A Real Story

I downloaded Feeld about eight months after my divorce, mostly because a coworker said it was where people were actually upfront about what they wanted instead of hiding it until date three. I set my orientation to ‘curious’ and my intentions to ‘ENM,’ figuring I’d dip a toe in without committing to anything. Within a week a couple named on their joint profile as Mara and Dev messaged me, and their opening line wasn’t a compliment, it was a paragraph explaining their rules: no overnight stays yet, no meeting friends, and Mara wanted to be the one who initiated anything physical first. I appreciated the bluntness more than I expected to.

We met at a wine bar in a strip mall, of all places, because Dev said neutral territory mattered for a first hang. I remember Mara ordered a cava and immediately apologized for being nervous, which made me less nervous. Over three months we saw each other maybe six times, always the three of us, and it worked better than I thought it would — until it didn’t. The group chat we used for logistics slowly turned into me and Dev texting on the side about a show we were both watching, nothing dramatic, just ours.

Mara noticed before I did. She brought it up over the phone, calm but clearly hurt, and asked if I was ‘still doing this for both of them or mostly for him now.’ I sat with that question longer than I wanted to admit, because the honest answer was I didn’t know anymore. I liked Dev’s specific brand of dry humor more than I liked the arrangement as a whole, and that’s not what any of us signed up for.

We ended things carefully, with an actual conversation instead of a ghost job, which I give all three of us credit for. What I took from it wasn’t that Feeld is a bad place to find this kind of dynamic — I think it’s honestly one of the few apps built for it — but that being upfront about your intentions on a profile doesn’t mean your feelings will stay that tidy once there are real dinners and real inside jokes involved.