How trolling for threesomes on an app taught me more about relationships than I could shake a dick pic at.

LOVE AT FIRST FEELD

It's 9 a.m. and I'm on the toilet, trying to organize a threesome.

Page after page of people with names like “Horn Nee” succumb to my rigorous standards for threesome participation, which include, but are not limited to: not holding a fish. Many soldiers have fought on that battlefield, and most have been picked off on account of their flip flops or anime makeup. Only the strong survived, winning the chance to be awarded with a message from me asking, “Wanna fuck my boyfriend and I?”

This song and dance is taking place on Feeld, the app with the wholesome goal of facilitating threesomes and other less normative stylings of casual sex between curious individuals. It’s like Tinder for ambidextrous people.

My interest in Feeld peaked a few weeks ago after I walked into a room full of friends who should have been talking to each other, but were instead perusing potential lays on Tinder in dead silence. They were looking down at their phones, saying nothing to each other, and making no conceivable use of the communication capabilities millions of years of evolution has gifted our species.

"That looks fun," I thought/ said out loud.

I'd get on Tinder right now if I didn't have a boyfriend. Shopping for cock sounds like a great way to amuse myself while peeing, and receiving unwarranted dick pics sounds the best way to use my useless physiology degree.

But, I’m happily tethered … to someone who doesn't hate the idea of a threesome. And so, my only real option for app-facilitated boning is Feeld.

I can get down with threesomes. We've had a few dalliances with group sex in our day, and they were perfectly enjoyable. In fact, I’d even say they brought us closer together. But, they were accidental. They were innocent, tequila-soaked brushes of arms and lips that animorphed into things you’d pay to watch on-demand at a Quality Inn. We’d never Louis and Clarked that shit, never planned out any explorations into the unknown; never said, “Tonight, we are shopping for a girl to sit on your face while I ride you.”

And that, essentially, was what we were in the market for: a female third.

IN WHICH WE ZERO IN ON A TARGET

A female third is a rare bird. Feeld is 99.352 percent single dudes looking to find two, unrelated chicks to fuck him for one night and one night only. It’s bursting at the seams with photos of guys hanging with their bros at a craps table, guys hanging with their bros near a plate of fajitas, guys hanging with their bros by a beautiful waterfall.

Some of these specimens even sport creative usernames like “Mr. Big Cox” and “PleasureMan” in their profiles. Their bios offer colorful statements like “I’ll give you an orgasm” and “Just graduated.”

The entire month I was on it, I came across one couple, and maybe five or six single girls, four of which had the pastel hair and MySpace angles of someone who got lost on the way to the ferret store or three-day rave.

I routinely rejected ladies of this phylum, but one day, one kind of stood out. She had red hair, rollerblades, and a grammatically-correct bio.

I messaged her.

It was nerve-wracking. I’ve never hit on a girl before. What do you say to chicks that simultaneously conveys your abundance of personality and that you have a vague interest in having her go down on you while your boyfriend fucks her?

I settled with “Hey,” the safe, yet flaccid dick of threesome initiations.

“Do you think we could do two redheads at once or is that illegal?” I added for mildly comic relief.

“Fuck the law. Redheads have more fun,” she responded a few minutes later. It was sassy enough for me to ask where she was from, and the conversation progressed over the course of a few days from small-talk to figuring out what each other were into. She told me her boyfriend was into the idea of group sex, and she thought two girls and three guys would make the perfect human mating ball. I was down.

But, when I showed my boyfriend her photo, his nose scrunched up like he'd just stepped in poop.

“That’s not what I had in mind,” he said, referring a photo in which she was flexing her biceps on rollerblades in a tutu. It was an obvious lead-in to the question, what did he have in mind?

Then, something awesome happened. We had a very frank and honest conversation about our sexual interests. Why did we want to have a threesome? What were we comfortable with doing? What kind of people we attracted to? Are we going to get all jealous? How can we make this simultaneously hot and comfortable for us other and whichever third wheel we take home? What kind of lower-back tattoos immediately disqualify someone in the running to be America’s Next Top Threesome Star?

We’d had talks like that a few times before, but it was different. It didn’t seem real, since we weren’t actually planning on acting on our fantasies, and so the tone of those conversations were entirely whimsical.

But with this whole Feeld thing, there was a degree of certainty that it was going to happen, and that made our talk about our fantasies seem concrete, like we actually had to figure them out with each other.

THE JUICIEST RELATIONSHIP SECRET IN JUICE HISTORY

Of course, communicating openly about your fantasies is healthy. Of course it’s what every sex therapist tells you to do. Of course it’ll make your relationship better. And of course, it’s easier said than done. Sometimes, your fantasies are too fucked up to tell the person you love about. You care about their opinion of you too much to sully it. You don’t want to tell the person whose parents just bought you $30 worth of organic artisan sushi to think about you as kind of liking the idea of being gangbanged on a farm.

That’s why apps like Feeld are good for couples. The sheer act of downloading it together requires that you talk about all the feels. It opens up a dialog about fantasy, boundaries, commitment, and sexuality that can seem out-of-place in other contexts.

In fact, if it wasn’t for that very conversation we had about the Feeld girl, I wouldn’t have known that he’d been watching public exhibitionist porn all month, and that it really turned him on. And he wouldn’t have known that I was really into that shit, too.

There was even a night when we were at the bar, and he saw me rejecting fools on Feeld as I inhaled a margarita like fish drowning in air. “What are you other fantasies?” he flat-out asked me. I’d been dying to tell him, but I hadn’t found the right moment to look up from my dinner and be like, “Hey, so I want you to fuck me in your office with the door half-open while your co-workers walk by.” I asked what his were, too, and we had another completely honest, no-judgements talk about it. It was like being on Feeld made us realize that although we loved each other, we were both pretty serious about spicing shit up.

Invariably, the process increases intimacy. Even if you find you disagree about what you’re comfortable with or about what turns you on, you’ve at least just found out something new about each other, and had an honest talk about a sensitive subject. But in the event that you have a mutual interest … think of what you just did for your sex life.

More than anything, Feeld got us to talk about sex more openly and honestly than before. It necessitated that we share our fantasies and boundaries, and that we make certain compromises in order to please the other. It’s weird, but trolling an app for threesomes taught more more about relationships than anything else I’d encountered. More than anything, it taught me that you have to push the limits of comfort in your relationship to move it to another level. Doing something that’s completely irregular and novel together makes you bond because you have to communicate and understand each other to get through it. And it makes a hell of a story to tell the grandkids.

After a month, I deleted Feeld. Not because we never found the right someone, but because I realized how much I didn’t like the planning aspect of it. I liked the process of pre-selecting threesome partners, but the act of doing that eliminated the thing I like most about weird sexual experiences, which is spontaneity.  But that’s just another thing we learned about each other; that we like surprise sex.

So, if you’re paired up, give Feeld a try. Even if you’re not looking for a threesome or weird group sex, the process of downloading and use it will open up a conversation about sex that you might never have had. Or at least, there’s a lot of single guys named “Cock Smith” on there you guys can fuck with.