In the New York Times, "A Dating App for Three, Plus"

Feeld, which some people tell me is the friendliest of the new apps specifically for group dating, got a writeup in the Style section of yesterday's New York Times:

A Dating App for Three, Plus

Nonmonogamous coupling — and “thruppling” — has been lubricated by the internet.

Emily Keegin; Shutterstock

By Haley Mlotek

Feeld is a dating app with options that put the Kinsey scale to shame.

If you’re single, you can set up an account stating your preferences and curiosities, as you might with any other service. The app lists 20 possibilities for sexuality alone, including heteroflexible (straight-ish) and homoflexible (gay, for the most part).

But couples and partners can sign up, too, in service of finding a third — or a fourth.

The app was released in 2014 by Dimo Trifonov and Ana Kirova, two graphic designers living in London, as 3nder (pronounced “Thrinder”). They hoped to appeal to individuals and partners looking to join or have threesomes. But after Tinder filed a lawsuit and the company rebranded as Feeld (as in “playing the”), the founders said they welcomed the opportunity to expand the mission of the app.

“Feeld is a platform for alternative dating, for people who are beyond labels,” Ms. Kirova said in an interview. “They can meet each other without the necessity of coming from a very defined place with a very defined requirement.”

According to the company... about 35 percent are on the app with a partner, and 45 percent identify as something other than heterosexual. (Gender options include nonbinary, intersex and two-spirit, as well as gender-nonconforming, genderqueer and gender-questioning.)

Feeld facilitates types of sexual attachment that are not exactly novel, but are often described in novel terms. (See “thrupple,” a term sometimes used to describe a romantic partnership for three people.) ...The company... says there are currently 12,000 connections made on Feeld and an average of 100,000 messages sent daily. ...

(OkCupid recently added a feature that allows couples to link their accounts in their pursuit of a third.)

...Mr. Trifonov and Ms. Kirova, who began dating six years ago... made Feeld as much for their users as for themselves.

Mr. Trifonov said that they had been together for two years when Ms. Kirova revealed she also had feelings for a woman. “She felt really bad about it, like she was doing something wrong,” he said. ...[They] wanted to stay together while also giving Ms. Kirova space to try other relationships, but they didn’t like the options available to them. (They decided to search as a couple.) They felt unfairly judged by the label “swingers,” and recall users on other dating apps reaching out to say they shouldn’t be in spaces intended for single people. ...

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...Now, the company is up and running more or less smoothly, with some 20 people employed. In the tradition of small businesses everywhere, all workers do multiple tasks, and titles are given more for the benefit of people outside than those within it. (The company also runs an event series on nonmonogamy [Feeld Experiences] and put out a magazine [Mal, "a journal of sexuality and erotics seeking to create new ground for writing about sex, gender, race & LGBTQ+ issues"].)...

If they had stayed simply a threesome app, Mr. Trifonov believes it would have died as a threesome app. ...

Read the whole article (in the print issue March 21, 2019; online March 20).

Update: Perhaps prompted by this story, the UK Times (no relation to the NYT) has published this: Want a threesome? Try Feeld, the polyamory dating app (April 18, 2019. Paywalled.)

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