‘Ballsy’ move sparked Fiona Falkiner, Hayley Willis’ romance

For most of us, Instagramming under the influence typically ends in accidentally liking a holiday photo posted by a friend-of-a-friend’s ex in 2013.
Yet for Hayley Willis, a leisurely scroll after a night out with friends five years ago had a much happier, not to mention rather romantic, outcome.
The former Nine sports reporter was browsing through her ‘Explore’ page – Instagram’s curated feed of posts it thinks users will like – when an alluring stranger appeared on the screen.
Watch the video above.
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“I’d had a few drinks, a bit of liquid courage, and just messaged her and said, ‘What are my chances of taking you out for a drink someday?'” Hayley recalled to 9honey in an exclusive interview in 2019.
The recipient was model, TV presenter and The Biggest Loser alumnus Fiona Falkiner, who is quick to dob in her now-wife of two years for not having been one of her followers at the time.
“She told me [later], ‘I just want you to know, I wasn’t, like, a fan of yours or anything like that’,” Fiona laughed.
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At the time, Fiona was working overseas, and recalled seeing Hayley’s message in her inbox. That in itself was lucky; she didn’t usually bother reading DMs from strangers.
She agreed to the drink, after closely inspecting Hayley’s Instagram photos (which mostly featured her family and dogs) and deciding she seemed “normal”.
“I also thought it was quite ballsy to just ask me out from word dot,” Fiona added.
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The pair exchanged messages for a few months until Fiona returned to Australia in October 2018, when they made that promised drink a reality.
Hayley admits that for the first time in her life, she was actually nervous for the date.
“I was such a mess. I had tackled pouring rain,” the journalist recalled.
Fiona, who had arrived 30 minutes early, admits noticing Hayley was slightly “dishevelled” and flustered, but was more struck by how beautiful she was.
First date nerves aside, the pair hit it off straight away, with conversation flowing.
“As the night progressed, her chair just got closer and closer and closer to me,” Fiona laughed.
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“At one point I went to the bathroom and I came back and she’d actually come and sat on my side of the table. I was like, ‘Nice one’,” Fiona recalled.
Unfortunately, the night was slightly derailed when a pair of men approached Hayley while Fiona was in the bathroom.
“They were obviously thinking we were two single women and were like, ‘Great, there’s two of them’,” Fiona said.
After chatting briefly to be polite, she asked them to move along, explaining: “Thanks a lot, but we’re on a date, I’m here to get to know Hayley.”
“That set them off, as soon as she said ‘date’. They were like, ‘Oh, you’re on a date? That’s so hot’, and kept persisting with their little comments for an hour,” Hayley said.
Fiona and Hayley eventually decided to leave, picking up a bottle of wine on the way home and “chatting the night away” at Fiona’s house.
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However, the incident put a dampener on the night and reflected a reality that confronts so many same-sex couples in their dating lives.
“I’d never experienced that before, because with my previous partner we had never really gone out dating in public. For me, it was really shocking,” Fiona said.
“I’ve been out for a decade or so, so I’ve come across it,” Hayley added. “The world is getting better, but sometimes you have incidents like that and you’re like, ‘Wow, it’s still a thing.'”
From that first date, Hayley and Fiona’s relationship progressed fast. Very fast.
“Lesbians will sometimes say things go from zero to 100 and it’s so true,” Hayley smiled.
“We literally were inseparable for the whole summer, and spent every moment together. I started thinking, ‘You know what? I want this for the rest of my life’.”
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Quietly, she began planning a proposal, and was careful to throw Fiona off the scent when asked about her thoughts on the prospect of marriage.
“She said, ‘Look, babe, we’ve got other things we’re saving for … weddings and rings are probably quite far down the track’. I had to completely manage my expectations then,” Fiona admitted.
“I actually think I saw her heart break when I said that,” Hayley laughed.
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Imagine Fiona’s shock, then, when she came home from a holiday in Vanuatu with a beautiful engagement ring on her finger just months later.
The couple spent a week at The Moso island resort in April, and on the second last night, Hayley told Fiona she wanted to surprise her with dinner as a thank you for arranging the trip.
Having been informed of the secret proposal plan, the resort’s owners had arranged a BBQ picnic on the private side of the island, which could only be accessed by quad bike.
“I told Fiona, ‘Wear a nice dress, but don’t wear heels,'” Hayley said.
Riding across the island, they arrived at a clearing by the water, with their picnic set in a heart shape in the sand and the sun setting on the horizon.
“They outdid themselves. We turned up and I was like, ‘I’ve nailed this’,” Hayley laughed.
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Fiona was instructed to stand on the water’s edge, facing the horizon, so Hayley could take photos of them against the sunset.
Even at this point, she had no inkling that something was afoot.
They celebrated the happy occasion with fresh seafood and a couple of bottles of champagne, which made the quad bike ride back to the resort an interesting one.
Though Fiona’s tears that evening were happy ones, it had been a very different story the night before.
“I’d started having nightmares that [Hayley] would leave me, and I would wake up sobbing. I even had one the night before she proposed,” she explained.
“She was about to throw the ring at me [like] ‘Calm down, I’m going to propose!'”
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Though upsetting, Fiona said those dreams were the telltale sign Hayley was ‘the one’, explaining: “It was this crazy fear that I was going to lose her … I’ve never lost sleep over anyone.”
Fiona and Hayley married in Byron Bay in October 2022. Just two months earlier, they had welcomed their second child – a beautiful baby boy named Spencer.
Sixteen months before Spencer’s birth, their oldest son Hunter came into the world.
When asked what they love most about their now-wife, Hayley and Fiona both pinpointed kindness as the other’s key quality.
“[Fiona] also has this quality where she can walk into a room and everything for me just stops, and I’m just like, ‘Wow, that’s who I’m marrying’,” Hayley added before the wedding.
“Tell you what, it was the best thing I’ve ever done, send [that] message on Instagram. The modern-day love story, I guess.”
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