In the late summer of 2020, when much of normal social life was suspended, a relationship that I had been in for several years abruptly collapsed. I was thirty-nine and scared by the idea that I would not be reproducing the kind of heteronormative nuclear family I had grown up in. I wandered the sidewalks of my Brooklyn neighborhood, where discarded masks littered the gutters, with a sense of having been exiled from my own life. My apartment, with its cat and its plants, still existed but was no longer my home; I could get a glass of cold prosecco at my favorite bar, but the people I used to see there seemed to have vanished. In Haruki Murakami’s novel “1Q84,” a character climbs down a ladder into a parallel existence in which things appear to be the same but nothing really is. It did not take long to understand that there would be no ladder back to the world I had known, and that the portal to whatever it was that came next was probably going to appear on my phone. This is when I downloaded a dating app called Feeld.
Feeld describes itself as a technology for “open-minded singles and couples who want to explore their sexuality.” It is free to sign up, although a paid membership, priced at twelve dollars a month, offers perks such as the ability to conduct specialized searches and let someone know that you like them before they’ve liked you. As on most dating apps, the profiles lead with photos, which range from smiling couples in formal dress at weddings to torsos in bondage gear. Below the photos is a caption that might read, “🙃, 31, transmasculine, gynesexual, 3 km away.”
Feeld was started in London and today is available in more than a hundred countries. You can join linked with a partner or as a single person, and choose from among twenty different categories of gender and sexuality. The app is popular with nonbinary and trans people, married couples trying to spice up their sex lives, hard-core B.D.S.M. enthusiasts, and “digisexuals,” who prefer their erotic contact with others mediated by a screen. It is a place to be yourself, or to play at being someone else. On Feeld, I’ve seen self-identified lesbians who want to have sex with men, men who desire lesbians, and “heteroflexibles.” In a setting sometimes described as “non-normative,” there are asexuals, cuckold fantasists, kitchen-table polyamorists, eco-sexuals, and collectives of men offering group sex to single women. Some users request no overtures from cis males, white people, or straight people; others make wry jokes about oppressive beauty standards. (“Fatter than my pictures 😂,” one user wrote.) Using Feeld, I often think of a line I read in Jeremy Atherton Lin’s book-length monograph “Gay Bar,” about the nature of queer spaces in night life: “Inclusivity might not mean everybody,” Lin writes. “It could indicate the rest of us.”
According to the company’s data, the typical Feeld user is between twenty-five and thirty years old and lives in a big city. Thirty-five per cent of users are part of a couple. Activity on the app peaks around four o’clock in the afternoon from Sunday to Thursday. I describe it to my friends as “the grownup hookup app.” By “grownup,” I mean not only that its users are above a certain age but also that they favor a kind of maturity and decorum; by “hookup,” I mean that the app facilitates not romance but sex, broadly defined. It is not the place to find your “down-to-earth, no-drama girlfriend” or your “partner in crime.” Love languages, attachment styles, tacos, and other clichés of Internet dating surface only rarely. Data points such as diplomas and fancy jobs do not confer status. Instead, the aim of self-representation on Feeld is to describe a sexual desire in language that won’t repel the kind of person you would like to meet, a skill that in a sexually immature culture turns out to be something of an art.
Setting up a profile is similar to most dating apps: you upload some photos, share your general location, and write a short description of yourself and what you are looking for. Then you list your “desires” and your “interests.” On Feeld, the desires are usually sexual arrangements or fetishes, and you can include as many as ten. The list might read something like “kink, voyeurism, group play, submission, shibari [the Japanese art of rope bondage], butts, FWB [as in, “friends with benefits”], MFM [as in, “male-female-male”], cuddling, eye contact.” The most commonly expressed desires are “ethical nonmonogamy,” “couples,” “sexting,” and “casual dating.” The interests are more prosaic: “Malbec,” “glamping.”
Over and over in my adult life, despite being an introvert with a preference for monogamy, I have found myself in situations where I’ve had total sexual freedom. The older I’ve got, the more I’ve understood how often sexual freedom imposes itself on people who don’t seek it out—no marriage contract, religion, posture of tradition, or abortion ban will protect a person from having to contend with the sexual possibilities of the present. (Even the spectrum of modern celibacy—incels, volcels, femcels—can be understood, at least in part, as a reaction to so much freedom.) A fulfilling sexual life and the search for a relationship could proceed along distinct paths, even if both tend to be grouped under the nebulous umbrella of “dating.” Because a romantic rejection could mess up your brain chemistry for months, it’s helped, when deciding with whom to spend time, to know in advance which lane you were in, and what was reasonable to expect from another person. Feeld was the first app I’d used that expressly differentiated the search for erotic friendship from the search for romantic partnership. It was also unique in that it did not advertise this search in the language and imagery of cis-male fantasies of no-strings-attached sex. Its culture indicated some understanding of the precautions and reassurances that the rest of us might need.
In my initial profile, I put a photo of myself holding the cat that I no longer lived with and a selfie I took on the street in SoHo one afternoon after getting my hair cut. I wrote something to the effect that I was newly out of a relationship and that I liked talking about relationships. With my profile uploaded, I could now see a feed of people arranged by geographic proximity and decide whether they were a yes, a no, or someone I wanted to set aside for the moment and think about later. Two users who say yes to each other can begin exchanging messages.
One of my first messages was to a male-female couple who, in their photo, were dressed in black and sitting on the gnarled trunk of a fallen tree, with the man holding a crooked wooden staff, making them look like they belonged to some kind of wizardry coven. They listed “tarot” and “psychonauts” among their interests. At the time, I was reading a book called “High Weirdness,” a history of esoterica by Erik Davis. “You guys seem so cool, I would be very into this,” I wrote. They didn’t respond.
The first date that worked out was with a couple in Bed-Stuy. Their profile has since disappeared, but in my memory of their faceless photo they stood in tasteful wool coats in front of a backdrop of snow. After they sent me pictures of their faces, we met in Fort Greene Park, and then I went to their brownstone apartment, which had crown moldings, vinyl records, and plants. The formulaic Brooklyn décor was comforting. I’d moved out of my apartment in a state of duress, with no time to find a new place. Most of my belongings were in a storage unit in Queens, and the rest were stuffed into the trunk of my dad’s Toyota Corolla. Meeting up with the couple was a way of pretending that everything would be fine. They made a vegetarian dinner for me and served orange wine; their linen sheets were freshly laundered. It was nice, but I was lying to them, cosplaying a sexual optimist instead of being a person with no idea how to start over.
A few weeks later, I drove a friend’s rented camper van from New York to Los Angeles, as a favor. I ended up staying in California for six months. Days would pass without anyone asking where I was or what I was doing, and I turned more of my attention to Feeld. It was an old strategy: when life doesn’t deliver on a promised expectation, I look for alternatives, and what I found on this app seemed like an alternative to the fantasy of family I was letting go of. “Feeld is for a new type of human,” Dimo Trifonov, the app’s founder, once wrote. “A human belonging to a new world, one of creativity, openness, respect and exploration.” This was one way to make my unwanted future tolerable, to at least make it interesting for myself: to pretend that there was such a possibility as a new kind of person in a new kind of world.
Feeld began, in 2014, with the story of Trifonov and Ana Kirova, two Bulgarian graphic designers in their early twenties who were living in London. After meeting through friends, they fell in love. Early in their relationship, Ana started having unexpected feelings for a French woman she’d met. “It feels a bit childish now that I remember it, but I thought, If I’m falling in love with this woman, then I’m probably gay,” Kirova said. Hoping to warn Dimo “that what we have is not necessarily going to last” she wrote him a letter. Instead of wanting to break up, Dimo surprised her by being humbled and moved.
They agreed to open their relationship. “We really thought we had invented a new way of living,” Kirova told me. “We didn’t know open relationships and polyamory existed.” They tried dating apps but were met with confusion by other users, who told them, “There are swinger Web sites for people like you,” or asked, “If you still want to date, then why are you together?”
Trifonov decided to create his own app to facilitate threesomes. He put up a Web site with mockups of what it might look like and a sign-up list to gauge interest. He called the project 3nder (pronounced “thrinder”), and for its logo made an interlinked design in the shape of a three. It had a simple premise: “Threesomes made easy.” Despite being little more than an idea, 3nder got a lot of attention in the sluggish 2014 media environment, when the business strategy for many digital news startups was to make hapless young writers post twenty times a day about press releases.
“It just blew up immediately,” Kirova remembered. “There was a massive sign-up list.” A venture-capital firm, Haatch, put in fifty thousand dollars to get the technology off the ground, and the app launched a few months later. Within a year, more than a million people had downloaded 3nder, with California and New York quickly becoming the biggest markets.
The app’s scope began to change in December, 2015, after Tinder sent 3nder a cease-and-desist letter over the similarity of the two companies’ names, which was followed by a trademark-infringement lawsuit. Trifonov encouraged users to flood social media with messages of support for 3nder, but by August, 2016, he conceded and rebranded the company as Feeld, which was not meant to be a pun on “playing the field” but rather a suggestion that the app offered “a field of feelings.”
Feeld now advertised itself as a place to meet “kinky, curious, and open-minded couples and singles.” A new logo, of three interlocking ovals, rendered the number three more abstractly. But these changes were not only a rebrand. They gave the startup a chance to reassess its purpose. Feeld arrived at a time when the trans-rights movement was changing ideas about gender; mainstream sexual culture was shifting, too, with the language and etiquette of polyamory and nonmonogamy becoming more commonplace. Kirova, who had been an informal contributor to the company, accepted a salaried position there. At first, she feared that it might negatively affect her and Trifonov’s relationship. But, she admits, her joining the company was “inevitable”: “we were both working on it anyway.”
The couple noticed that Trifonov would move through profiles decisively, saying yes or no, but that Kirova would sometimes open the app, look at the person on top, and then close it again, unable to make up her mind. They rebuilt the interface to allow users to scroll through their feeds without having to decide whether they liked one person in order to see the next. “It was a very large piece of work at the time,” Kirova remembered.
In 2018, Kirova took over as the head of product, meaning that Feeld’s philosophy and user experience fell under her control, while Trifonov, as the C.E.O., focussed more on growing the company. One day, she came across a long and heartfelt message from a trans woman who was frustrated that Feeld had, at the time, only three gender options. “She felt like she was erased, because she couldn’t express her identity beyond the ‘other’ option we had, but that Feeld was the only dating app she felt comfortable in,” Kirova said. (OkCupid had added twenty-two gender options in 2014, but other apps were slow to follow.) “I’m quite embarrassed by it, because it was a typical case of a person from a marginalized community educating someone from a privileged one.” She recalled the lesson as an emotional one: “This is not some game they’re playing,” she realized, of her customers. “It’s something which has serious impact and importance in people’s lives.”
Kirova hired a consultant to help Feeld compile a broader spectrum of gender identifications and sexual orientations. She began inviting trans and nonbinary influencers to the company’s in-person events in London, where she would engage them in long conversations. She went on other sex-forward apps to see how they worked, including Grindr, where a gay couple invited her to join them as a voyeur. Today, Feeld’s Web site offers a glossary for more obscure terms, such as “objectumsexual” (someone whose sexuality is activated by specific inanimate objects) and “GrayA” (people for whom sexual attraction is very rare). Half of Feeld’s users identify as something other than heterosexual, so the company tries to be as responsive as possible to variations in language. It allows users to change their gender selection on their profile up to three times, and their sexuality as many times as they want. Other revisions have come in response to safety, such as requiring that both members of a couple have individual profiles. On the company’s blog and in a literary journal it publishes, Mal, sexual trends are discussed and explored; an issue from 2020 was devoted to sex negativity, with essays about the incel phenomenon and “heterofatalism.”
Kirova took over as the C.E.O. of Feeld in April, 2021. When I talked to her over video in early spring, the day after her thirtieth birthday, she told me that Trifonov had decided to step back from tech to focus on his work as a visual artist and other projects. (Trifonov declined to be interviewed for this article.) The two are still a couple.
Kirova has curly brown hair and a measured, thoughtful demeanor; when we spoke, she was in a co-working space in the Portuguese city of Porto. Feeld is now a fully remote company with sixty team members, and it tries to be as progressive in its corporate culture as it is in its product. Nearly half of the leadership team identifies as female, and salaries are transparent, with a floor of eighty thousand dollars a year. Under Kirova’s guidance, the app has seen immense growth, in part because of the strategy she deployed to get through the pandemic.
On Feeld, users can either select G.P.S. to identify their location or, because Feeld has not been widely adopted outside a certain circuit of globalized urban centers, place themselves in the “core” of a city that has a high concentration of members—the “Melbourne core” or “Amsterdam core”—even if they are elsewhere. (People often do this in advance of visiting a city, to set up some dates.) The pandemic hastened the creation of a “Staying-at-Home core,” a kind of global clearinghouse for people who are only interested in meeting online. Soon the company added two more virtual feeds—the “Fantasy Bunker,” for people who want to skip the small talk and start sexting, and “Remote Trios,” for those wanting a digital threesome. Following the announcement of the virtual cores, Feeld saw a fifty-per-cent increase in downloads in the first half of 2020, and a hundred-and-twenty-per-cent increase in messages sent as sexting grew in popularity. “Unlike porn, it’s interactive,” Kirova said. “A good sexting partner can surprise you.”
Los Angeles has a reputation for being a difficult place to meet people. Then, in late November, 2020, a COVID spike shut the city down. If anything, this made connecting with people on Feeld even easier; no one had anywhere else to be. I knew at the time that I was risking getting COVID, but the alternative, prolonged sexual isolation, seemed at least as harmful. I timed my encounters so that I wouldn’t endanger my relatives, who were the only other people I saw regularly. Occasionally, I would hang out with a couple, but I preferred the company of single people, mostly because there was an equality of need. I could arrange an encounter in minutes. I would take a bath, exchange a few photos from the tub, and a date would be set up; once, a guy diverted his jog and ran to my house. My dates happened sober and had an air of healthy exercise to them. Often we would go for a walk in a park, like in a Jane Austen novel. Sometimes we would meet again; most of the time, we wouldn’t. I preferred the emotional distance of someone new.
I have several unmarried and childless female friends who also started using Feeld during the pandemic. We were none of us very young; all of us had been “hooking up” with people for large swaths of our adult lives, and we had gone through the evolutions of Internet dating, from Web-based services to apps. The other apps, for all their creative prompts, had never stated the question quite this plainly: What kind of sex did we want to have? It helped, too, that the dynamics which might upset the balance of a domestic partnership or be too embarrassing to propose to friends were less fraught to bring up with strangers. Sex with people outside of our everyday social circles offered the freedom to remain undefined. Feeld could serve as a laboratory setting, in which one could articulate a desire to try a new thing—erotic hypnosis, say, or tantric massage—and discover a willing and experienced collaborator. At other times, we were offered something we would not have thought to ask for. Whereas some users liked to present themselves as edgy and experienced, Feeld was also a place where you could state plainly that you were a prude, or nervous. Suddenly, good sex wasn’t only a spontaneous connection of “chemistry” but a wide range of scenarios that could be engineered. Any sense of privacy was an illusion—a man whose profile contains photos of his face and who states his desire to get pegged is as visible to his co-workers and friends as he is to anyone else browsing the app—but the compartmentalized nature of the encounters offered the promise of sexual experimentation without public declaration. This setup perhaps held special appeal for anyone who did not want to suffer the real or imagined judgment of their colleagues, relatives, or friends.
The most dedicated Feeld user I know, who also turned to it during the pandemic, is my friend Anna, who lives on her own in Berlin. Anna works in food and wine and has more social energy than almost any person I’ve met. The only things that I’ve seen really scandalize her are crass manners, pomposity, and what takeout culture has done to the sacred practice of eating dinner. In 2020, Anna, who is in her early forties and grew up in Sardinia, was the first person to tell me about the messaging app Telegram, adding me to a bunch of sex and drug chat groups of the Berlin underworld, just so I could see how wild they were. But Telegram looked shady; I told her that there was an even better pandemic casual-sex scene, on Feeld.
She was in Sardinia for a visit and downloaded it while sitting under a tree in a vineyard. Two hours later, she and a friend were on a ferry to La Maddalena, a rocky archipelago in the Mediterranean, to see a guy. “I told him, ‘I’m with a friend,’ ” she remembered. “He’s, like, ‘I have friends—just come!’ ”
She liked that Feeld was not about finding a boyfriend but about “people with dirty minds meeting up.” She found it “really sweet” to see that women were comfortable with stating their horniness, that it was accepted as a common trait. “It’s good. It’s just, like, say what you want,” she said. “Which has always been my idea of how we should bring up girls: say what you want, and say what you don’t want.” Back in Berlin, she met academics, people with menial jobs, rich people in powerful positions, and “a lot of nerds.” They weren’t desperate, but they also weren’t too cool to express what they longed for, especially not during the long, dark winter of 2020 into 2021. “There was something special about that time in sexuality,” she told me. A forward-thinking, sex-positive city’s entire population of single people were isolated and hoping to connect. “It’s what I allowed myself,” she went on. “Like, O.K., I’m not going to have illegal rave parties, I’m not going to have twelve people over, but I will fuck, because otherwise I would lose my mind. And I really think it did save my mind.”
Through Feeld, she developed a small fetish for scripting absurd first dates. Once, she asked a man she had never met in person to meet her at a busy supermarket near the Zoologischer Garten U-Bahn station. It was winter; everyone had heavy coats and masks on. She described what she was wearing—a long coat with very little underneath—and gave her date permission to creep up on her and “be excessive” if he recognized her. “I kept circling around the aisles,” she said. “I was kind of looking around for him, and everyone was horrible, but then I just caught a glimpse of these two really beautiful blue eyes.” It was her date. “We were inappropriate in the supermarket and then left.”
Another friend, who lives in Los Angeles and asked not to be named, downloaded the app late one night in 2020. She was house-sitting at her parents’ home in the suburbs, “alone, bored, horny, and wasted,” she told me, “swiping right on everybody who was a reasonable prospect.” Within thirty minutes, she had a flood of messages. She started chatting with a guy who lived three hours away; they moved to video, and he offered to make the drive. By then, it was one in the morning. She waited, trying to stay awake. He arrived and busied himself at her parents’ bar, muddling herbs from the refrigerator and making cocktails for the two of them. They had sex that night and again in the morning. Of the ten or so encounters she has arranged since then, she has turned down only one person—which, after years of dating on standard apps, she finds “uncanny.” “One guy after another was a kind of adventure,” she said. “It was like the Olsen-twins movies”—“Holiday in the Sun,” “New York Minute,” “Passport to Paris”—“but with sex.”
A historical truism of the Internet-dating industry used to be that the more a site led with sexually explicit or pornographic content, the fewer women signed up for it. In the early days, general-interest dating sites resorted to euphemism: they let users look for “activity partners” and added questions about religion or children to attract people seeking long-term relationships. They banned explicit photos and used white backgrounds and friendly, heart-shaped graphics.
Even as Internet dating lost its stigma, a lot of these structural norms remained. Whatever Tinder’s reputation as a “hookup app” might have been when it launched, in 2012, its founders diligently avoided sex in the app’s language and advertising. Less subtle services (anybody remember “Bang with Friends”?) were flops. Blendr, the general-interest app from the company that started Grindr, failed to take off, in 2011—the minimal interface didn’t make women feel safe. Hackers exposed the user base of Ashley Madison, the dating service marketed to people seeking extramarital affairs, and it turned out that a disproportionate number of the few women on the site were bots. There are many Reddit posts by women upset by sexual overtures that they received on dating apps from people they haven’t got to know yet. As Bumble wrote, when it announced its photo policy, “You wouldn’t necessarily want to meet or approach someone in a restaurant in your (or their) underwear. You want a user’s consent to send that kind of content.”
Feeld has some of the same safeguards as other dating apps—explicit photos are typically blurred until two people match, and one can block someone without hesitation. But users are also disincentivized to be rude; why would you risk messing up the possibility of sex by clumsily introducing yourself with a dick pic? Instead of blunt overtures, communication on Feeld tends to favor the knowing use of highly specific vernacular and jargon. This follows the tradition of kinky online sex communities such as FetLife, the social network for B.D.S.M. enthusiasts and other fetishists, where language distinguishes a sexually explicit subculture that emphasizes consent from a pornographic mainstream. On Feeld, declaring a preferred sexual role—dominant or submissive, top or bottom—clears up some of the murkiness about dating, especially in an age in which there’s little consensus about who makes the first move or how to balance equality with the power dynamics that some people find sexy.
“Ethical nonmonogamy,” often abbreviated as E.N.M. and one of the most popular “desires” on Feeld, is a term influenced by a canonical self-help guide to open relationships, “The Ethical Slut,” written by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy and first published in 1997. “G.G.G.,” another popular tag—which stands for “good, giving, and game”—is a phrase popularized by Dan Savage, an alt-weekly-newspaper sex columnist turned podcaster. Ten years ago, these terms might have indicated a person who had undertaken some kind of sexual study of themselves, but today they have become the clichés of open relationships. It might not be fair, but there’s a certain kind of person I avoid on the app. Their profile will include a line such as “Nonmonogamy with a beautiful and awesome partner” or “Partnered and ENM with my sweet rock of a hubby” or “My dear wife and I are new to this ENM thing” or “In a near-decade-long partnership with my favorite human.” Every couple has a little mythology about themselves. I prefer to stay out of it.
Kirova suggested that the typical Feeld user represents not a demographic so much as a “mind-set.” The company has noticed that its users tend to change their conduct as they become more comfortable with the app, and with the way people on it express themselves. This kind of adjustment is also probably driven by conversation. My friend Anna recalled an instance in which a guy wouldn’t lay off after she’d decided that she didn’t want to meet him. “He was, like, ‘Why don’t you block me?’ ” she said. “I said, ‘Because I want you to make the decision to not bother me.’ He said, ‘If I can’t write you, it’s the same thing.’ I’m, like, ‘No, it’s not the same thing, because I’m giving you the possibility to just do the right thing.’ ”
If Twitter-style scolding is your fetish, there’s a lot of it on Feeld, but it’s also a real-time working out of gender expression and sexual identity before a knowing audience. I’ve seen nonbinary people express annoyance with the appropriation of queer identities. (“Being submissive doesn’t make you heteroflexible, nor does being a sissy,” a person who identified as a pan-gender omnisexual wrote.) I’ve also seen the opposite: “Heteroflexible/straight cis dudes are allowed to say hi,” a trans woman in her forties wrote. “Stretching is beautiful. Proud of you sweetie.”
I later spoke to this woman, who asked me to identify her only as G, on the phone. G lives in Brooklyn, is a mom, and is in a polyamorous marriage. For seventeen years, she presented as a bisexual man, before moving into a more gender-neutral presentation in 2018 and coming out as trans in 2021. She joined Feeld while transitioning. (Her pronouns are she/they.) Like Anna, G will take time to school a cisgender man who approaches her with sexualized insults or “negging,” but she thinks that Feeld could do more to protect its more vulnerable members from verbal harassment or abuse. “Trans people are driving a lot of their engagement,” G said. “My dance card is fucking full.” Like other forms of social media, dating apps have always spent more resources suggesting measures that people targeted by harassment could use to keep themselves safe than on figuring out how to make predators feel unwelcome, G said.
Feeld is popular in cities that have nurtured subcultures with ethics of anti-harassment and respect, places where parties often post their philosophies of inclusion and consent on event listings. G suggested that Feeld could take a similar approach, asking users for a reference, promoting literature about consent and feminism, or offering the digital equivalent of the monitors who sex parties train to help guests deal with harassers. (Feeld advises users to take screenshots of threatening behavior and submit them to its support team, which will decide whether the offender should be blocked from the app.)
Taking cues from the policies of queer spaces would make good business sense. A publicist for the company told me that in New York the users who make the most connections and stay active and engaged for the longest time are nonbinary people, a group whose numbers on the app grew more than two hundred and forty per cent between January, 2021, and January, 2022.
“It’s all the hot queer people and all the hot nonbinary people,” AdamLee, a thirty-eight-year-old performing artist and nurse, who uses he/they pronouns and is in an open relationship, told me, after we connected on the app. “Now that Feeld exists, that demographic is more easily at my fingertips,” they added. “I’m like a little bodega cat always trying to finesse.” In a tight-knit community, there’s also a lot of crossover between the digital and real worlds. They told me a story about going home with a couple from a bar that they’d previously seen on the app: “The bodega cat got taken home that evening.”
Charles Fulford, Feeld’s chief creative officer, said that the future of the app will have less to do with the notion of “dating” than with creating a safe space for people to explore undeclared or unquestioned aspects of their identities. “We believe this dynamism and fluidity is preternaturally human,” Fulford wrote me, in an e-mail, “much like the eroding taboo we see around psychedelic drugs going from perceived weirdos on the fringe to mainstream medicine and pop-culture acceptance. We want to help people navigate this change and push forward this next age of how we view identity, sexuality and relationships.”
I spoke with a trans person in their early thirties who told me that the number of available labels at first made them pause. “Those are the labels that exist, but they exist almost like a step ahead of where I exist,” they said. “I’ve gotten closer to those labels based on the connections that I’ve made, but I wasn’t in a place to know them ahead of time.” The language of identity does not always precede experience, they continued. Over time, “you figure out what language you need to speak in order to be seen.”
Looking ahead, Fulford said, Feeld might expand to connecting people in physical spaces and at events as well as online. “We don’t see ourselves just as a dating company,” he said but, rather, as “something that potentially looks like a media or network platform company.” It’s a nice idea, but making Feeld too much about figuring out who you are and less about already knowing might alienate a user base that is tired of having to explain itself. Its members just want to meet others who have already been to the rave, or the dungeon, or the dark room, or the play space, and who don’t need the rules of engagement to be spelled out.
Feeld, unlike most other dating apps, quantifies the interest its users receive with a number that Kirova assured me is real. In the two years I’ve been on the app, more than eleven thousand people have liked my profile, whose only proscriptive has been “no liars.” I’ve never felt as much license to dismiss male entitlement as I have on Feeld. If a man casually insults my appearance; if he pressures me to meet after I’ve said that I’m busy; if he treats me like a food-delivery service, ready to serve him when he’s in the mood; if he imposes rote pornographic fantasies on me without any curiosity or charm; if he indicates that he’ll try to negotiate his way out of using condoms; if he is coy or unforthcoming in a way that makes me suspicious; if he has no sense of humor or isn’t kind—I disconnect without hesitation or regret. There is no reason to tolerate any dehumanizing or insulting behavior.
I have mostly met men through Feeld, although I list my identity as “pansexual” to stay open to any proposition that might be interesting, a move I’ve seen criticized on the app. (A Feeld publicist told me that this is typical for women: “We have noticed they are looking to connect with humans of all genders and sexualities—suggesting that women joining Feeld view sexuality and attraction as something fluid that opens their desire to explore.”) The men I met surprised me: something about the dynamic of mutual understanding that separated sex from romance made them more open, or maybe it was just my no-entitlement policy paying off. When I visited their houses, they would serve fresh fruit, they would make tea, they would lend me books, they would tell me about their childhoods, they would respond immediately to text messages. In long conversations about relationships, they would express vulnerability and talk about their insecurities and regrets. They were open about their health and their S.T.I. status. They were effusive in their enthusiasm and their gratitude. It was so different from the dynamic of scarcity and coldness that I was used to in casual dating. I have fallen in love in the past two years, but not with anyone I met on Feeld—which is part of the reason I like using it.
My friend Anna compared the experience to taking a walk in the forest. “You know, you take a walk because it’s nice to walk, and then sometimes you find mushrooms. Sometimes you find herbs. Sometimes you find nothing, but the walk was nice. I bring home what I get, but the reason I’m chatting with new people all the time is because you never know.”
I’ve gone back to the standard dating apps a couple times, but none offered the same ease of connection. I kept experiencing a suffocating gender dynamic: regardless of the kind of person I am, I was somehow forced into the role of a desperate pursuer trying to win the affection of the elusive and “emotionally unavailable” male, a dynamic that was confusing to see revived in a moment when I was experiencing as much sexual agency as I’d ever had in my life.
“There’s a lot of judgment when you come to a date with relationship expectations,” Kirova told me. “You come there with a cutout and you place it over people. If I ask you on a date because I want to get married and have kids, I’ll have a very specific list, and as we’re talking I’ll be putting that over you, and I’ll be, like, ‘Oh, do you fit?’ And as soon as you say something that flashes in red, you’ll see it in my body language, because we’re not actors. . . . I think that can be very traumatizing, because you’re being yourself but you’re being rejected because you’re not fitting into someone’s perfect picture. The difference with this noncommittal approach is that you go out there with an open mind—you go with curiosity.”
It was never my goal in life to maximize my sexual experience, and I’ve always been skeptical of people who posture flippantly about sex, who reduce sex to bodies being hot or not, who ignore the spooky nature of attraction. For single people, casual sex is not a glib life-style choice but a serious attempt to be happy within a specific reality. There are many more single adults now than there were in 1973, the year Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to abortion, which was taken away in June. In 2020, a Pew Research Center study found that forty-five per cent of adults between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-eight do not live with a spouse or a child, a shift that is as much about the economic conditions we live under as a sense of identity. Not having a partner and not having kids may mean that you have more sporadic sexual encounters with people you do not know very well. If you live in a state with an abortion ban, as many now do, forced pregnancy must be added to the calculation of risk, but the attack on reproductive rights goes beyond physical consequences. It is a siege on sexual autonomy.
I joined Feeld because I missed physical connection during the pandemic but also because I am drawn to what is new and transformative in the world around me. The encounters I had through the app might never be repeated, but nobody I’ve met on there has pretended that those encounters haven’t mattered to them in some way, or that they weren’t, in the moment we sought each other out, very much needed.
The people who craft anti-trans legislation and laws to control sexuality see lives that are different than theirs as a threat to their own integrity. Imagine what that must be like, to not be able to think about change, and the possibilities it might offer. ♦
