If the Tinder bio "Seeking: fellow corny hater with whom to discuss this Illuminati mess" is not getting you anywhere in the romance department, consider Awake Dating, a dating site for conspiracy theorists. And I'm not just talking about people who spend way, way too much time in Serial Season 1 Reddit threads.
Rather, Awake Dating posits a dichotomy between the "awake" and "sleeple," which is to say, people who are hip to the ways in which mainstream information is hazardous to everyday life, and the people who dismiss them as crackpots. Awake Dating claims to recognize how difficult mainstream dating can be for the "awake" and seeks to give them a space in which to be fully themselves, to embrace and express their full range of beliefs without fear of judgment, and, ideally, to find other like-minded individuals with whom to connect.
The site itself opens to an introductory video that (actually pretty empoweringly) states that Awake Dating is for "real people with real awareness who deserve someone to face the truth with."
This catchy jingle for Awake Dating also puts out a call for users interested in anti-GMO, false flags, anti-vaccination, and, basically, truthers of all stripes.
According to an in-depth report on the site and its users, Daily Dot found:
"There are the passions and ideas on the more conventional side (veganism, holistic health, cannabis) and those on the extreme (9/11 truth, hollow earth, 'Jewish mind control')."
And the site's COO Jarrod Fidden described an "awake" person as:
“One who has investigated and come to his or her own conclusions on a collection of topics and issues. And through this research and critical thinking, [he] has ‘woken’ from the fantastic false dream carefully crafted for the ‘consumer.'”
As you've probably guessed by now, the site, which lets users self-identify as either a straight man, a straight woman, a gay man, or a lesbian woman, organizes its matching algorithm around a drop down list of "awake" interests the user may have. Those interests are also sorted into broader categories like Music, Mainstream Media, Fashion & Beauty, Sports, and Food & Drink to help users navigate more easily.
After the site's initial launch, Fidden also realized the platonic potential of his dating platform, so he opened up the site for all users to connect with each other by building 3D avatars in the "Awake 3D City," which the site describes as "aware themed discussion rooms, where you can mingle with other members who share your understanding and interests."
Fox Mulder-types with off-beat (but reasonable!) ideas about the JFK assassination and the existence of extra-terrestrial life: rejoice.
Images: Fotolia
