Would You Read a Magazine By a Dating App?

The original post is located at www.elle.com 

It’s a tricky time for dating apps. Even as modern dating has turned into a hugely swipe-driven venture, dissatisfaction is in the air. It’s the endless gamification, the constant pressure to pony up for premium membership, the sheer labor of having to sift through yet another set of lackluster notifications. At the same time, sexuality is growing thrillingly more complex. Gen Z is reportedly the queerest generation ever, and even suburban moms are experimenting with polyamory now. These days, the task of explicitly defining one’s personal predilections for connection has become as much of a hurdle as the actual search for like-minded horny humans.

Enter Feeld, the so-called destination for “alternative dating” originally founded as an unambiguous app for threesomes and open relationships in 2014. The London-based company has since expanded its mission as a “dating app for the curious” and made a name for itself connecting birds of a feather, particularly within kink and poly communities. And business has been great: According to Feeld, the app has seen 30 percent year-over-year growth globally since 2022.

Now, on October 16, Feeld is launching a print magazine. Titled A Fucking Magazine (but also interchangeable as A Feeld Magazine), the project features originally commissioned pieces from luminaries including Daphne Merkin (of the infamous 1996 New Yorker spanking essay), Allison P. Davis (of New York’s recent polycule cover story), and Tony Tulathimutte (author of this fall’s critically acclaimed incel novel).

“We’ve always been uniquely resonant with creatives in our community,” Feeld CEO and cofounder Ana Kirova tells me, explaining the initial inspiration for the foray into print. A Fucking Magazine—or, as she calls it, AFM—is a celebration not only of the app’s goal to help you get creative about specifying the sex or connection you’re seeking but also one that taps into the creative lives of archetypal Feeld users as well (half of the content, Kirova notes, was produced by Feeld users). Plus, I got the sense that, like many of those said creatives, Kirova herself couldn’t say no to the chance to produce a gorgeous print object: Her mother used to run a print newspaper in Bulgaria, and Kirova herself was a 21-year-old graphic design student when she first met her future co-founder/partner, Dimo Trifonov, at a party in London. “Print has always had a special presence in my life,” Kirova says.

The resulting magazine, drawing direct inspiration from the 1980s French arts publication FMR and Fuck You: A Magazine circa the 1960s, wouldn’t look out of place amongst the matte copies of N+1, The Drift, or The Whitney Review on your typical indie intellectual’s coffee table (in fact, ads for all three appear in the back of the issue). Inside, the content is substantive: film criticism, poetry, essays galore, a roundtable of literary darlings pondering the difference between commitment and loyalty but also a how-to guide for making your own latex. It’s more esoteric than lurid, though certainly less sanitized than your typical brand IG feed.

When I mention to Kirova that it seems rather bold to include something like author Merrit Tierce’s essay envisioning an abortion TV show in a magazine issue of which the theme is “Pursuit of Happiness,” she doesn’t bat an eye: “We really wanted to give room to allow people to say what others won’t or cannot or avoid,” Kirova explains. This isn’t Feeld’s first foray into print publishing: For a few years leading up to the pandemic, the company published five issues of an erotic literary journal called Mal. This time, Kirova hopes to publish AFM twice a year.

From a branding perspective, going into the media business is hardly an unexpected move. Snapchat’s online magazine, Real Life, was high-minded and beloved, as was the Dollar Shave Club’s men’s publication, MEL Magazine (though both publications have since shut down). The print medium has particularly enjoyed, if not a fully monetizable renaissance, then at least a renewed cachet particularly among traditional magazine publishers as well as fashion and luxury brands. Who could forget the lines for Miu Miu’s book pop-up from June? Tactility in a time of screens—turns out, there’s nothing cooler.

Even Hinge has recently gotten into the zine scene, commissioning a clouty literary assemblage of its own to write short stories about actual Hinge-matched couples. I ask Kirova what she thinks of AFM launching months after the Hinge zine campaign, to which she doubles down on the unique relationship Feeld has with its “community.” (It’s not a bad strategy—I have a hard time imagining most men I’ve encountered on Hinge wanting to read a few thousand words on “The Erotics of Unhappiness.”)

Besides making an actually good magazine, I suspect Feeld also stands to uniquely benefit from this moment in time culturally. Surely, all the latest discourse about our growing anxieties about heteronormativity, marriage, and monogamy itself could be Feeld’s eventual gain; one can easily picture a world where an app that offers more than 20 sexuality and gender identity options, and the ability to link up to five members of the polycule, wins out over the hurry-up-and-delete-us ethos of traditional dating apps.

“We were way ahead of our time with what we built,” Kirova says, when I ask if Feeld is the future. She’s careful to use the kind of Esther Perel-y speak of “openness” and “intention” when she talks about Feeld’s mission; her tone evokes a pleasant utopic vision where plentiful sex and connection is simply a matter of earnestness and well-intentioned design. At the very least, it’s now much easier to talk about the app itself: In its early days, she and Trifonov supposedly couldn’t rent an office space because the landlord didn’t approve of “the nature of their business.”

“I’m very optimistic in our intention,” Kirova says of the threat of general dating app fatigue. “I believe that even though technology right now is disappointing a lot of people, I think it’s just a period of maturation for the whole medium of how we’re meeting.” That is, we might be used to relying on the apps now, but maybe we still have to get used to the idea that no app can do all of the work for us.

That’s a lesson that Kirova professes to have been learning herself. Before hopping off Zoom, I ask how her own views on dating have evolved since the days she first wrote a letter to Trifonov that led to the opening of their own relationship—a critical part of Feeld lore. She ponders this for a second.

“In the same way that I don’t subscribe to monogamy as a norm, I don’t really subscribe to ethical non-monogamy as a norm either,” Kirova says finally. “I look at the relationships I build with people with a lot of care and intent, each one and all of them together, how they influence each other. It sounds a bit abstract, but that’s how I approach my coexistence with people rather than think about, oh, how do I connect with this person and then with that person, how is that configuration going to work? I really feel like I’m creating with other people.”

She adds, “The one thing that has stayed the same is that there’s always something to learn. There’s not a moment where you’re like, okay, I figured out all relationships.” Which is to say: the process never ends. But you can still create a thing of beauty—or at least a magazine.