Some people move through the world collecting experiences.
Bruce moves through it collecting people.
He is the kind of man who will meet a stranger at a Saturday market, feel something. A curiosity, a warmth, a sense that this person belongs somewhere they haven’t found yet. He invites them. To a party. Onto his boat. Into a group that didn’t exist until he made it. He doesn’t do this because it’s strategic. He does it because inclusion is, for him, as natural as breathing. His love language isn’t words or touch. It’s the door he holds open. The table he makes bigger. The room he fills with people who didn’t know they needed each other until they were in it together.
Scroll through his phone and you’ll find over fifty WhatsApp groups. Parties, events, gatherings, communities. Each one started because Bruce saw a gap between people and connection, and decided to close it himself. Not because anyone asked him to. Because it’s what he was made to do.
When he discovered that love and relationships could look different from everything he’d been shown, that there were whole communities of people loving in ways the mainstream didn’t have language for, he didn’t just want to find his place in that world.
He wanted to build one.
“Nobody should be judged or dismissed for their relationship and sexual preferences.”
Bruce
The first event was four people in the corner of a cocktail bar.
He kept going.
Three people the next time. Ten the time after. Mostly men at first. Which told him something. Women were interested, but they needed to feel safe before they’d show up. So he figured out how to make the space feel safe. And when he did, women came. And stayed. And came back. Not just for connections, but because for the first time in a long time, they didn’t have to explain themselves to be there.
What they kept telling him was that they needed somewhere online that felt the same way.
He heard them. He started building PolyFinda. That app would grow into helloPOLY.
Lexi’s reckoning was quieter. More internal.
She knew what she wanted. The kind of relationships she was drawn to, the conversations she wanted to have, the way she wanted to love. But wanting something and being able to pursue it openly are different things. On mainstream platforms, being honest invited friction. Honest about kink, about non-monogamy, about the full shape of who she was. Judgment. Silence.
So she simplified herself. Used apps that were easier. Had connections that were fine.
Fine.
It took years of fine before she named what was actually happening: she wasn’t protecting herself. She was shrinking. And the reason she was shrinking wasn’t personal failure. It was the absence of a space that made honesty feel safe.
She understood, from her professional life, what it meant to serve communities the mainstream preferred not to see. She knew what dignity looked like when it was built in from the start, and what it cost people when it wasn’t.
What she didn’t yet have was somewhere to put all of that.
“Nobody should feel as though their choice of relating is less valid because it sits outside what we are told is normal.”
Lexi
Bruce and Lexi had been moving through the same corners of Melbourne for years before they properly found each other in 2024.
When they did, it took almost no time to realise they had been solving the same problem from opposite ends. He had a decade of community instinct and a vision that kept getting bigger. She had the architecture. The marketing, the operations, the ability to make something bold work in the world. They became partners in every sense. They got married.
And then, after COVID had gutted the events, after the technical walls, after the stretches of real uncertainty about whether to keep going, they built helloPOLY.
What finally settled it wasn’t a business decision. It was the same question, asked by almost everyone they knew, every time they saw them:
When’s the next event?
The community hadn’t moved on. It had been waiting.
helloPOLY exists for everyone who ever simplified themselves to make dating easier.
For everyone who left the complicated parts out because explaining was exhausting, or because the platform wasn’t built for it, or because they’d learned, gradually and quietly, not to expect more.
For the polyamorous. The kinky. The ethically non-monogamous. The shibari-curious. The swingers. The people who are still finding the words for what they want.
You don’t have to shrink here.
The door is open.
Come as you are.
Say hello.