A Week on Feeld Without Feeld

Welcome to a week off Feeld with Audra, a queer woman in her mid-thirties living in Philadelphia. Join as our writer pauses on making new connections in the midst of a heartbreak, and reckons with what comes next.

Monday—Yeah, obey, baby, do what I say 

I had planned to write for Feeld about my open, non-monogamous relationship. Shortly after getting the assignment, I left an almost four year relationship with my boyfriend. I deleted all of my dating apps including Feeld. What was I supposed to write about? A week on Feeld without Feeld?

I was in a tailspin of unbridled grief; there was no steamy fun, no good stories, no exciting conquest. This thing just has to loosen its grip, I thought to myself, and that will take time. Grief shatters our realities and forces us to, in the best cases, build better systems for connecting. Integrating our grief can feel like the most devastating trench warfare of the heart, but it is a necessary battle. As they say, grief is love with nowhere to go. 

This week, my Week Off Feeld, I reflect on the relationship and how it feels to pause the app. 

Tuesday—I could be your girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl 

Today marks two weeks of no contact with my ex. In previous years, after a breakup, this would mean scouring the apps for new lovers to fill the void, creating a round robin of reliable dick. But I knew better this time around. What at first might feel like Scrooge McDuck diving into a bunch of money would quickly turn bleary and gray, like an overwrought pharmaceutical depression commercial. I can’t do it. Pause. I’m alone and watching the season finale of Mad Men. An overarching theme of the show asks, is love something we consume or something we participate in? Someone mentioned to me that in Hindu culture when mourning a death you spend thirteen days indoors to process the pain. But with romantic death, when the connection dies, part of each of you goes with it. Each party remains alive, but the bond is severed. This is a confusing rupture with no clear end. Unlike grief over death, relational loss is ambiguous. Has he moved on? Maybe he doesn’t think about me at all. The thought crushes me. 

Wednesday—I’ll come running to see you again 

Woke up from another horrific dream. I walk into my ex’s house and there is a comforter laid out on the floor with cum and period stains from his new girlfriend. I ask him to please do something about the mess, try to have some respect. He shrugs and leaves the room. I wake up and feel sick. I come across a note I had written a few weeks ago: “He who fears to suffer, suffers what he fears.” In other words, attempting to evade suffering is self-fulfilling. But also, this suffering can turn atrophic. By trying to ensure that my partner still loves me, wants to be near me, clamping down, air tight, I create the conditions that make closeness impossible. I am trying to secure the connection and in the process I am suffocating it. 

There is a possibility that part of me does these things I know are destructive because I want to confirm that I deserve to be alone, that I’m not lovable; to form an attachment to suffering is to obliterate any future connection. That part of me is looking for evidence that my worst fears are true because at least there’s certainty in that; it wants irreversible, irrefutable evidence that I am unlovable. When in trouble, I resort to familiar salves. If I am chosen, I am safe. If someone desires me, I exist. Am I something to be consumed or am I a participant?

Thursday—Hotter than the bluest flame 

I wake up overheated, sweating with a realization: I had loved with integration as the goal, and he had loved with regulation as the goal. I was building something inside myself while he was trying not to fall apart, and those are not equal projects. Maybe it’s not that I was too much, but simply more than he could hold. Non-monogamy was not just preference for him, but also refuge, and maybe what felt like suffocation was actually his own limit being reached. 

For a minute, my anger is reduced and he is humanized. But even so, he chose relief over truth. The grief here is not just losing him; it’s losing the fantasy that if I loved well enough, deeply enough, consciously enough, it would be recognized. That fantasy is incredibly human and even so, letting go of it feels like losing a religion. A story that preserves someone’s equilibrium is not the same as a story that is true. 

Friday—We have a special need to feel that we belong 

I start watching Elizabeth I. There is a scene of a man being drawn and quartered. Something about this feels akin to grief, a punishment for some treasonous act, in this case a treason of the heart. 

In Tudor England, public executions were theater, designed not for justice but to display authority and enforce obedience. At the end of a relationship, the spectacle is quieter. English executions asked the crowd to read the body like a text: this is what betrayal looks like. In Tudor belief, the body mirrored the state, treason was corruption from within, and destroying the body of a traitor symbolically destroyed the crime. Grief isn’t just sadness, it’s rotting attachment—its own kind of corruption from within. The loss is betrayal, and this possession is its bedfellow. To be tortured by your past, your decisions, your ex, your most undesirable traits, feels inescapable. There is no clean execution, no easy exorcism. 

Saturday—Leave tonight or live and die this way

Nights alone are the worst. I pick up a book called Taste Poison. It explains that in Zen Buddhism, there are three poisons—desire, anger, ignorance. I find these poisons to be present in relationships and dating. If you come into a relationship too rosy (ignorance), there will be disappointment. If you’re too pessimistic (anger), you’ll miss out on an opportunity. If you’re too desirous, you’ll quickly become overwhelmed. But the poisons themselves are not meant to be eradicated; they are made to be acknowledged, and worked with. In other words, they are natural and necessary to the human condition. 

Putting Feeld on pause has allowed me to review what matters most to me, and how I can be more myself. In tasting poison—reflecting on my own desires, anger, ignorance, through the experience of the pain and processing of this breakup—there is some comfort in knowing that I am at least feeling things, universal things, that bind me to something bigger. I am not alone, I am with myself.

Sunday—My love is wider than Victoria Lake

I wake up and pronounce with clarity: I over-prioritized the relationship and under-prioritized myself. There’s a kind of radical acceptance in recognizing the loss, your loss, their loss, all sides of the loss, without trying to make it otherwise. After a week of pausing my account, I realize that maybe a new beginning comes not from immediately hopping back on the app, but doing the private work no one can see—acknowledging the distress, the loss, the grief, and finding out what it needs, what it believes, what it’s trying to do. What does it want? What is it trying to say? What is it afraid of? When was the first time I remember hearing from it? What is it trying to protect me from? When did it learn how to protect me? And is it still a useful form of protection, now?

To make sense of where I am right now, I keep thinking about the artist Chris Burden’s Trans-Fixed from 1974. He crucified himself to the rear bumper of a Volkswagen Beetle and rolled out of a garage to a group of onlookers. The engine revved for two minutes and then Burden disappeared back into the garage like a spectre. It may seem a dramatic image, but then, heartbreak can feel like the ultimate prostration—with the possibility for renewal. Pain is mysterious, and grief asks many questions, begging for meaning, insisting on time. Here I am, I think to myself many times a day. Splayed out, exhilarated, frightened, fleeting, consecrated.

Curious about discovering more of your own desires, and yourself? Find what’s waiting for you on Feeld. To submit your own week using the app, take a look at our pitch guidelines.