Consonance (Gleichklang) for Finding Friends and Dating with Disabilities

Consonance (Gleichklang) specifically supports finding friends and dating for people with physical disabilities or illnesses, mental health conditions, and also sexual dysfunctions.

In doing so, we facilitate finding friends and online dating with disabilities using the principle of acceptance:

• As part of our matchmaking service for people with disabilities and illnesses, we ask all our members whether they would like to enter into a partnership or friendship with a person with a disability or illness. In our matching, we can thus ensure that acceptance exists and rejections can be avoided.

Our evaluations show that members of Consonance (Gleichklang) with disabilities or illnesses have a high chance of successfully completing their partner search and friend search with us:

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Dating with Various Disabilities and for Wheelchair Users

As a member with a physical or mental disability, you can be confident at Consonance (Gleichklang) that we will only suggest other members to you who indicate that they do not find a disability or illness to be an obstacle in a partnership. This enables people with disabilities and illnesses at Consonance to have a dating experience that is both effective and relaxed.

To enable an effective partner search, we also record the severity of an illness or disability (e.g., reliance on a wheelchair) and the acceptance of this. This ensures that even in cases of severe illnesses or disabilities, the suggested individuals have acceptance for it.

Consonance is not a dating platform exclusively for people with disabilities or illnesses. The majority of Consonance members do not have a disability or illness. We also do not specifically match members with disabilities or illnesses to other members with disabilities or illnesses. Rather, we apply the principle of acceptance, so that disabled and non-disabled members can also find each other on the basis of mutual acceptance. This distinguishes Consonance from dating sites that cater only to people with disabilities.

Singles with disabilities and illnesses thus have a high likelihood of a successful partner search at Consonance. Likewise, it is particularly easy for people with disabilities and illnesses at Consonance to find friendships.

More Comprehensive Information on Online Dating with Disabilities

Partner Search with Disabilities at Consonance (Gleichklang)

Many people with disabilities experience increased uncertainty in online dating because openness about their own life situation is tied to concerns about how others will react. Some choose not to mention their disability online at first. However, this often leads to the agonizing question of when to disclose their disability. At the first meeting or even later? This depends largely on the visibility of the disability.

What we consistently observe at Consonance (Gleichklang) in surveys and conversations with disabled members is that postponing increases the pressure and sometimes even leads to refraining from deepening the connection or meeting. Those who do go on dates, on the other hand, experience unpleasant situations or rejections quite often if the disability is visible.

It is the decision of those affected how they wish to handle this. Some do not want their disability to influence their dating behavior. They prefer that the first meeting take place without prior knowledge of a disability. That is legitimate, but equally legitimate is the desire of most to avoid disappointment and rejection. Because disappointment and rejection are experienced as setbacks, they lower confidence and activate a tendency in many to completely abstain from dating. Self-esteem can also be affected.

It is precisely at these experiences of people with disabilities in online dating that we at Consonance (Gleichklang) step in as an inclusive dating platform.
In our matchmaking and friendship matching, we give our disabled members the option to decide whether we should filter for acceptance beforehand or not. In the first case, everything is left in the hands of the members. In the second case, we work to ensure that encounters do not fail due to rejection because of a disability. This makes dating more relaxed and confident for many.

We achieve this through the principle of acceptance:

Acceptance as the Foundation of Matchmaking with Disabilities

Our matchmaking service for existing disabilities is based on a principle that is as simple as it is highly effective:

• Regardless of whether someone is personally affected, members indicate whether they have a basic acceptance for a partnership or friendship with people with disabilities, people in wheelchairs, or people with physical illnesses, mental health conditions, or sexual dysfunctions.

This surveyed acceptance now forms the supporting basis for our psychological matching in matchmaking and friendship matching. If a member desires that acceptance exists, we only suggest other people who have declared this acceptance.

There is no absolute guarantee that the disability will no longer play a role. But what we have learned from our many years of experience is that the probability of rejection due to disabilities is greatly reduced when we apply acceptance matching.

Self-Determined Design of the Partner Search

Self-determination is crucial in deciding whether we perform acceptance matching or whether we do not consider disabilities in matchmaking or friendship matching. In the first case, we reduce disappointments and rejections for our members with disabilities in their partner search. In the second case, members engage more directly and unfilteredly with the reactions of others in order to make their partner search or friend search a success.

Promoting Inclusion

The online dating we offer our disabled members is based on maximized inclusion. Other platforms for finding a partner for people with disabilities or handicaps put the disability completely in the foreground. On such platforms, often only people with disabilities meet each other, or they meet people who fetishize that disability.

All of this is not to be judged; it is up to those involved to choose which path they prefer. At Consonance (Gleichklang), we do not specifically match people with disabilities to other members with disabilities; rather, the focus is on acceptance. Singles looking for a partner or members looking for friends can be introduced to all members (no restriction) or they are specifically introduced to members who have affirmed basic acceptance for a relationship involving a disability.

When acceptance matching is applied, a certain exclusion still exists. Because suggestions are excluded because acceptance is lacking. However, this exclusion is smaller than with specialized matchmaking services or dating sites for people with disabilities, where almost everyone has a disability or where getting to know each other focuses mainly on those who experience the disability as a particular incentive in the sense of fetishization.

Furthermore, we provide psychological articles and make it clear that partnerships with people with disabilities are not a sacrifice or a deprivation, but fully fledged partnerships. Some things need to be arranged differently, but affection, understanding, emotional support, and much more take place in these partnerships just as they do in all others. It is, as we know from our surveys, a common misconception among daters without disabilities to assume that a partnership with a disabled person primarily means renunciation.

Through the combination of self-determined use of acceptance dating and psychological education, we can maximize possible inclusion and thereby simultaneously improve the chances of all our members for a successful partner finding.

Reducing Psychological Barriers Through the Principle of Acceptance

The principle of acceptance is not only suitable for reducing disappointments and rejections but specifically lowers psychological barriers as well. We know from our matchmaking work that quite a few people with disabilities live with fear, worry, inhibitions, feelings of shame, or the impression that everything is pointless when it comes to dating. Anticipated rejection and hopelessness often act as a blockade to finding a partner.

All of this loses its urgency, however, when those affected can rely on the effectiveness of the principle of acceptance. Using our principle of acceptance for disabilities in matchmaking and friendship matching, we can simultaneously support our members with disabilities in overcoming their inner blockades, fears, and mistaken expectations. This alone can lead to a breakthrough in finding a partner or a friendship.

Psychology and Value Orientation

Consonance (Gleichklang) is not a typical dating platform and fundamentally differs from most dating sites, matchmaking services, or dating apps through our focus on value-based matching and community. The second special aspect is the orientation of our matchmaking and friendship matching according to principles and findings of psychology.

Ecological responsibility, social justice, solidarity, and inclusion shape the inner attitude and beliefs of most Consonance members. Likewise, there is a high seriousness of the desire for a relationship and the striving to find a person with whom genuine relationship development, authenticity, and self-disclosure are possible. For these reasons, many members come to Consonance who do not feel at home on most dating platforms and dating sites.

This orientation of our community, in turn, forms another part of the foundation that makes the interaction among our community members more socially compatible, more attentive, and more loving than is the case with most online dating. This helps everyone, but can further strengthen the trust and self-confidence of people with disabilities in particular to actively pursue their partner search and friend search.

Finding Friends, Projects, and Communities

Most members of Consonance are looking for a partnership. However, we are more than a matchmaking service or a pure dating platform by explicitly enabling members to search for friendships, projects, and communities in addition to or independently of finding a partner. For many people with disabilities, this social integration is a central component of a fulfilled life. Our goal is to support our members in strengthening their overall social connectedness.

Dating Apps and Our Consonance (Gleichklang) Dating

Dating apps follow a basic logic of a structure oriented toward superficiality, variety, and acceleration, in which continuous selection processes form the core of the action. Encounters there arise primarily via visual stimuli and short profiles that are evaluated in a very short time. This results in an environment in which encounters rarely take place because of constant distraction, the hope of a more interesting profile devalues any existing contact, and often very effective processes of gradual rapprochement and attraction development cannot come into play.

There is also often an implicit shift in goals, away from focusing on the goal of finding a partner and toward the goal of getting matches and making contact with as many people as possible. Users adapt to these conditions through often unnoticed conditioning processes by presenting themselves strategically and doing everything to increase the number of matches, even if this does not increase but rather decreases relationship prospects.

The result is a gamified structure in which short-term rewards override long-term relationship development. Such gamified structures can bind users to the platforms and, through goal displacement, even create a relative satisfaction, even though the actual goal of dating is missed.

Consonance has a completely different structure. As a platform with people who all contribute for participation, we do not have a flood of suggestions. The focus on shared values steers the focus away from a purely image-based decision in seconds. Consonance is also not suitable for distracting from boredom, satisfying trend orientation, or seeking self-validation.

There are no matches, but the probability increases that one day not only the right person will come along, but that we will also recognize them and seize the opportunity. In the final analysis, at Consonance, compared to dating apps, the partner search is not characterized by competition. The focus is on the encounter and the desire to explore together whether a relationship can develop.

Success Prospects for Partner Search with Disabilities

We have comprehensively examined the prospects of our members overall in their partner search. The exact figures can be read in detail in this article. The encouraging finding is that we find no significant differences in the success rates of our members with or without disabilities, physical illnesses, mental health conditions, or sexual dysfunctions.

Members of Consonance (Gleichklang) with disabilities have comparable success prospects in their partner search as members without disabilities when partner search is understood as a process over time. The number of possible suggestions is reduced, but the chances of finding a partner are not affected by this.

For wheelchair users, particularly high prospects for successful matchmaking are even evident, even though they receive very few suggestions. The focus on that one person is apparently particularly possible here and more often leads to a partnership relationship than for members without disabilities.

Meet-and-Connect Community

Our members with disabilities are part of a community of people who want to meet in romantic relationships, friendships, travel partnerships, projects, or communities. Many consciously distinguish themselves from the indifferent mainstream, and quite a few have found that this is not the right path for them on dating apps and dating sites. By replacing forced multi-tracking and image-swiping with value-based matchmaking, Consonance (Gleichklang) has become a dating community in which there is a particularly high chance of fulfilling existing relationship desires.

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