She ate her salad with the precision of a surgeon, and that should have been my first clue.
It’s taken me years to understand what I witnessed during those two years in Los Angeles, living with someone whose veganism wasn’t just a diet but an entire cosmology. Back then, I thought our struggles were about food. I thought the tension came from navigating restaurant menus or explaining our different choices at dinner parties. I thought the distance that grew between us was about ethics and values.
I was completely wrong.
What I discovered—what I can only see clearly now from my apartment in Singapore, years and continents away—is that we weren’t really fighting about food at all. We were trapped in something far more insidious, something that affects millions of relationships where no one’s even heard of tempeh.
The pattern revealed itself slowly, like film developing in solution. She’d been vegan for three years when we met, and her commitment was beautiful to witness. She knew every ingredient, every manufacturing process, every hidden animal product. She could spot casein in a ingredient list from across the room. Her dedication felt like integrity incarnate.
But somewhere between the first kiss and the first fight about honey, something shifted. The veganism that initially felt like passionate conviction began to feel like invisible walls. Not walls between her and animal products—walls between us.
I remember the night it first became clear, though I didn’t understand it then. We were at a friend’s birthday party in Silver Lake. Someone had brought homemade chocolate chip cookies, and the baker mentioned she’d used regular butter, not vegan. My girlfriend’s face went through a series of micro-expressions—disappointment, judgment, resignation—before settling into a practiced smile. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’m not hungry anyway.”
But she was hungry. I’d seen her eyeing those cookies before the butter revelation. And in that moment, something cracked in the facade. Not her veganism—her humanity. She’d chosen the performance of purity over the simple admission of desire.
This became our pattern. Every meal, every social gathering, every grocery run became an opportunity for her to demonstrate her commitment. But here’s what nobody talks about: when your identity becomes indistinguishable from your choices, every human moment becomes a potential betrayal. You can’t admit to craving cheese because that would mean you’re not who you say you are. You can’t acknowledge that sometimes the vegan option sucks because that would undermine your entire worldview. You can’t just be tired, or indifferent, or human.
The word “devout” in my title isn’t accidental. Her veganism had all the hallmarks of religious fundamentalism—the purity tests, the constant vigilance, the subtle evangelism, the guilty confessions when she accidentally consumed something with milk powder. But unlike traditional religion, there was no confession booth, no formal absolution. The church was her own mind, and she was both priest and penitent.
I started noticing how this rigidity infected everything. She couldn’t watch movies with meat-eating scenes without commentary. She couldn’t enjoy a meal unless it aligned with her ethics. She couldn’t even dream without guilt—she once woke up distressed because she’d dreamed about eating scrambled eggs.
But here’s the deeper pattern I missed then: I was doing the same thing in reverse. I became “the non-vegan boyfriend,” performing my own role with equal dedication. I’d order meat dishes almost defiantly, as if to assert my independence. I’d make jokes about bacon to pierce her seriousness. I was just as trapped in identity performance as she was—mine was just the photo negative of hers.
The real tragedy wasn’t dietary incompatibility. It was that we’d both confused temporary choices with permanent essence. She wasn’t just someone who chose not to eat animals—she was vegan, in the way that someone is tall or is blue-eyed. And in defining herself so rigidly, she forced me into an equally rigid counter-definition.
This is what I call identity fusion—when the boundary between self and belief dissolves so completely that questioning the belief feels like existential threat. It’s happening everywhere, not just with veganism. I see it in my friends who can’t admit their side hustles are failing because they’re “entrepreneurs.” I see it in people who can’t question their political party’s positions because they are progressives or conservatives. I see it in parents who can’t adjust their parenting philosophy because they’ve built their entire social identity around attachment parenting or sleep training or whatever tribe they’ve joined.
When you’re identity-fused, you lose the capacity for what psychologists call “cognitive flexibility”—the ability to adapt your thinking to new information. But in relationships, this flexibility is everything. It’s what allows you to grow together instead of calcifying into opposing positions. It’s what lets you say, “I was wrong” without feeling like you’re disappearing. It’s what makes intimacy possible.
The saddest part? She was one of the most compassionate people I’d ever met. Her veganism came from a genuine desire to reduce suffering. But somewhere along the way, the identity had become a prison that prevented her from extending that same compassion to herself—or to me, when I failed to live up to her standards.
I think about one particular fight we had near the end. I’d bought ice cream—regular ice cream—and put it in our shared freezer. She found it and reacted like I’d brought pornography into a convent. “How can you put that in our freezer?” she asked, genuinely hurt. “You know what that represents to me.”
But that was exactly the problem. The ice cream had become a symbol, loaded with meaning far beyond frozen dairy. It represented everything she stood against, which meant my choice to buy it represented a fundamental rejection of her values—and therefore, of her.
We couldn’t find our way back from that symbolism to the simple reality: two people who loved each other but made different choices about food. We couldn’t access what I now call “fluid integrity”—the ability to hold values deeply while holding identity lightly. To care about something without becoming it.
The relationship ended not with explosive fights but with the slow suffocation of two people who couldn’t breathe in the boxes they’d built for themselves. She couldn’t be vulnerable about her struggles without threatening her identity. I couldn’t be supportive without feeling like I was betraying my own autonomy. We were playing roles in a drama neither of us had consciously written.
Years later, I understand what we were really fighting about. It wasn’t animal rights or environmental impact or health choices. It was about the terror of not knowing who you are without your carefully constructed identity. It was about using ideology as armor against the uncertainty of being human. It was about the way we all grip our chosen identities so tightly that we squeeze out any space for growth, surprise, or genuine connection.
I’ve since been in relationships with vegans who held their practice lightly, who could laugh about the challenges, who could admit to missing cheese without existential crisis. The difference was striking—their veganism was something they did, not something they were. They had what I couldn’t see then: the wisdom to know that you are not your choices, you are the consciousness that makes them.
The thing nobody talks about in relationships between vegans and non-vegans isn’t the practical challenges or the ethical disagreements. It’s the way any rigid identity—dietary, political, spiritual, professional—becomes a barrier to the very thing relationships require: the ability to be fully human with another person. To be inconsistent, evolving, sometimes hypocritical, always growing.
I don’t blame her for her devotion. In a world that feels increasingly chaotic, ideology offers the comfort of certainty. But certainty and intimacy are incompatible. Love requires the courage to exist in the space between who you were and who you’re becoming, to let another person witness your uncertainty without trying to resolve it through rigid adherence to any doctrine.
Looking back from Singapore, years removed from those Los Angeles dinner debates, I can see what I couldn’t then. We weren’t really talking about food at all. We were two people terrified of the groundlessness of existence, using dietary choices as life rafts in an uncertain sea. But you can’t build a relationship on life rafts. You need solid ground—the kind that comes from knowing yourself as something deeper than your choices, deeper than your beliefs, deeper than any identity you might temporarily inhabit.
That’s what I discovered in those two years, though it’s taken me many more to understand it. And I suspect it’s what many of us are discovering in this age of identity politics and lifestyle brands and personal brands and all the other ways we try to solve the problem of selfhood through ideology.
The answer isn’t to believe in nothing. It’s to believe deeply while holding it all lightly. To care passionately while remembering that you are not your passions. To choose consciously while knowing that you are bigger than your choices.
She taught me that, though neither of us knew it at the time. And for that unintended lesson, I remain grateful.
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