Amid mounting political—and now medical—dissension, for many looking to connect with those who share mutual values has become a more complicated and even lonely endeavor.
Author Laura Wellington seeks to change this with ZNEEX, a dating and friendship app that matches people according to their vaccination status—unvaccinated and vaccinated.
Wellington told The Epoch Times that she got the idea after a long-time friend gave her an ultimatum: if they were to continue to be friends and go on their regular walks, Wellington had to get the experimental mRNA vaccine.
“I was really hurt by that,” Wellington said. “And then I came to realize that a lot of people were experiencing this in their own way, and I could see this huge divide happening.”
Seeing fear on both sides, Wellington said she began looking for a way to build a bridge, asking, “How do we create a situation where we’re meeting everybody where they’re at?”
Wellington created ZNEEX to connect the unvaccinated, the vaccinated, and those who don’t care.
A Loneliness Epidemic
“Even before COVID, there was not only an obesity epidemic but also a loneliness epidemic happening,” she said.Among its recommendations to combat the issue was a “reimagining and reweaving” of the social infrastructure.
For Wellington, this reimagining and reweaving can be facilitated by linking people having a more difficult time finding each other in an undeniably more divided society, thus alleviating at least some of the loneliness while “rebuilding social systems.”
“Primarily, what I wanted to do was to give the world an app that brought people back together while modeling how we can live on one platform, so to speak, and still share different points of view but still exist, happily,” Wellington said.
However, that’s not where we’re at as a society right now, she said.
Currently, the breakdown of relationships is harming people who are hurting on an individual level and collectively as one nation, she said.
‘Be Careful What You Wish For’
Wellington, a mother of five children, blogger, children’s television series creator, and children’s book author, has seen firsthand the significant role relationships play in one’s life and how important it is to cultivate and treasure them while they last.In her book “Be Careful What You Wish For,” a fictional love story based on her experience with her late husband, Dean Wellington, she reflects on their time together, how that relationship shaped her, and how the absence of that relationship shaped her as well.
“When we first met, he said to me, ‘Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it,’” Wellington said.
Accurate on many levels, that perfect life she wished for happened, though it remained subject to the law of impermanence.
“Be careful what you wish for, or you might fall in love with a man, marry him, and have a perfect life until—be careful what you wish for—the perfect life is now gone,” Wellington said.
In Dean’s third year of cancer, he arranged a birthday party for Wellington where he toasted her and thanked her for being his wife, she recalled, though he could barely stand at the time.
After he passed 14 days later, Wellington carried with her the value of those fleeting moments, she said.
“When I look back on that, I remember what life is all about,” Wellington said. “It’s the relationships that make up our lives.”
