To address the difficulties atheists have finding love, Olakunle suggested irreligious dating apps. ‘Maybe dating apps for irreligious people to meet. I mean, we have dating apps for queer people. We have Grindr, we have other apps for queer people to meet and date and commune together,’ he said. He thinks parties, clubs, and raves exclusively for atheists might help, too.
Like Olakunle, Melvin believes a dating app for irreligious people and people belonging to religious minorities could mitigate the problem:
“This answer [might be] on the nose, but there should be an app that caters to nonreligious people. These people do not have to be atheists. They could be agnostics, polytheists, Buddhists, people who are outside dominant religions, basically. Now we have dating apps for Muslims, dating apps [for] Christians, why can’t there be a dating app for atheists and nonreligious people?”
He thinks that this is especially needed because general dating apps can allow for religious discrimination. He thinks people might swipe past someone’s profiles if the person has openly identified as an atheist:
“I’m aware that dating apps allow for people to show their religions if they’re Christians, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, and whatnots. This is a more general app, right? And this can also put them in line for discrimination. People might [swipe past] their profiles because they see they’re an atheist or agnostics [sic] or whatever. But if there’s an app catering to this [dating for nonbelievers], that would be nice.”
Melvin, who is a member of the Nigerian chapter of The Secular Community, a global network of nonbelievers, thinks atheist communities are usually too scholarly, which inhibits opportunities for dating. He believes this could be rectified if secular communities allowed for fun activities and spaces where members can mingle and date:
“A lot of nonreligious communities tend to be scholarly, you know, dissecting the Bible, dissecting religious entanglements with society, culture and politics. So it doesn’t really create space for much romantic entanglements or engagements. But if there are more free areas for just fun for nonreligious people this would be welcome, I think.”
The Ranting Atheist, the leader of the youthful Nigerian Atheists on Discord, when asked if the community matchmakes atheists, said their matchmaking plans had been difficult to execute. ‘It’s been tough to get it off the ground for some reasons,’ he told me. ‘Most important is the know-how, because without a proper system and planning, things can go south quickly.’ There is another setback: a lack of models. ‘[I] don’t know of any atheist community doing such.’
For her part, Jade believes there are two ways to better the dating experience for atheists in search of love, but also thinks them impractical:
“If more atheists are openly atheist and if more religious people are more accepting, [the dating pool for atheists can get wider]. Neither of those options are viable for many reasons [because] these situations are not changing soon.“
Anya thinks a dating app would be great, but also thinks it could be problematic. She expects that such dating apps would need to be public so that users can verify and confirm the identities of the strangers they are about to meet. ‘For security reasons, a dating app has to be public,’ she said.
But these apps also need to be anonymous for the safety of those who cannot publicly identify as nonbelievers. ‘For nonbelievers to survive very hostile and stigmatised situations, they have to be anonymous and cannot have their identities traceable.’
She worries about how atheist dating apps will solve this paradox:
“There is an inherent mismatch between the needs of a public app and the needs of the people who are dating there. And so it’s very difficult. I personally will never advise a woman—especially a woman who’s dating men—to go on any app where the men are allowed to be anonymous. That is a recipe for a lot of problems.“
“And I usually see it as an app that is going to be very male in the population. We already have the problem of nonbelievers’ organisations and groupings being majority male, and not just majority male but also majorly misogynistic as well. They don’t believe in God, but they definitely believe in patriarchy, which, funny enough, was conferred by God.“
There is another problem: catfishing. Queer people for one had been victims of kito, a specific type of catfishing whereby queer people, under threat of being outed, are extorted. ‘I think a dating app for nonbelievers in Nigeria will be very ripe for kito [and blackmailing], especially if people want to keep anonymous,’ Anya said.
Anya would thus not promote atheist dating apps which do not address these inherent problems. ‘I see it as a space that is potentially going to be unsafe, especially for women, and I’m not gonna promote something like that.’
Like Jade, what she will promote instead is more visibility for atheists. ‘Those of us who are in a situation where we can be open in public with our atheism, we definitely should.’
Nigerian atheists seem to have been shunning mainstream dating sites and apps like Tinder, while AfroIntroductions, a niche dating site created by the matchmaking company CupidMedia, seems to be unpopular, despite having an atheist segment for African nonbelievers: none of those interviewed for this story had heard of it. Given that dating apps and sites are not popular among Nigerian atheists, and if many atheist organisations, virtual and physical, are not yet matchmaking their members, safe and public solo efforts like that of Anya’s remain the only viable way for Nigerian atheists to date.
After Olakunle suggested dating apps and parties and raves to boost the chances of atheists looking for love, he said, ‘There are some people that are doing good work concerning this. Uju Anya, for example, used to do this poll for…irreligious people to meet and hopefully to get you to be in a relationship, that kind of stuff.’
The demand for a safe, public platform for Nigerian atheists to find love is there, in other words. How this can be achieved is as yet unclear, which means, sadly, that Nigerian atheists will continue to be marginalised even in the most intimate of spheres.
By Adesomola Adedayo