I stifled laughter as I dangled a pair of nipple clamps from my fingers. Sprawling across a friend’s couch in a vintage silk nightgown, I struck the most seductive pose I could muster.

“Are you sure this isn’t too ridiculous?”

My friend snapped a few more photos, and we both exploded with giggles. “It’s perfect,” she said, firing off one of the pictures to a guy with the profile name “Cowboy” before I could object. 

I’d recently downloaded Feeld, the “dating app for the curious,” in search of like-minded guys to spend time with. As a 39-year-old woman who doesn’t want children and travels all the time, I felt that many of the eligible men using Hinge, Bumble, and other apps didn’t jibe with my lifestyle. More than one dude I’ve matched with thought it was appropriate to ask me if I was “sure about the no-kids thing” before we even made plans to meet up.

So during my latest romantic dry spell, a female friend who always seems to be overflowing with hot prospects suggested I try out Feeld. It wasn’t an obvious choice: The app was designed for people already in relationships looking to find additional sex partners. I’m about as monogamous-minded as they come — but so is the friend who told me to join. “Just see what happens,” she urged me. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

Feeld’s user base has ballooned in recent years, with “triple-digit growth” in downloads since 2020, according to spokesperson Ashley Dos Santos. A spate of recent articles have suggested that the service once catering to the polyamorous and fetish-forward has gone “mainstream,” inundated by normies. But Dos Santos says the newcomers are also alternative types — just a more diverse group. In addition to folks seeking multiple partners, Feeld is now a welcoming forum for the kink community, celibate people in search of intimate emotional connections, singles looking for respectful casual sex, and more. In other words: a thriving meat market for anyone who errs on the side of the unconventional.

That pretty much describes me and many of my monogamously inclined single friends. So I fired it up and created a profile.

The first few days scanning for potential matches made one thing clear: The men on Feeld present themselves with an unusual level of candor. On Hinge and Bumble, I’ve spent hours swiping through profiles of guys who enjoy hiking and coffee, who plan on buying a single-family home in the Excelsior as soon as their equity vests, and whose most pressing questions are whether I prefer the Ikon or Epic ski pass.

On Feeld, by contrast, I scrolled through disarmingly vulnerable reflections about what men were looking for and why, plus a host of new vocabulary words. I’ve lived in San Francisco long enough to know that “ENM” means “ethically non-monogamous,” but “objectumsexual” was a new one. (A YouTube deep dive on the term turned up the documentary “Married to the Eiffel Tower,” in which you meet a woman who has fallen in romantic love with the Golden Gate Bridge.) 

Creating my own profile, in turn, felt empowering. Instead of coming up with a handful of attention-grabby quips, I wrote confidently about my sobriety, my monogamy, and my borderline-unhealthy obsessions with jam bands and my dog.

Not everyone was a match: I wasn’t interested in the many “happily married and trying this out for the first time” husbands, men closer to my father’s age, couples who linked their profile pages together, or the numerous headless torsos wearing tight boxer briefs that bulged with possibilities. Being immune to certain performative expressions of San Francisco weird, I swiped past requisite Burning Man photos and proud tantric meditators.

Within less than a week, though, I was nurturing interesting, meaningful conversations with some of the most attractive and open-minded men I’d ever encountered on a dating app. I eagerly met up with one for coffee — his proclamation that he “wasn’t on a life escalator” drew me to him — and although our vibe was platonic from the onset, we had a lovely three-hour conversation and still sporadically trade travel tips. Another guy I spoke to at length confided in me about his burgeoning existential crisis, then offered to dog-sit.

Many of my pals have had similarly positive experiences — and data from Feeld reflects this. In San Francisco, the company over-indexes on millennials, with 54% of its local user base part of the same generation as I am. Gen Z represents only 16% of the city’s Feeld members, though they comprise the app’s fastest-growing demographic overall. This suggests that, at least around here, folks aging into what society may consider more conventional life phases are increasingly seeking alternatives.

A divorced male friend who’s in no rush to settle down again but identifies as neither kinky nor poly told me he prefers Feeld to other apps because it has more of a “let’s see how it goes” attitude.

“Look, the biological-clock thing is real, and I completely understand the urge to find a life partner if you want to start a family,” he said. But on apps like Hinge and Bumble, he had yet to find matches who were “open to exploring a connection without the goal of it turning into a serious relationship.”

One of my female friends with a very real biological clock told me she started seeking connections on Feeld because she doesn’t “see myself with a ‘normie’ guy. A lot of my social life exists in queer spaces, and I need to be with someone who’s comfortable in that realm. And I do consider myself as more of a kinky person. The last person I dated self-described as ‘vanilla,’ and I found our sex life to be unsatisfying.”

Once the initial excitement wore off, I realized that I wasn’t totally enamored of Feeld — for the same reasons I don’t like other dating apps. I still think it’s tedious and superficial to wade through romantic candidates on the internet, and I don’t prefer to spend my time awkwardly meeting up with strangers to see if we might want to sleep together one day (or that night). 

Feeld’s brazen sexual aspects also turned me off, though I know that’s a draw for many users. I don’t find it appetizing to receive a dick pic in the middle of a deep conversation about navigating mental health issues. And jumping immediately into graphic descriptions of intimate acts with guys I otherwise knew nothing about felt hollow and sad. Eventually, I added a line to my profile that said, “My kink is getting to know you first.”

After a handful of brief dates with clear mismatches, I slowed down my swiping. Cowboy and I never had a chance to meet in person. (It turns out I’m just as likely to get ghosted on Feeld as I am on other apps.) I returned the nipple clamps to the adventurous friend who loaned them to me for that photo shoot. These days, I tend to open Feeld only when I’m bored or traveling. 

My friends fared better. The divorced guy met up for drinks with a cute girl who is also looking for casual connections. And my female friend who wants kids and a life partner has for a month been dating a man who also considers himself monogamous and family-oriented. When she told him she was “looking for someone to match my freak” and he replied “I’ll be your nasty girl,” she knew she’d found the peanut butter to her jelly.

Meanwhile, longtime Feeld users I spoke with — those with extensive experience in polyamorous and kink communities — seemed excited that the app is expanding to include basic bitches like myself. One friend, a woman who’s been in an open marriage with her husband for more than a decade, compared Feeld’s growth to a bustling hotel lobby filled with people with whom you’d want to have an interesting conversation.

Dos Santos approved of that analogy. “It’s not that Feeld is becoming mainstream,” she said. “It’s that society is expanding its definition of what relationships are and can be. People are finding they have a safer space to land here, and that they feel comfortable being their authentic selves.”

In the midst of a political climate that’s trending toward “trad wives” and “family values,” a bigger platform for unconventional connections can only be a positive thing. And even though Feeld probably isn’t the forum where I’ll find my next boyfriend, you never know — I might end up with a hot new dog sitter.