Dating Apps Ranked By A Polyamorous Bi
Stand aside, amateur swipers
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I’m not just good at online dating, I’m an Olympic medalist.
After X2 stormed out of our then-apartment never to return, I waited five days before downloading all the major dating apps: Tinder, OKCupid, Bumble, and Feeld.1 Within an hour, I’d matched with a hot Jewish gay lawyer on OKCupid, and within three hours I had a date with him lined up that night. That same week, I matched with two women on Feeld and slept with them in one-night stands, one after the other. The next week I’d matched and slept with a woman from Tinder, and one from OKCupid; Then I slept with…everyone. Men, women, gay, straight, bi, cis, trans, it’s frankly a blur. I eventually made a spreadsheet to keep track of it and figure out what the hell I was even doing.
Once upon a time, I tried to write dating advice so readers could be as awesome as I am. I had some good takes, but they were also glib and reductive, and at any rate not that useful to straight people2. Now I just have takes on why I personally am a commodity, and also what good dating apps are to me, not I to them.
Ugh, fine, I’ll throw you straights a bone: dating apps do not exist to get you dates; they exist to get themselves engagement, and that goal is often independent and even opposed to you getting dates. By Tinder’s own metrics, most of their user base never goes on any dates and treats the app more like a mobile harem game of hot or not.3 They don't want you to be happy; they want you to keep swiping and pay them for the privilege of selling your engagement data, which often involves you remaining unhappy and stuck in a dopamine loop. That's how capitalism works; you also don’t have to do it that way. Just, you know, figure it out and do better.
Anyway: here’s the dating apps ranked and explained by myself, a bisexual polyamorous single parent who is almost certainly Better At This than you are:
Feeld
Feeld is the gold standard for online dating, for the simple reason that its users are sex positive, and not “sex positive.”4 Ostensibly an app for the non-monogamous and swingers, Feeld also has a big following of people who just like sex, and don’t put it on a pedestal behind a lot of nonsense about Real Emotional Connections. No, they’re not just there for sex: just as many profiles talk about what other things they want to do, often before having sex at all. They like sex, not “like sex, but…” And last but definitely not least, Feeld is horny for bisexuals. They adore bisexuals, for threesomes, for the exoticism, for a lot of them being bisexual. There are also a lot of couples looking for the hoary “other couples or a female” sapphic women roll their eyes at, but there’s also a lot of Couples Or A Female looking for them too, so it all comes out in the wash.
Until very recently, Feeld was also complete garbage as a user experience. It was buggy, it lagged for minutes on end and then crashed, the search settings often didn’t work at all. So I gave up on it a few months ago, the headache outweighing the vastly better user base. But they overhauled it, and wow, the UX is better than Tinder now. My only quibble is I can no longer filter searches by orientation, and thus I spend a lot of time swiping away straight men. But my primary partner and I are also not opposed to a straight man joining us, so that’s basically fine.
OKCupid
OKCupid is great in theory, and it also produced my first date with a man. For one thing, it has the absolute best filters of any of the apps. You can laser-hone your search settings down to a ludicrously specific identity and gender. Two-spirit polyamorous androsexual? A few taps, and that’s all you’ll see. Don’t want to see straights in your stack? Goodbye, straights; get back to me when you’ve fixed your unfortunately deficient orientation.5 And that goes for describing exactly what I myself am as well, and exactly what I want. They even have an opt-in for non-monogamy that lets the woeful simpletons looking for just one partner pretend they’re totally cool while the rest of us get down to business.6
However, this setup breaks down for two reasons. First, queer people are very, very rare. Even the most generous estimate that a lot more people are fluid than we all think puts us in single digits in population distribution. So when you divide and sub-divide queer, you’re going to get dozens of little baskets of a handful of people, all looking for exactly their queer and seeing only a handful of people. Second, and I’m aware I’m stepping real close to a third rail here, the more elaborate non-cishet identities like demisexual and gray-spectrum often- not always! I will even say not most!- amount to a dating regime that to me personally is indistinct from basic friendship.7
I first noticed this when I matched with a supposedly polyamorous gray-spec person who seemed to be there for dating and sex, then promptly treated me to several paragraphs explaining that they were asexual and looking for emotional connection and friendship and a lot of other sentences I confess I skimmed before replying “Okee dokee” and unmatching them. This turned out to be a very common experience for me on OKCupid, to the point that I completely burned my stack and just kept seeing the same recycled profiles of two and three word designer identities who definitely were not there for the things I was there for. So, if you are looking for that, great! But otherwise OKCupid falls pretty flat.
Tinder
Tinder’s biggest strength is the same as its biggest weakness: everyone goes there. Everyone. And you can’t filter any of it past man/woman/everyone, and making it show you your own orientation first. That only shows me bisexuals first, most of whom are women.8 You can get decent matches and dates off of Tinder. But when you jump into the everyone pool, it is much more work. Most profiles have no bio, and just one photo, and it’s often bad. Most matches turn out very quickly to be unresponsive, yikes, or a bot. That is just the mathematical reality when you set out to swipe every. Single. Doofus. In online dating. Remember: most people on Tinder will not ever, ever, ever go out on a single date with someone they met on Tinder. As far as their revealed preferences are concerned, they don’t want to! That’s what you have to swipe through.
Also, there’s no gentle way to say this: Tinder is not queer-friendly. For one thing, biphobia is rampant among the straight women of Tinder: “no bisexual men” or “straight men only” is something I see at least weekly when I swipe there. Meanwhile, whatever is going on with Tinder’s moderation scheme, it has also gained a reputation for banning trans people as jackasses mass-report them. My primary partner was abruptly banned with no explanation, while talking about abortion justice with another queer. She’d been on Tinder both as straight and bisexual, and only started getting auto-warnings when she identified as bi. I myself received auto-warnings in Tinder DMs while just talking about queer sex with other queer men.
Maybe this is AI glitching, maybe it’s bad moderation standards, maybe it's an attempt to crack down on revolting straight men gone awry, but whatever it is, who cares? I don’t get on dating apps to be lectured about how I flirt while straight women tell me to get lost because of who I am.9
Bumble
Deep, weary sigh. Bumble: where fun goes to die, for a promise of feminine security it doesn't even keep. Seriously, women don't message men first there anymore: Bumble added a “compliments” feature, so men message first anyway.10 But let's assume that wasn't the case for kicks. Okay, I'm a bisexual man and get on Bumble. Bumble tells me that with women I'm such a risk that I have to just sit there and wait for a comfort zone to grace me. Okay, fine, straight men are trash, I know how it goes. But queer men are also trash, including on Bumble: the only match I ever went out with from there I named “Yikes Mike” for reasons too numerous to list.
So…Bumble is there to protect women from me, but not to protect me from men, that's just my problem. To me, that just amounts to a bad app I had a bad time on. It certainly didn't deliver a higher caliber of man or woman for all the fuss, and if it doesn't do that, why should I go through the extra hassle? Bumble is a solution to a problem I have nothing to do with (if it even does that). If its UX and, um, uniquely charming user base speak to you, vaya con Dios, but that is not my style or what I'm looking for.
In summary: Get on Feeld, but don’t pay for it
There are other platforms, of course.11 But after eight months of unhinged queer sluttery, I’ve finally just uninstalled everything but Feeld, and canceled my subscription. Subscriber benefits are that you get unlimited right-swipes, you can see your likes, and you can limit your stack to only people who have been active in the past week. Sure, those are decent benefits. They are also most certainly not worth twenty bucks a month, unless you don’t notice twenty bucks a month or care what it gets you. I’m here to date and fuck and get in poly relationships, and a few right swipes a day is fine for that, and I’m fine with waiting too.
Admittedly, most of this ranking is specific to polyamorous bisexual men. I get it: the median experience from straight men in online dating is blood curdling dogshit12, and since men outnumber women 3 to 1 in online dating and straight women are the majority consumers of romantic content, that is basically all that is relevant to straight women saying it and straight men dealing with them saying it. Sure. Also, that's not my problem or business. A lot of the time, being a bisexual man means I answer for the sins of my gender writ large while I also get erased, or at best minimized and downplayed, when it comes to my own needs and wants. That's no one's problem but mine, and the reason I threw Tinder in the trash. And this Substack is also no one's but mine, so for the cool kids out there, Feeld for free is where it's at.
I would have done it one day later, but I had my kids for the first half of spring break.
Though I submit that Five Things Straight Men/Women Should Know About Dating Bisexual Women/Men were both classics.
No judgment, Tinder users. The tides will roll back at bisexual command long before any of you stop being trifling cowards at my command; that’s why I don’t use Tinder!
You'd be surprised at how many “sex positive” acquaintances I've run into whose definition of “sex positive” amounted to “I want to feel cool about my boring sexless straight marriage,” or possibly “When I do the three dates then three minutes of missionary every three weeks tango, it's actually scorching hot.” Sure it is.
I jest; All Orientations Matter, and of course it is not straights’ fault they’re straight. I mostly blame capitalism for it.
Remember: the number one cause of divorce is straight monogamous marriage. I'm just passing along facts here.
To be very clear, I am not judging any of this. I’m sure what looks to me like sexless friendship is to those users some manner of breathtaking romance. That’s fine! We just aren’t looking for the same things.
Gender and bisexuality is very, very complicated, and there are a lot of one-sided prejudices and risks bi men and women both face from both genders. But that hard pill to swallow is for another take.
Also, bisexual men have a unique and ironic dilemma on Tinder: in the immortal words of AC/DC, there’s too many women. Profile after profile of painfully mediocre women as we hunt for queer men.
Once again, remember: this is about giving Bumble engagement. It is of no consequence whether their dumb features “work” in the sense of leading to dates and romance and relationships; it matters that people keep logging in and swiping. And why would you keep swiping if any of them worked? You’d have your date/romance/relationship. Think of it like a slot machine, except without all of the mental health benefits.
For example, Taimi is a queer app, and its UX is so bad it nearly scared me straight. Fetlife is a swingers website too exhausting to peruse. Flure doesn't even let men register: they have to get on a wait list and go through some manner of background check. Hinge thunders it is “designed to be deleted,” while it forces you onto serial monogamy rails lab-designed to fail and keep you coming back. Cool, cool, cool.
Oh, you thought I liked you, straight men? You're half the reason for the nonsense I face, and I don't see too many of you sticking up for me either. Go work on that whole patriarchy thing, or at least on not being straight.