Is Bengaluru India’s capital of alternative love?

Bengaluru has never encountered a human interest it could not turn into a community. There are groups for runners, sourdough enthusiasts, amateur astronomers and founders recovering from the emotional consequences of founding. It follows, then, that if you are polyamorous, poly-curious, interested in kink or simply wondering whether monogamy’s terms and conditions deserve a closer read, there is probably a WhatsApp group for that too.The city’s contribution to modern intimacy may not be sexual liberation so much as giving desire an organisational structure. There are workshops devoted to kink, mixers for people exploring alternative relationships, rope jams (an open social event for shibari and rope bondage)centred on consent and trust, and communities where the complexities of loving more than one person can be discussed without anyone getting scandalised.Yet beneath the easy jokes lies something more interesting. Bengaluru appears to have created what many Indian cities still struggle to offer: spaces where unconventional desires can become ordinary enough to discuss without shame.When Sri, 29, moved to Bengaluru from Coorg in 2023, he had already spent years wondering about kink and power exchange without possessing much of the vocabulary to describe either. “You spend years wondering if certain desires make you strange because you never hear anyone talk about them,” he says. During earlier visits, he had sought out niche events and workshops, once even arranging a session with a professional dominatrix visiting from Southeast Asia. What surprised him after moving was not that these spaces existed but how unremarkable entering one could feel. Someone welcomed him, asked whether it was his first time and explained the rules; nobody stared or behaved as though he had arrived carrying a particularly alarming secret.“I don’t think the city made me interested in these things,” he says. “I was always interested. The city just permitted me to be curious without feeling like I had to hide.”Perhaps Bengaluru’s peculiar talent is not persuading people to become different but allowing them to discover that they were never strange to begin with.The numbers, although they deserve the usual caution afforded to surveys commissioned by dating platforms, suggest that this openness extends beyond a small subculture. A 2025 Gleeden-Ipsos study found that 70% of respondents in Bengaluru were accepting of open marriages, consensual non-monogamy and polyamory, while 21% said they were already in such relationships. Bengaluru is also extra-marital dating app Gleeden’s largest market in India, accounting for roughly 18% of its four million users in the country. Representative image | Photo Credit: Getty Sybil Shiddell, Gleeden India’s country manager, attributes this partly to a population of professionals working long hours in technology, finance and consulting. “You still love and respect your partner, but sometimes it begins to feel like you’re living separate lives or with a roommate,” she says. Dating apps, in that context, become a relatively frictionless route to novelty, companionship or emotional connection.Work, however, explains only part of the story. Bengaluru is a city of migrants, many of whom live at a useful distance from relatives and the auntie surveillance network. Puducherry-based sexuality coach Pallavi Barnwal, who hosts sexual wellness workshops in the city, says many of her Bengaluru clients appear less concerned with managing appearances and more willing to discuss desire, vulnerability and dissatisfaction. “There’s less pretence and concern about being judged,” she says.What distinguishes the city may also be who feels comfortable entering these spaces. At events organised by The Intimacy Curator, which supports alternative intimacy through events, applications in Mumbai can skew dramatically male, with 300 to 400 men applying against only 20 to 30 women. At the same time, Delhi sometimes sees as few as 10 female applicants. Bengaluru, by contrast, approaches a near-even gender split.Founder Aili Seghetti says participants in the city tend to be “more informed and articulate about what they’re looking for, and more comfortable with the vocabulary of consent and kink” than those she typically encounters elsewhere.The city’s openness, however, did not emerge overnight because tech workers discovered therapy vocabulary. Arundhati Ghosh, author of All Our Loves: Journeys with Polyamory in India, traces it to decades of queer, feminist, Dalit, arts and civil-society organising, whose communities frequently overlap rather than remain in separate social worlds.Its polyamory communities, including Bangalore Polycules and Polyglamorouspolis, are not merely dating pools but networks of friendship, care and practical support. Bengaluru, Arundhati argues, is also less preoccupied with social performance than many other cities. “You don’t feel like you have to prove anything to anybody here,” she says. “That makes it much easier to be different, because difference itself doesn’t feel particularly remarkable.”The city’s real achievement is that it has made room for people to question inherited ideas about love without requiring them to turn their difference into a spectacle.A fortnightly guide to love in the age of bare minimum