It’s late at night and I’m showing my friend Andy round Feeld, “the dating app for the curious” where sexual preferences roam free. There’s quite a lot of beardy male talent, I explain, even if you have to weed out the ones that say they’re into kayaking and total submission. “Do you mean submersion?” he says, thinking it a kayaking term. “No I do not,” I tell him, handing over my phone. “Oh my God this one’s interests are: chess, BDSM and hot wax,” he gawps. Then: “This one’s into hot pot and foreplay!” I tell him he’s seen nothing yet.
With Tinder admitting that user numbers are falling, and Bumble, the “feminist app”, also in trouble – with its share price falling 80 per cent and founder Whitney Wolf Herd standing down as CEO – Feeld is now the go-to dating app. It’s likely that it will hoover up even more daters when Hinge presumably has its foundations shaken next. That’s the order the “traditional” dating apps exploded in (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge), and their implosion, at least in terms of dwindling users, is so far following the same order. How strange to now think of any dating app as traditional, but like Henry VIII’s wives, they’re lining up one by one for a beheading in favour of a sexier new muse: the kink app.
So why are we daters all evacuating for the dark side? I’m kinky enough I’d say, but I’m certainly no dungeon-dweller and joined Feeld four years ago purely because it was where all the best matches were, I’d heard. Feeld calls itself “the dating app for the open-minded” and trust me, if you’re open-minded, you can learn a lot just by making a profile. The first couple of days I was basically just going from Feeld to Google, trying to work out what ENM, FWB, MMF and FFM were.
I swiftly realised that my friends were right – there was a sexual smorgasbord of attractive men on offer here, quite a welcome change from the offerings I’d been matched with on other apps. Bumble was tame and on Hinge the guys just rolled out the same jokes. I started to wonder whether the really hot, cooler guys were on Feeld because they didn’t feel they had to offer a relationship. Whilst it’s definitely changing, men are still probably more likely to use dating apps just for sex and at least emotionally, they usually do manage to stay colder after the clothes have come off, I find. More than that, I think it’s just a sign of the times and a move away from commitment in general.
Originally created in 2014 by a couple who decided they needed to work a way for her to explore her interest in women without it causing him and her a game over, it was only much more recently that Feeld became so mainstream. Now two million connections and 30 million messages are sent each month, according to the app’s own research, and given that the app is clunky and irritating to use – plus it’s not free anymore, but the most expensive at £14.99 for a month – that’s saying a huge amount about how openly interested in experimenting we are. And it’s not the only kink app on the block; there’s also Pure, and more recently, WAX (WeAreX), which launched earlier this year, all picking up daters migrating from dating apps.
On Feeld, judging the large number of vanilla profiles, at least a quarter to a third of its users (I’d guess) aren’t even that bothered in the super kinky, and are just using it as they would any other dating app. I’ve probably been on more great dates via Feeld than on any other app without a single person wanting to tie me up in Japanese rope and suspend me from their ceiling (this is “shibari”, if you didn’t know yet).
Last week I met a musician who wanted to watch Polish noir movies and insisted on doing all the washing up after dinner. In the bathroom he folded all my towels very neatly and brought me a cup of tea in bed. Two years before that I met a pianist on Feeld and all he wanted to do was go to the lido (he had a “glucose problem” that made a lot of sex very dangerous apparently – so maybe that was his kink).
I did once have a few dates with a Feeld ENM (ethical non-monogamy) guy with a life partner and kids but instead of his preferences it was his children getting Covid mid-date and the “life partner” ringing non-stop (apparently she knew about his profile, but didn’t want to know when he was on a date) which made that most awkward.
As far as I can tell, its meteoric rise is a result of quite a chessboard of moves. Firstly, a rise in polyamory and casual sex and away from monogamy and other traditional styles of relationships (possibly because of the new order of things not being get married, buy a house, have a baby anymore). Feeld instead fuels the fun of the situationship instead. You can also link your profile to someone else’s – so “friends with benefits” or couples wanting to spice things up a bit (or feel like they are) in lieu of not being left out of this louche new way of life can both create a profile, connect them and then swipe together. Group chats spark up then and you can all get to know each other simultaneously. Other couples just have one profile and presumably sometimes sit in on a Friday night eating Deliveroo and watching Netflix as they always did, but now do it feeling a whole lot sexier because they’re on an app which says they could be down for a threesome.
As for the OGs of the dating app scene now being left behind, it’s almost amusingly apt. It was Tinder that first encouraged us to scroll and scroll through people’s pictures in the cut-throat manner that has given modern dating a negative, judgemental and fickle edge. Once we got used to that, of course we were going to jump ship from a dating app when another new and now more interesting version came on the market, just as we did with matches. The apps turned us too fast and furious for their own good and now the originals are a victim of their own success. Before too long, you know exactly what will happen. There’ll be a new kink app and we’ll all leave Feeld for a hotter model.
