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Has anyone ever met a conservative, atheist, vegan before? I have this friend that is all 3 and he feels like such a niche character. 1 in 2k? 1 in 10k? I'm not sure, but I'm informally curious how many folks with this similar set of beliefs there are out there. Particularly how many are women. As this topic is related to finding a mate with compatible values, and I think if he sticks to requiring them to meet his values, he's going to die alone.
Values are pretty important in a partner. He should at least know where he is willing to compromise or meet in the middle.
I'm atheist my wife is Catholic. I agreed to raise our kids catholic, but I never agreed to convert. And by raising them catholic I made it clear that I meant getting out of the way, and not undermining her efforts, but very little active assistance.
Would he be fine with a vegetarian?
Would he be fine with someone that is mostly apolitical?
In general, the more strict your filter is the more you are going to filter. I always had the approach that nothing was truly off the table. There are gonna be things you like and dislike in a partner. You want it to be net positive in the moment, and for it to be likely to remain a net positive in the future.
You can maybe get your friend thinking in the direction of tradeoffs by asking about age, weight, and looks tradeoffs. Since those things are more of a sliding scale and we all recognize that one of those characteristics being slightly off from perfect is fine if there are other positives to balance it out.
My understanding is that while he is open to marrying a Christian woman, he like you would not convert. Around where we are, supposedly that is a non-starter for enough conservative woman. They want a man to "lead them in loving Christ" I'm not entirely sure what that means exactly, but I can infer.
As far as Veganism goes, I think he's pretty inflexible on that. He thinks its downstream of values, and vegetarians are just copping out, making their life easier because being moral is hard. He of course is morally righteous, objectively. He has a very black-and-white moral absolutist stance on a lot of topics. Apolitical is fine, but anyone even slight left of center is: "infected with a virus that makes them dumb sociopaths screeching about empathy" There is actually a lefty woman who seemingly likes him, follows him around, goes on runs with him, but because she advocates for feminism and socialism, that's a red flag for him.
I am increasingly convinced he, like many incels, has gotten stuck in this red-pill rage phase and is fed by constant social media, content creators, and crab-in-the-bucket blogposts that make him think woman having rights is bad for him and his dating life. He of course dresses this up as "what's good for society" and "illogical decisions by woman to risks in the modern dating market".
I agree. I also think you need to go where your potential mates are, figure out what they are looking for, figure out what are the bare necessities are for you, and make everything else flexible. Having extreme minority political views from multiple distinct tribes leaves a subsection of the populous that is just too few. Doubly so because woman cluster closer to the middle of social views.
These are expectedly not things he wants to budge on, ditto for divorce or kids. The biggest issue is that he's in his late 30s at this point, he is quickly approaching the mirror of "bitter middle age woman who thinks there are no good men and blames society", expressing this to him gets a screed about how its asymmetric and he doesn't have the same decisions/control/power that woman had.
Any thoughts on how to deradicalize a friend?
If his failures in life haven't deradicalized him I don't know if you will.
I was painfully lonely for a period and that made me drop some of the strictest requirements I had for a partner. That painfully lonely period was only months though, not years or decades.
You are a better friend than me. I would have probably dropped this bitter pill of a person from my life. Such bitterness and negativity will only get worse, not better.
I see my younger self in him a lot, though I am currently younger than him. I was very black-and-white. I went through an MRA and Red-Pill phase, which is funny enough how I found the motte back on reddit. I mellowed as I got older, learned to see the grey in the world. Some self reflection/introspection, points to the possiblity I'm trying to reach back through to my younger self and help him by helping this friend.
Yeah my fear. He is already too stubborn to take advice.
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