How We Love Now
Deep Read with Feeld CEO Ana Kirova
Today’s Deep Read is with Ana Kirova, CEO of the dating app Feeld. Offering users over twenty sexualities and gender identities, Feeld reflects the social and cultural shift that has been unfurling in slow motion over the past decade. While there’s still a (very) long way to go until the LGBTQIA+ community receives the full acceptance and acknowledgement it deserves, we are undoubtedly living in more open-minded times than those many of us grew up in – even if you were lucky enough to live out your childhood in a progressive and diverse major city, as I was.
At the heterosexual, cis-gendered end of the spectrum, the growing popularity of apps like Feeld offer hints at the future of relationships between straight men and women. As I’ve explored in recent Salons on Family and Home, the concept of the monogamous, lifelong marriage and the nuclear family is, if not under threat, then at the very least, under intense scrutiny. With so many people now choosing to embrace child-free lives and abandoning the idea of the three-bedroom home for the 2.4 family (out of financial necessity if nothing else), it follows that our approach to dating, sex, and partnerships will change with it. These are some of the topics I covered in a wide-ranging conversation with Ana, which explores how many such cultural and economic changes play into the ways we have sex and fall in love.
The conversation can be found on Apple here and Spotify here. (and please do like, subscribe, and share with a friend if you enjoy it - good ratings really help!
The past few weeks have been very heavy, so I’ll leave it here for now. If you’re feeling saddened, heartbroken, and overwhelmed by the global status quo, I hope this conversation offers some distraction or respite. As always, there’s a Deep Reading list to accompany the episode below.
Phoebe
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ANA KIROVA - DEEP READING LIST
Keywords: Queer Culture, Feminism, Heteropessimism, Tech, Pyschedelics, Learning to Love
Ana’s Personal Picks
Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
“It’s a fun and dark read at once, but holds history about what I consider the place of origin of tech — San Fransisco. Anthropologically, it gave me context for behavioural, social “soil” on which modern empires are built. I’m from Bulgaria and only went to the US for the first time last year. It feels very familiar because of media, and yet very foreign. This book just gave me layers which media doesn’t clearly lay out.”
There are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss.