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When Caleb was 20, he kissed a 19-year-old girl in the back of a car. For most young men born and raised in Virginia, as he was, this would have been unremarkable, but instead it ate him up with guilt. The strict evangelical Protestant church in which he was raised considered such behaviour before marriage a sin. When he confessed the act, he was subjected for a few months to what was termed “church discipline”. Other members of his congregation were told to “withhold fellowship” and stop associating with him, he says; he was barred from playing piano in his church worship group.
Not long after that, he met his wife – a member of a similar, though less strict, church – at a Fourth of July party. They were both virgins at the time, and very attracted to each other. They soon started having sex. Caleb felt intense guilt about this too, he says – so, “as many young evangelicals do”, they got married within 18 months so they could have sex without feeling shame. Over the next eight years, the couple had three daughters and went to college – and began to realise, gradually, that the close-knit religious community in which Caleb had grown up had no real warmth for them. “These people weren’t our friends,” he says. If he and his wife couldn’t attend a service, “Nobody called to say, ‘Hey, we missed you because we missed you.’ They’d say, ‘We missed you because you weren’t there, and God says you have to be there.’”
One Sunday morning in 2012, Caleb woke up and told his wife he didn’t want to go to church. She replied that she didn’t want to either. It was, he says, “one of the best days of [his] life”. They left the church, along with most of their social life, and started figuring out who they really wanted to be. The way for for both of them to “sow our oats in a way we didn’t get to when we were younger”, he says, was to open up their marriage.
Online, they saw people talking about a dating app “tailored towards nontraditional-type stuff, be it kinks or nonmonogamy”: Feeld. This was back in 2017, when the app was only three years old. Caleb says they had to pump up their distance-range setting in the app to 100 miles or more to find anyone – and that the first people they met through it were from West Virginia, an entirely different state. But despite being scattered across the map, Feeld’s users were friendly and welcoming: via the app, Caleb, who’s now 41, has formed around 15 short-term romantic relationships outside his marriage, and made many close friends.
Feeld has been booming in recent years: from 2020 to 2022 its userbase quadrupled, and has grown a further 30% every year since. From April to June this year, the app had an average of 1.5 million monthly active users, and the company’s profits increased from £2.4m in 2022 to £5.5m in 2023. Although that steep increase in users might be good for business – like most dating apps, Feeld offers paid subscriptions that give users more functionality – some Feeld veterans are worried about the app’s core community being diluted by “tourists” who treat their lifestyle as a novelty. This invasion of “vanilla” users has turned the already paranoid dating-app scene into something approaching civil war.
Feeld was born in 2014, when a different couple decided to open up their relationship. Ana Kirova, who is Bulgarian but was living in London at the time, started feeling a romantic connection to a woman she worked with, so she wrote a letter explaining her feelings to her boyfriend, Dimo Trifonov. Rather than end the relationship, he was accepting of it – and when the pair couldn’t find a dating app to help their move into nonmonogamy, he created one himself.
It was, and remains, built for sexual nonconformists. When you set up a Feeld account, you enter your birthdate and a name – many people go anonymous, or semi-anonymous, given the app’s sexual frankness. Then you’re presented with a list of 20 gender options, including bigender (being two genders, simultaneously or at separate times), genderfluid (having a gender that changes), and two-spirit (a traditional Indigenous American term for gender nonconformity). Then come 20 sexualities, including androsexual (attracted to masculinity), grayA (feeling very little sexual attraction, but not none), skoliosexual (attracted to genderqueer, nonbinary and transgender people) and objectumsexual (attracted to objects). You can then specify if you’re looking for one person or a couple. And before you get a chance to outline your non-erotic interests (Cinema! Flower-arranging! Roast dinners!), you have to express what kind of relationship(s) you’re after and what kinks you’re into: “BDSM”, “toys” and “edging” are about as explicit as the categories get.
Among the relationship options are ethical nonmonogamy (ENM) and polyamory (poly). ENM is the umbrella term, and can take in pretty much any kind of consensual situation in which more than two people are intimately involved – a long-term couple might be casually dating separately, for example. (The “ethical” in ethical nonmonogamy means it’s not “cheating”, but mutually agreed.) Poly stresses the romantic aspect: it could involve a three-person “throuple” in one relationship, or a person in two separate relationships.
Martin, 36, grew up across Eastern Europe in a similarly socially conservative environment to Caleb. “Until I was 25 I was monogamous, because I didn’t know there were any other options,” he says. But the arrangement felt like a betrayal. He would be in a loving relationship, but unable to act on the feelings he experienced for others. He finally addressed this gnawing unhappiness while studying for a PhD in New York, when he went on a date with a woman he had met on OkCupid, an early dating site. She was polyamorous, having been brought up in the United Arab Emirates by parents who were swingers in the ’80s and ’90s. Unprompted, she explained the concept of polyamory to Martin. “It clicked for me,” he says. “I never looked back.”
Their ensuing nonmonogamous relationship lasted about six months, but when Martin moved to London in 2016, he signed up to Feeld. He met one of his three long-term partners on the app, as well as one long-term friend-with-benefits, and has participated in official Feeld events: monthly socials that it holds in some big cities; and, in July 2023, a “comedy roast” in Soho where comedians gently satirised the Feeld profiles of volunteers – including Martin – on stage.
Yet over the last couple of years, Martin says, his experience on the app has deteriorated. He says the user influx means it’s “slowly morphing into just another vanilla dating app” – “vanilla” meaning people who have little interest in kink or ENM. He sees a lot of profiles of users openly admitting they’re vanilla, or saying that they’ve hopped over to Feeld because they’re not happy with their matches on other apps like Hinge. The invasion feels personal, he says, even though he isn’t matching with those users because they are after different things. “They’re invading the space that, for such a long time, was our space.”
Kelly, a 36-year-old New Yorker who joined Feeld in May, was a Hinge defector herself. She became single a year and a half ago, and says that the people she subsequently matched with on Hinge and Bumble were “so dry”. It was hard to get conversations going, and when she actually went on dates, no one seemed to have anything in common with her.
But when friends persuaded her to join Feeld, she found that its users were more interesting, and more comfortable being themselves. Her sexual preferences include “gentle femdom” (female domination) with men, so the Feeld community’s interest in kink worked for her, and she found its users were better at communicating the kind of sex they wanted than those of other apps. It was also the first app on which she felt comfortable saying she was pansexual. She’s met at least 20 people via Feeld and only had one bad date. She is also, she says, having “the most consistently good sex” of her life.
Even in the few months Kelly has used the app, she’s noticed an increase in straight men who don’t seem to be interested in actual kink and are just there because they think it’s a place to find easy sex: “I saw a man’s profile once that said, ‘Here when my libido requires it, otherwise happy on [members-only dating app] Raya.’” To try and fit in, some of those men pretend to be kinkier than they actually are. Kelly once went on a date with a guy who wasn’t explicit in his profile about the stuff he was into, and so she asked him. When he said he was “open to whatever”, Kelly responded that she wasn’t going to “just do whatever” to him. Another date admitted he only said he “leaned dom[inant]” on his profile because he felt he had to say something along those lines.
In October, Feeld held a launch party at London’s Standard hotel for its new magazine, AFM (“A Feeld/Fucking Magazine”), which is full of fiction and nonfiction about sex, queer life and other Feeld-adjacent topics. Contributors read their short stories from the magazine, including one about a break-up scene involving a box of sex toys being thrown down a river, and another, “Celia, Celia”, about two lesbians called Celia.
Attendees I spoke to had mixed feelings about the app. Julian, whose thin moustache sat below a diamante nose ring, had used it occasionally, but thought its extensive list of gender and sexuality categories was jarring. “Heteroflexibility; what the fuck does that mean?” they said. “Labels, labels, labels – sexual liberation doesn’t mean a list of labels.” Celeste, who had bleached eyebrows and a choppy black mullet, spent three years on Feeld until her relationship circumstances changed. She said she adored how clear people were about their desires on the app – but that without getting a premium subscription, which allows users to see who has liked them, she wouldn’t have coped with its surging popularity.
Feeld’s lightning-fast user growth – the kind that means it can launch its own magazine – is particularly unusual given the general state of dating apps, which have hit a period of stagnation. According to a November report from Ofcom, the number of British adults using Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and Grindr in May 2024 declined by between 1.9% and 5% for each app, compared to the same month in 2023. Anecdotes and articles back that up: after more or less taking over the dating scene, “the apps”, as they’re sometimes bitterly referred to, are now increasingly seen as unromantic and ineffective.
Why is Feeld bucking the trend? Kirova, the platform’s chief executive, puts it down to society at large catching up with the app’s focus on nontraditional relationships and sexual practices. “It’s where the world’s going,” she says, adding that Gen Z is currently their fastest-growing demographic. As to whether some of its new users aren’t quite as kinky as they say they are, she says Feeld was founded “in the spirit of honesty”, and that users are “strongly encourage[d]” to be honest too – but that “it takes time for people to build and evolve their voice.”
The stats (partially) back up Kirova up about a society-wide swing towards kink and ENM. Match, a dating company that has done detailed surveys of America’s sex life since 2010, has reported that the proportion of unmarried people who’ve been in a consensually nonmonogamous relationship has gone up from a fifth in 2014 to a third today. At the beginning of 2023, worldwide Google searches for “ethical nonmonogamy” jumped, and now average about triple what they did before; meanwhile searches for “kink” have nearly doubled in the past five years. Pop culture is reflective of this trend too: TV shows like Industry, Billions and Euphoria use kink as a buzzy on-screen device to get viewers talking about them, while two of the biggest novels of the year, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and Miranda July’s All Fours, explore open relationships in their plots.
But existing Feeld users aren’t convinced that everyone joining them is sincerely looking to explore their sexual boundaries. The most complained-about subset of incomers is an overwhelmingly male group who use Feeld’s sex positivity as an excuse to ignore etiquette. Rachel, a 32-year-old Londoner, says she was made to feel like “some sort of pro bono sex worker”, and was bombarded with so many inappropriate comments – one man opened by saying he wanted to get her pregnant and drink her breast milk – that she’s now quit the app indefinitely. Kate, a 50-year-old bisexual woman who’s used Feeld for just over two years and is now giving it a break, says the app has deteriorated because of all the cishet men who’ve just joined to look for hookups.
Béa, a nonbinary, pansexual creative director and musician who lives in Amsterdam, joined Feeld four years ago, shortly after they and their partner went nonmonogamous. They were drawn to the app because it was the only place where people had done their homework. “Whenever I’d go on a date with somebody from the other platforms, I had to explain what nonmonogamy was; what being nonbinary was,” they tell me. “I didn’t have to explain these things to anyone I met on Feeld. I would show up to the date and they’d be like, ‘Cool, so you use they/them – how’s nonmonogamy going? My partner and I are just starting it out.’” Out of more than 100 Feeld dates, they only had three or four bad ones – everyone else ended up as “a lover, a collaborator or just somebody who’s great to hang out with.”
In the beginning, Amsterdam’s Feeld community was small, and felt like a secret, exclusive part of the city’s queer scene. Béa would often bump into matches at parties. Now things have changed. As well as vanilla people joining the app, and horny men posing as doms, who are really “just assholes”, Béa says, there’s been a surge in users that they feel are only engaging in ENM in a superficial way. For them and their primary partner, with whom they share a house, going nonmonogamous was “the hardest thing we’ve done in our life” and has required a “strong foundation of really good communication”. Sometimes this is on an emotional level, like texting “I love you” when they’re staying over with other partners. Sometimes, it’s more mundane: the pair share their Google calendars with each other, and go through their schedules every week to keep track of who’s in the house or walking the dog when.
Béa says that the “cultural shift towards more people becoming aware of these lifestyle choices” is a great thing. But they also think that a lot of ENM-curious Feeld newbies are just using it “to try and fix something in [a] relationship that is already broken.” Couples open up their relationships rather than confront the problems underpinning them. This, they think, gives the whole ENM world a bad name: “It means that your relationship is falling apart if you’re nonmonogamous.”
Then there’s those simply trawling for threesomes. “I don’t want to ever put any shade on anyone for exploring,” Béa says, “but the [number] of straight couples I see who come on to Feeld with ‘looking for a girl for an unforgettable night’ [written in their profile] – that’s not queer. That’s just this hetero, straight male fantasy.”
This – along with Feeld’s recurring glitchiness, which many users complain has cost them countless matches – has made Béa disillusioned with the app. (When I asked Kirova about the technical issues, she responded that more members means they can invest and scale, and that "with the demand we have, there are changes that have to be made sometimes").They used to meet someone from Feeld once a week; now it’s more like every two months. They’re planning to let their paid subscription lapse, and focus instead on the “niche queer parties” where they know they’ll meet like-minded people. Feeld has “lost its lustre” – an appeal it originally had “only because it was hidden”.
The debate around Feeld is hard to imagine happening with one of the mainstream dating apps, which function less as communities than vast school discos, with pools of people eyeing each other up and picking who to pair off with. But Feeld is different. People who practise ENM don’t just choose a partner and scrub “the apps” from their phone, because they’re always (or often) in the market for choosing someone else. Feeld “should be a companion with you for your life”, says Béa. Business-wise, that’s both a blessing – Feeld traditionally hasn’t suffered from the user churn of apps like Hinge, which admits it’s “designed to be deleted” – and a curse: dedicated customers are more sensitive about their fellow users.
Because of this, Kirova stresses that her team tries to balance the needs of new and long-term users. One feature the latter – including Caleb, the former evangelical Christian – have been requesting for years was finally added to the app a few months ago. Constellation, as it’s named, allows users to show their connections to multiple partners, so potential matches can pick between each set. (Previously, Caleb had to create two accounts, one for the relationship with his wife and one for the relationship with his other long-term partner.)
Though kink and ENM naturally have a lot of overlap, Kirova suggests that it’s more with the latter, along with other types of relationship, where Feeld’s future lies. “In our early days, I remember that threesomes [were] one of the desires that people were most interested in,” she says. (Riffing on this, the app was initially even called 3nder, before a legal challenge from Tinder.) “That’s really changed: right now, people are a lot more interested in things like ethical nonmonogamy or [platonic] friendship. Rather than a specific experience, they’re looking for certain types of dynamics.”
The mainstream exposure of ENM and kink is altering more than just Feeld. Bumble, Hinge and Tinder have all added options to specify nonmonogamy on profiles in the last couple of years, while new kink and ENM dating apps, like Pure, BeeDee, Joyce, WAX and Nymph, are coming for Feeld’s users.
Caleb, who’s been on Feeld for most of its existence, hasn’t used the app much recently. He and his wife are “in a different stage of life now”, he says. Their children, who know about their nonmonogamy, are now in their late teens, “with extracurriculars and soccer games and all kinds of stuff. And then I also have a second committed partner of four years. I’m very satisfied with where I’m at.”
He’s also pretty relaxed about the app’s recent boom. In fact, he believes the Feeld community getting larger means that newbies are likely to find each other more easily. “There can be a lot of gatekeepers to experiences,” Caleb says. “I think those people often forget that they too were once outside.”
Some names have been changed.
