In the late summer of , 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. 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.
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. 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. It is a place to be yourself, or to play at being someone else. Some users request no overtures from cis males, white people, or straight people; others make wry jokes about oppressive beauty standards. Thirty-five per cent of users are part of a couple. Data points such as diplomas and fancy jobs do not confer status. 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.
Even the spectrum of modern celibacy—incels, volcels, femcels—can be understood, at least in part, as a reaction to so much freedom. 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.
