, environmental indifference, and exclusion are tolerated.

We build diversity everywhere into our community logic.

The community structure also includes a solidarity-based financing model: Services are understood as collective services. There is a fixed contribution, and discounts for people in financial need are advanced to the point where participation never fails due to money.

How to Deal with Religion, Spirituality, and Self-Experience?

Religious, spiritual, atheistic, and agnostic orientations are integrable, and members decide whether this dimension is taken into account in matchmaking or friendship matching. We consider meditation or yoga as self-experience and development practices when this is important to members. People should be able to find each other who can build something together from this in everyday life.

Green Dating as a Counter-Model in Everyday Dating

At Consonance (Gleichklang), we have not built in any short-term rewards and do without all monetization and manipulation practices of dating apps. People should be able to find each other at Consonance (Gleichklang) who jointly live ecological responsibility and a solidarity-based fundamental attitude in everyday life and thus contribute to environmental and climate protection, human rights, animal welfare and animal rights, justice, inclusion, and humanity. A further detailed text by our co-founder and psychologist Dr. Guido F. Gebauer on the foundations, theory, and practice of ecologically oriented Green Dating can be found here: Ecological Dating in Foundation, Theory, and Practice.

Consonance (Gleichklang) as a Psychological Dating Platform

Beyond the area of Green Dating, we believe that psychology and its insights into human experience and behavior play a central role in supportive partner search and friendship search. What psychology of partner search and relationships tells us and how Consonance is based on it is presented in this detailed text.