A dating app aimed at alternative relationships nearly doubled its revenues last year as non-monogamous, queer and kinky users helped the UK-based business expand its reach across the world. Feeld, founded by an entrepreneur couple in an open relationship, has said it is "on a mission to elevate the human experience of sexuality and relationships" from its registered office on an industrial estate in Carlisle, Cumbria. Growth in the app's popularity in recent years, amid surging interest in non-traditional relationship structures such as polyamory, meant that last year was the first for which Feeld was large enough to file full accounts at Companies House. They show that the company's profits increased from 2.4m to 5.5m in the year to the end of 2023, on the back of revenues that rose from 20.7m to 39.5m. The majority of that income is now derived from outside the UK, with 33m of turnover coming from overseas.

In the late summer of 2020, when much of normal social life was suspended, a relationship that I had been in for several years abruptly collapsed. I was thirty-nine and scared by the idea that I would not be reproducing the kind of heteronormative nuclear family I had grown up in. I wandered the sidewalks of my Brooklyn neighborhood, where discarded masks littered the gutters, with a sense of having been exiled from my own life. My apartment, with its cat and its plants, still existed but was no longer my home; I could get a glass of cold prosecco at my favorite bar, but the people I used to see there seemed to have vanished. In Haruki Murakami's novel "1Q84," a character climbs down a ladder into a parallel existence in which things appear to be the same but nothing really is.