Obviously if you are not on any dating apps, you shouldn’t have any opinions about them, and you definitely shouldn’t worry about other people’s opinions of them. But I have been hearing so much about Feeld that I can’t ignore it.
People sometimes call Feeld the “throuples” dating app because of how it started: a tech entrepreneur couple, Dimo Trifonov and Ana Kirova, considering opening their relationship, had an idea for an app that they originally wanted to call 3nder. In fact, it’s not just for throuples, but anything remotely unconventional, dating-wise, from ethical non-monogamy to the most casual one-time-only hookup.
It is run from Cumbria, but most of its income is from overseas users, and its revenues have nearly doubled in a year, to almost £40m. It is “on a mission to elevate the human experience of sexuality and relationships”, it says. So, recapping the caveat that I shouldn’t have any opinions about this and definitely shouldn’t be worrying about it, nevertheless, thank God. Because dating apps were starting to sound really dark.
Around all the traditional sites – Bumble, Tinder, Match – the same phrases kept cropping up: “bear pit”; “wild west”; “Hobbesian pre-civilisation hellscape”. The rules were brutal. You could be love-bombed one minute and ghosted the next. The absence of social architecture, mutual friends and so on meant you could be rejected 50 times without ever knowing why.
Concurrently, young people stopped having sex. In the UK in 2020, a quarter of those aged 18 to 24 hadn’t had sex at all in the previous year. Back then, everyone blamed Netflix. Then they blamed Covid. When, in 2021, a study found that nearly 40% of Californians aged 18 to 30 had had no sex in the past 12 months, tech bros started to blame the apps.
Scott Galloway, academic, podcaster and author of Adrift: America in 100 Charts, floated the theory that women pick mates using three criteria. “Number one is ability to signal future resources. Number two is intelligence. Number three is kindness.” Internet dating has messed with the chemistry, he told me last year. You can’t judge intelligence or kindness from a dating profile, so you’re left judging only on resources and they all cluster round the guy with the visible Rolex. There are, he said, studies showing that in a group of 50 men and 50 women, about 45 of the women will pay all their attention to just five men, leaving 45 men vying for the attention of five women.
So a two-tier system was evolving – the men who couldn’t get laid at all, and the ones who were in high demand, leading to what Galloway called “Porsche polygamy”. When I heard him say this, I assumed he meant Portia polygamy; her own high status leaves her paralysed by choice in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice – “If I should marry him, I should marry 20 husbands,” etc. Instead, he meant: the dude’s got a Porsche, so he can do what he likes.
I never really swallowed any of that. It is a social fairytale (some) people love to tell themselves, that women are thinking with their ovaries, always looking for security – financial, temperamental, romantic – while men are capering about and have to be somehow lassoed into stable units like wayward cattle. It speaks to a fragile masculinity that can’t cope with the idea of women as equally chaotic, because it can’t really cope with women in the first place. But I couldn’t help noticing that the conventions of dating apps, not just within the dating game, but also in the discourse around sex and dating, were hurtling back to the 50s. Men had to look rich. Women had to look well groomed. Men were looking for sex. Women were looking for marriage. This found its ultimate cultural iteration in the tradwife, Instagram’s fascinated recreation of the 50s housewife.
Feeld is not so much a challenge to these weirdly revivified gender constraints as a site where such notions are irrelevant. If anyone on Feeld is “very demure, very mindful”, it is most likely a fetish. Sure, it may be an existential threat to the nuclear family. But that’s fine too.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist