046 - Jewlie & Me

How the lurv of my loife and I met on a dirty kink app, because of course we would

We met on the app formerly known as 3nder—pronounced ‘Thrinder’—that is, ‘Tinder for threesomes.’

I had heard it advertised on a podcast and decided on a whim to give it a whirl, proving both the efficacy of podcast advertising and the resilience of my dating optimism.

Newly single and approaching the completion of my fortieth orbit around the Sun, I thought of myself as a battle-tested Marine coming off another brutal and failed mission. I had eclipsed twenty years of active duty service, and was eligible for retirement—a measure I was seriously considering in the wake of my most recent tour. [Editor’s Note: Please confirm that your deployment of a Marine metaphor does not constitute psychological stolen valor]¹

I had been sitting quietly with myself for three months, in the safety and comfort of my childhood home, reading, resting, self-reflecting, and restoring the psychic energy that my last relationship had drained from me. I minimized external distractions. I stopped following the news, largely cut out television, and started this Substack. For once in my single life, I didn’t even think about dating.

But then—as recounted in a previous dispatch from Rogo’s Modern Life—my curiosity for the suburban dating pool, coupled with my thawing libido, got the better of me. I downloaded Hinge.

What I didn’t share in that post is that, while in the Bay Area on a work trip shortly after curtailing my courtship with ‘nice but not for me’ Ananya, I received a head-scratching email from Hinge: I had been kicked off the app—for impersonation.

Impersonation? Did some cynical Silicon Valley “Veteran of Forlorn Wars” report my profile, assuming there’s no possible way that viral trivia guy from eight years ago could ACTUALLY be single at 40 and looking for love on a popular dating app?!

Was I being accused of impersonating… me?

Or was it because, having been inspired by the New York Times obituary² of Prince Karim al-Husseini—who had lived a fascinating life as the ordained spiritual leader of an esoteric sect of Islam called Nizari Isma’ilism for nearly seventy years, under the inherited title of Aga Khan IV—I had edited my Hinge bio earlier that week, changing ‘Work’ to Nizari Isma'ili Muslims and ‘Job Title’ to Aga Khan V?

Either way, with my budding Hinge binge abruptly halted—and feeling the osmotic pull of my sexually liberated San Francisco surroundings—I took a leap of faith and dove headfirst into Feeld. I even splurged for a paid ‘Majestic’ membership, swayed by their very reasonable $11.99 single-month rate. For the price of a 12oz. Farmers Market açai bowl, I could spend thirty days metaphorically (and hopefully, literally?) balls-deep in what, as far as I could tell, was the closest thing on the market to Straight Grindr? TAKE MY MONEY!

Cutting my losses on the prospect of an SF hookup and thinking ahead to my imminent return east, I set my location 3,000 miles away from my Menlo Park motel to the Big Snapple and started swiping through New York City’s finest sex freaks. Please understand: I use the term sex freaks with the utmost respect. The only freakish thing about Feeld users, as I quickly and quite pleasantly discovered on my maiden voyage, was the unflinching frankness with which they described themselves, their desires, and their dating intentions.

This was not an app for the emotionally immature interested in playing games (unless the game was Pin the Tail on the Furry). The authentic self-expressions of one’s kinks and vulnerable admissions of one’s journey to sexual self-discovery—coupled with the app’s mission of supporting all forms of intimacy as evidenced by their unparalleled options for identity/orientation/relationship model—fostered a refreshingly safe and inclusive space for exploration without fear of judgment.

I did find myself facing one particular, practical challenge in this new arena of radically honest dating: deciphering the many acronyms and unfamiliar phrases that kept popping up in profiles. I came to Feeld pre-loaded with just enough to know that a BDSM³ fetish didn’t imply an interest in Bubbly Drinks & Sizzling Meatballs, and that if someone said they were looking for a Dom, they didn’t necessarily mean Irrera.

But… Demiromantic? Heteroflexible? Skoliosexual? GGG? Even words I had previously encountered and comprehended with confidence were throwing me off. Switch? Like, that Nintendo thing? Brat? Is that what that whole Charli XCX shit was all about?

I won’t make the same hacky crack about mistaking ‘Pansexual’ to mean ‘romantically attracted to cookware,’ but… are we absolutely sure it has nothing at all to do with Guillermo del Toro’s filmography?

Lying in bed at the end of my first Feeld day, on my final night in the Bay, a gorgeous face stopped me dead in my swipes. I eagerly flicked through her curated carousel and grew more attracted with each one: a New Yorker tote? a skeleton onesie? a luxuriously elongated ombré mane? She may have been ethnically ambiguous, but she was unequivocally beautiful. And then I read her profile:

True profilephiles will appreciate this masterpiece

It was love at first read. I swiped right so hard I broke my thumb in three places.

Jk—but I’m not joking when I say I earnestly prayed myself to sleep, hoping that this mysterious, mid30s ‘j’—no doubt inundated with a Niagraesque volume of Likes and Pings—would somehow notice my tiny, battered barrel before it went over the falls.

If the 1980 U.S. men’s hockey team didn’t already have you believing in miracles, this should cement it, because wonder of wonders, I woke up the next morning with a single notification from Feeld: I made a connection. ‘j’ had caught my virtual wink across the continent and sent one back, igniting our match, and allowing the all-important in-app banter to begin.

We were off to the races, swiftly establishing the basics—Where do you live? What do you do? Let me see your dog! (ours both happening to be variations on the theme of Chihuahua)—and exchanging giddy flirtations before dropping the act to level-set on our intentions and motivations.

Whereas on mainstream dating apps it’s common to use your real name and lie about everything else, on Feeld it’s the Bizarro World opposite. I only knew my match by her chosen initial, J, and until I revealed my true identity, she was interfacing with me as Alan Smithee. But I had gotten so comfortable in such short order that I didn’t even hesitate in offering her my government appellation.

She didn’t let on then, but it eventually came out that—while claiming never to have been an HQ Trivia player herself—she had nonetheless played a pivotal role in its virality, and thus, my rising celebrity. HQties will remember: the app had been organically gaining steam in the fall of 2017, growing from 100 concurrent users to 100,000 in its first three months. But after The Daily Beast’s publication of Taylor Lorenz’s now-iconic “Sweetgreen Incident” article on November 21, the app blasted into the stratosphere. Less than six weeks later, over 1,000,000 players tried to enter the New Year’s Eve game—crashing the servers.

It turns out that J—who I would later jokingly call Jewlie (a pseudonym that has cheerfully stuck)—was then working at The Daily Beast as Head of Audience Development, and in that very role, had been directly responsible for developing that article’s audience. It trended on Twitter for the entire extended Thanksgiving weekend. Jewlie did that!

She said “word” like I say “word”—quasi-ironically, and with a healthy self-awareness of the cultural appropriation. She pluralized nouns with a ‘z’ like I do—fully ironically, and also because, why not? It’s fun! She knew her way around the Mt. Rushmore of Jewish comedic intellects: Groucho, Woody, Joel and Ethan. She was the one who pulled the “Let’s ditch this glitchy app” transition-to-text—what had historically and exclusively been my move!

She seemed too good to be true.

Thank Brahman, she wasn’t.

The truth is, she’s been better than too good, while being realer than real. From our first date—at a surprise party for my friend Ari’s 40th, in the rain, in Brooklyn, where she didn’t know a single soul, as barely did I, because Ari is a somewhat distant friend with whom I’ve only recently reconnected—to our second date seeing (and afterwards, breathlessly analyzing) Anora at Film at Lincoln Center, a short walk from her cozy UWS apartment—to the dozens of dates and thousands of hours we’ve spent together since in our bicoastal, always curious partnership built on the solidest foundation of openness, patience, and mutual respect—I’ve been obsessed, impressed, and blessed (never-stressed!) with this remarkable woman.

Jewlie is brilliance, personified. It shines through in her essays and poetry, her strategic thinking and skillful communication, her academic pursuits that took her and her devoted study of Søren Kierkegaard from New York to Minnesota to Romania as a Masters in Religious Studies and a Fulbright Scholar, her preternatural ability to connect with strangers, whom she turns into friends, whom she then networks into her many intersecting friendship circles.

She revels in foreign films, existential philosophy, horary astrology, and artful mani-pedis (that she invariably and hilariously messes up on her walk home). She bemoans museums for being impersonal, preferring to fill just about every square inch of her apartment wall space with prints by Matisse, Monet, Degas, and the Dutch masters. At any given time she’s reading three books at once, pulling from her library that boasts titles by Rumi, Lahiri, Salinger, and Rowling in equal measure. She journals daily, every few weeks adding another completed notebook to her lifetime collection of what might be hundreds of editions, catalogued and accumulating in boxes under her bed. She hates bananas.

And yet, she makes me banana pancakes. In a funny way, that sums up what I love most about our dynamic. We see each other for who we are. We meet each other where we are. We respect each other and accommodate each other in a generous cycle of give and take, always with authentic intention and our fullest attention. We listen to each other, we learn from each other, we’re patient with each other, and we’re actively growing with each. We’ve found ourselves stuck in upward spiral that we can instinctively feel carrying us to ever greater joy and exponentially infinite love—and we have no complaints.

We often talk about how we may not seem like a ‘match’ on paper, how, if we had signed up for one of those algorithmically-reliant dating apps that tries to set people up according to the highest percentage of shared interests or perceived personality alignment, we might never have been served each other’s profile. Perish the thought!

Considering the improbable venue where we met and the precise point along our respective life journeys when we did, our alignment seems cosmic, rather than algorithmic. Was it predetermined? Perhaps. Informed by past lives? Potentially. I never really gave much credence to such outré metaphysical theory, but the more I ponder the yonder… We are consciousness. Consciousness is energy. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. After watching that Pixar movie Soul, I’m now convinced each one of us has a soul. But what is a soul? Is it our karmic battery pack? The powerhouse of our consciousness that transfers from one body to the next, generation after generation, evolving into increasingly elevated states of being from the beginning of time—forever and ever?

What if we each of us started out 14 billion years ago as quarks and leptons arising out of the primordial plasma—the inaugural, infintisemal specks of nanoconsciousness that gradually evolved into protons, neutrons, and electrons, which became elements, which became molecules that formed cells, which clustered together to form microorganisms, algae, and plankton, which evolved into guppies and minnows, frogs and snakes, pterodactyls and chickens, moles and voles, lemurs, gorillas, neanderthals, Democrats, Republicans, and ultimately, you, me, and Lou Diamond Phillips?

Today is Jewlie’s birthday: May the 4th be with her and all who celebrate. We’re meeting in Mexico tonight—she arriving from New York, me from LA—for a twelve-day vacaciones split between CDMX and Cabo. Despite our many independent stints of international jetsetting, neither of us have been to either destination. We both value travel not just as a hobby or an escape but as an essential engagement with the world, which is why we’ve each packed a carry-on bag full of Chalupa Supremes, Beefy 5-Layer Burritos, and Cheesy Gordita Crunches to share with locals in the spirit of cultural exchange (and as personal insurance in case we don’t come across any good Mexican food).

In her last voice note to me, she very sweetly referred to me as a ‘gift in her life.’ I appreciate the sentiment, of course, but I would offer a slight rewrite to say that our relationship is the gift—a gift that will keep on giving as long as we keep giving of each other, to each other… living, laughing, domming, subbing, and hopefully avoiding diarrhea along the way.

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Want to hear something adorable? The biggest smile just flooded my face thinking about how I excited I am to give her a big hug and kiss her in the airport. I’m going to really ‘go for it,’ too. Full tongue. It’s her birthday, after all.

FUN FACT:
I was Jewlie’s fortieth Feeld date in three months on the app.
She was my first.
We are our last.

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1. Per ChatGPT: “Thinking of yourself as a Marine as a metaphor for your dating life—without claiming actual military service or honors—is not considered ‘psychological stolen valor.’ To be absolutely clear, you are not eligible for a VA home loan, priority boarding on airlines, or discounted movie tickets.”

2. The Obits—with their gentle, contemplative rhythm in contrast to the constant churn of the the almost entirely catastrophic daily news—have long been a perennial, personal favorite and one of the few sections of the paper I still allowed myself on my restricted media diet.

3. Nor does it mean “Back Decks, Scenic Mountains” as mentioned in my “coming out” post…