Recently I was driving back to London after a lovely family weekend in the country, feeling utterly desolate. Newly single, parent to a small baby, scared about basically everything, the world seemed very bleak. “I just want to have some fun,” I said forlornly to my sister as we crawled through traffic in South London.
“Why don’t you go on a date?” she suggested. I dismissed this idea on the basis that I’m wholly unready to be in a relationship. “In which case,” she said, always wiser than I am, despite being younger, “you should try Feeld.”
I didn’t like to admit to her that I didn’t know what Feeld was, but later, after I’d put my daughter to bed, I downloaded it.
The entire time the little orange icon was arriving on my screen, I felt like a criminal. Technically, I had used dating apps before. As a lifestyle journalist, I had intermittently written pieces like Can I get a Tinder date using only Taylor Swift lyrics? or What happens if I pretend to be Kanye West on Hinge? I’d make basic profiles and then delete them the same day. But aside from making moderately unfunny content, this was a whole new world, and anyway, Feeld is very different from Bumble, Hinge, Tinder and the rest. Very, very different.
The Feeld tagline is ‘a dating app for the curious; for those open to experiencing people and relationships in a new way’. It’s different because it allows for non-monogamy (couples can have profiles), and doesn’t shy away from the idea that people use dating apps to try to find sex. It was created by a couple, Dimo and Ana, who navigated the choppy waters of open relationships when Ana wanted to explore her bisexuality. It was founded in 2014, and now about two million people per month match on the app.
I filled out my profile, wrote a painfully embarrassing paragraph about myself, and started swiping. Despite having spent much of the early 2010s on the fetish scene, Feeld felt like falling down the rabbit hole. I know it’s madly naïve, but I couldn’t believe that there were hundreds of people within a couple of miles radius, all of whom seemed to be up for just… having sex? People were posting their rough location with dates when they wanted to hook up. Specific sexual fantasies they wanted to fulfil. The length of their penises. This definitely wasn’t Hinge.
I quite quickly got over my reservations when I realised that the people on Feeld were actually, possibly surprisingly, really great. You might assume that the clientele there was going to be pretty weird – I did. But to my surprise, it’s not. There are plenty of Toms who work at PwC and Chloes who teach art, who happen to want to explore alternative sex and sexuality. There are also, to my gossipy delight, quite a lot of famous people. In the last week I’ve matched with a former reality TV show contestant and three comedians (comedians, it seems, are very raunchy). I’ve also had several people I know in real life come up, resulting in a wry acknowledgement next time we saw each other, like when two bus drivers drive past each other and nod.
Unlike other apps, Feeld allows couples to search for additional people to sleep with or date, facilitating joint or shared profiles. And perhaps because wherever polyamory goes, kink follows, it’s got a pretty sizeable usership from people in the BDSM community. It’s also, unsurprisingly, got a litany of options to pick from in terms of your sexuality and what you’re looking for. I’d always been warned that finding women to sleep with as a bisexual would be nigh on impossible, but Feeld seems to have a robust community of women who are bisexual and not put off by women who have predominantly been with men.
Perhaps because it’s a quirkier app, Feeld seems to attract more creative people than other platforms. The quality of conversation is consistently great. Sure, you get the cliched ‘u up’ messages every now and again, but the majority of people just seem to be entirely decent. I’ve never been sent an unsolicited penis (although I’ve had lots of polite offers, which I turned down). Perhaps because sex is right at the top of the shopping list on Feeld, people seem to behave much better and more respectfully about the whole idea.
Of course there have been some sticky experiences. I got into a weird fight with a couple I chatted to. They told me I was a lesbian because I showed more interest in her than I was in him (in fairness, she was more interesting and more attractive). There have been conversations that fizzled, and fairly frequently someone will panic when they discover that I’m a writer. But for the most part, it’s been exactly the Divorce Hobby I needed.
The date
Inevitably I was going to have to take things offline eventually, a completely terrifying prospect given that I hadn’t been on a first date in almost a decade. But I fell into easy, funny, flirty conversation, which then moved to Whatsapp (Telegram or Kik also seem popular but I can’t face another platform to not reply to messages on) and eventually, despite being terrified, I took the plunge.
I found myself nervously knocking back a really mediocre glass of Picpoul outside a pub, talking too much, oversharing, laughing, and to my enormous surprise, having an incredibly nice time.
I say this with all the wisdom of someone who just started doing it: dating is lovely. The excitement of getting dressed for someone, the frisson of seeing them for the first time, exchanging stories and anecdotes and realising that you’ve gone off on a huge tangent. It’s all a little bit magic.
On Feeld an outset of honesty, when you meet on an app which specialises in sex and non-monogamy. It seems to prompt a conversation quite early on about what you both want and what you’re both looking for. I can’t help feeling that if I’d looked up over my glass and told a nice normal man from Bumble that I was trying to claw back the lost years of my twenties by dating lots of interesting, creative men at the same time, he might have been a bit shocked. But my date seemed to regard this as entirely sensible.
I’m not suggesting for a second that downloading an app was the single universal life hack to healing from an agonising breakup, or that it’s a silver bullet for finding love. I’m still a long way from being any kind of expert in any kind of dating. But I’m consistently surprised by how few of my friends have heard of it, and how those who have heard of it wrote it off on the basis that it “sounds weird”. Admittedly, it is a little bit weird. But then, as I’m increasingly realising, so are some of the best people.
Maurice Saatchi: I used to adore capitalism – then I had lunch with Margaret Thatcher