A Real Story

My partner and I linked our Feeld profiles the week we decided to open things up, which sounds tidy but was actually us sitting on the couch arguing about whether to list our relationship as ‘open’ or ‘polyamorous’ for twenty-five minutes. We picked polyamorous. Within a few days I matched with a woman named on her profile only as ‘K,’ a hospice nurse who wrote her whole bio in the voice of someone filling out a very honest OKCupid profile in 2011, and I liked that immediately.

Our first date was coffee that turned into four hours at a bar because she asked me, unprompted, how my partner and I handled jealousy, and I realized I didn’t actually have an answer beyond ‘we’re working on it.’ I went home and told my partner everything, which felt like a betrayal of some unwritten rule until I realized the whole point of doing this on an app built for it was that nothing had to be hidden in the first place. That distinction — private versus secret — took me way longer to understand than it should have.

Where it fell apart wasn’t with K, actually. It was three months later when I matched with someone else who turned out to also be dating one of K’s other partners, and the four of us ended up untangling a small, funny, slightly mortifying web at a barbecue none of us had planned to attend together. Nobody stormed off. We just laughed about how small the poly dating pool in our city actually is once you’re a few matches deep.

What I’d tell anyone starting out on these apps is that the profile-linking feature isn’t the hard part, and neither is finding matches — there are plenty. The hard part is building the muscle to talk about a date with your existing partner in specific, boring detail before the anxiety fills in the blanks for you. The app just gives you the people. You still have to build the honesty yourself, in real time, usually badly, at first.