Residence 11 Editor-in-Chief Rachel Kramer Bussel recently interviewed Elizabeth Dell, founder of the app Amorus and the game Chat Sparks. Amorus was one of the sponsors of February 2023’s Desire Summit, and is at the forefront of technology to help bring couples (and others) closer together.
Watch the interview to learn more.
Selected excerpts. Quotes have been lightly edited and condensed.
On her background in sexuality:
In some ways, I did go to school for [sexuality]. I have a master’s in public health, and I spent a lot of time studying sexuality and intimacy as part of that, and then went away and kind of came back again, via personal passion. Iwas a film producer for the better part of 15-20 years, and spent a lot of time thinking about storytelling, thinking about how we tell stories to each other, how you tell a story to a large audience, how humans tell stories, one to one.
At the same time. I’m always I’ve always been the friend who you can call up and talk to about the crazy sexy adventure or the stressed-out tension. I’ve always been interested in a wider view of sexuality and sensuality and romance than my peers. And I think it was a combination of that personal interest and then the pandemic [helping] me to find new passions. Amorus was created because I needed a thing and I could not find it. And I was like, Maybe more people need a thing. Maybe I should go make it for everybody.
On using technology to create the app Amorus:
Our origin story is that [when] the pandemic started, we all went into our quarantine lockdowns. At the time, I was single, and I had a few partners, none of whom I felt comfortable having inside my lockdown circle. Now they all had their own personal lives and their own circles and that and I was doing all of my intimacy remotely, basically.
I’m also someone for whom intimacy and romance is a coping mechanism; that makes me feel better in times of anxiety. So I was leaning in pretty hard, and was looking for ways to help make that experience better, because I really wanted to be fun and delicious with my partner. But we were in a shared apocalypse, right? I was not my best self, I was not the most creative, I was not the most funny.
The initial thinking was not, I’m gonna go become a tech entrepreneur in this space; it was, I’m gonna go find a sexy game to do with one of my partners. And this will be fun. And I will not have to do all the creative lift to get delicious with them on my phone, I will not have to think about all the scenarios, I will not have to discover. I will have to ask a whole lot of questions and have them say no to a lot of stuff. We can just do this. This is the internet, it’ll be great.
I went and I asked the internet for this, and the internet said no. I was shocked. How is it possible? What I realized was that so much of intimacy and sexuality available to us digitally is oriented around a solo journey. And that makes all the sense in the world. We are individually asking questions, we are individually looking for pleasure. But I wanted a two-player game, I wanted something that would engage me with the partner I already had. And I couldn’t find it.
That kicked off a big discovery and realizing, Hey, this is a space that needs help. Like we have this huge tech business for finding strangers on your phone. That’s dating apps, that’s swiping right and left. But why is there nothing on my phone that helps me be delicious helps me stay connected, helps we stay fiery with the partner I’ve already figured out I want to get spine shivers from?
That was the birth of Amorus; that was what kind of kicked it all off. I had no idea how to make an app. I wanted it to feel private, like this was a one-to-one connection. So I wanted it to be an app and not a website. Because I wanted it to feel intimate. I wanted it to feel really phone-based. But from there I went and I had to find partners and built a prototype on my own. And then I found a tech co-founder who was really excited to build this out with me.
On how the Amorus app works:
Amorus is really oriented around being feeling like a communication app. It feels a lot like a messaging app. You come on the app, you create a username, you send a private invitation to your partner. That’s a direct link to you, that’s a one-to-one invitation, [or] it can be a QR code that they scan.
Then you create a private space, and that private space is a conversation between you and flame [partner] from which you can play a bunch of games. It has all kinds of features to create private and safe spaces for intimacy. So for instance, we encrypt everything in sending and in sharing. We store in the cloud so that if you revoke permission to search for something, it revokes on both partners automatically. If I decide a week later, I don’t actually want that picture in the world, I’m going to delete it, it’ll delete from my side. And from my flame side, we have screenshot alerts. So this is a place to have this kind of intimacy, but not to share outside that.
We have a whole lot of features you don’t find elsewhere to create a safe and private space. But then building on that is our games. And so we have three games to start with. Our first game is called Fantasy Swipe. It is kind of like it sounds. You get cards that have fantasies on them a little a few every day. You say yes or no, I like this. I don’t like that. Your partner does the same. And they’re a little asynchronous. So you don’t know who’s seeing what, when. But then when you match, it’s fed to you in the chat. So all of a sudden, you get this one tile that says you both think librarian student is kind of sexy. Who’s going to have the overdue book and what might be the penalty?
There’s a little prompt and you’re like, Oh, it’s a way to kind of engage with fantasy, engage with desire from a hell yes. You’re gonna start from, We both think this idea is really cool. How can we explore it? How can we talk about it? And here it is right in our chat, and we can kind of message about Ooh, what if it was this?
Another game is called Jigsaw. It’s kind of like it sounds; you can send a picture to your person as a blurry puzzle that they have to solve before they get to see what you sent. And then the third game is called Chat Aparks, which is why our card game also has the same and that’s hundreds of conversation prompts. How do we spark a new conversation? And those can be questions, What’s the smell that always turns you on? If you had $50 to fulfill a fantasy, how would you spend it?
They can be as mild as what’s an ice cream flavor you never want to see in the world again, to spicy questions. Both of you get asked that question, and it’s a way to engage with a new idea without having to always be the creator of that. And also without having to ask the question or [get asked] why is that question being asked, because it’s coming from the app. And if you don’t like it, hit the button again, and get another question.