How Singapore’s government-run courting service works, and why it gained’t remedy the nation’s courting woes

Three years after the demise of the Social Development Network, it seems to be like a brand new government-run matchmaker is again on the playing cards for Singapore.

Earlier this month, a pilot progamme by GovTech known as FirstDate was introduced, with authorities staff set to be the primary batch of daters. If this sounds acquainted, that’s as a result of I used to be the primary to report on GovTech testing the waters with this concept all the best way back in April for The Straits Times.

Kai@teo_kai_xiang

I CALLED IT.

It’s happening y’all. The singapore gov has launched a pilot programme for a gov-run dating service. Looks like the pilot is currently restricted to just government workers for now.

8:15 AM · Sep 29, 2026 · 4.54M Views

237 Replies · 945 Reposts · 13.5K Likes

How will the matchmaking work? What questions are even within the matchmaking questionnaire? (Read on for the complete record)

On FirstDate’s web site, one line stands out: “FirstDate makes use of a Nobel prize-winning framework known as the Gale-Shapley Stable Marriage Algorithm”. It’s a brow-raising element as a result of, regardless of the identify, the algorithm has nearly nothing to do with marriage, however extra on this later.

The courting service will use Singpass to confirm the id of customers, match folks in cycles (you get just one match every cycle), and share contact particulars solely when each customers comply with their match.

To get a way of how the matchmaking works, right here’s the questionnaire that the federal government staff signing up should fill out. The questions are a mixture of close-ended and open-ended ones, throughout 8 classes, spanning matters like pursuits and passions, life-style and every day habits, and communication and relationship model.

These are the questions:

1. What are you into today? (choose as much as 5 out of a guidelines of things like gaming, movie and cinema, volunteering, cafe-hopping, and many others)

2. Now, spill! What do you truly love about your hobbies? (open-ended, non-obligatory)

3. What cuisines do you eat on repeat and by no means get sick of? (choose as much as 3 out of a guidelines)

4. Which restaurant do you retain going again to and why? (open-ended, non-obligatory)

5. How typically do you discover an excuse to go away the nation? (close-ended, with choices like each probability I get (4+ journeys a yr) to I choose staying in Singapore (by no means))

6. What type of traveler are you, actually? (close-ended, with choices like journey junkie, tradition seeker, and I don’t journey a lot)

7. What’s a rustic that’s ruined all different nations for you? (open-ended, non-obligatory)

8. Team dawn, or crew “it’s 2am and I’m nonetheless up”? (close-ended)

9. Gym rat, occasional jogger, or train is a delusion to you? (close-ended)

10. Any meals guidelines we must always find out about? (close-ended, with choices like vegetarian, pescatarian, halal)

11. Do you smoke? (close-ended)

12. Be trustworthy! What does your room appear like proper now? (close-ended, with choices like spotless, organised chaos, and tidy up solely when wanted)

13. Hustle mode, or defending your private time? (close-ended, with choices like profession comes first proper now and private life comes first)

14. Real speak. How a lot of your day disappears into your cellphone? (close-ended)

15. Describe your social power. Are you the lifetime of the get together, or the one who left an hour in the past? (close-ended)

16. How vital is it for you {that a} match brings the identical power, or do opposites entice for you? (close-ended)

17. After a brutal work week, what’s your reset button? (close-ended, with choices like alone time at residence and going out and socialising)

18. New metropolis, new passion, new something. How do you’re feeling in regards to the unknown? (close-ended, with choices like adore it and like to stay to what I do know)

19. When you’re feeling so much, what do you truly do about it? (close-ended, with choices like specific brazenly and thru actions somewhat than phrases)

20. How do you wish to be liked? (close-ended, choose as much as three, with the 5 love languages as choices)

21. How do you specific love? (close-ended, choose as much as three, additionally with the 5 love languages as choices)

22. Non-stop texting, or comfy silence. Where do you land? (close-ended)

23. Mid-disagreement, what’s your intestine intuition? (close-ended)

24. Paint us an image. What does your dream first date appear like? (open-ended, non-obligatory)

25. What are your non-negotiable inexperienced flags in a associate? (choose 3 that matter most to you, out of choices like kindness, humour, and honesty)

26. Are you all the time engaged on your self, or is “adequate” adequate? (close-ended)

27. Do you see your self having youngsters? (close-ended, with choices like sure, open to it, and undoubtedly not)

28. Saver, spender, or “I’ll determine it out finally”? (close-ended)

29. What’s your faith, if any? (close-ended)

30. Any arduous nos for you? Be trustworthy, we gained’t decide. (close-ended, non-obligatory, with choices like smoking, totally different dietary wants, and somebody of a unique faith)

31. What’s the youngest age you’d think about courting? (open-ended)

32. What’s the oldest age you’d think about courting? (open-ended)

33. Write a brief observe in your future match! Tell us about your self in a couple of sentences. (open-ended)

After a query in regards to the identify you like to go by and your cellular quantity, the questionnaire additionally collects details about what number of first dates you’ve been on prior to now yr, whether or not you’ve used a courting app or matchmaking service earlier than, and while you final went on a primary date.

An earlier prototype of GovTech’s courting service proposed free meals for first dates, which is what I assume all of the food-related questions are for.

But how will the remainder of the info collected by way of these questions be used? The fascinating historical past of the Gale-Shapley Stable Marriage Algorithm (also called the deferred acceptance algorithm) offers us some clues.

Before the algorithm earned its identify, an analogous system was used to match medical college residents with residency programmes in hospitals within the United States for the reason that Fifties. After an interview course of, docs and hospitals present a rank ordered record of their preferences, which the algorithm turns right into a secure match.

What makes the match secure is that after all of the matching has concluded, no pair would somewhat be paired with each other over their present companions.

Confused? This YouTube video explains it higher than I can:

What made the algorithm so novel was that it proved that such a secure match all the time exists when there are equal members of every sort (and that there’s a resolution to realize it). The 2012 Nobel Prize in economics went to one of many mathematicians who developed the algorithm (Shapley) and an economist who identified the medical resident instance and used it to develop different actual international stage purposes.

It’s known as a wedding algorithm as a result of the speculation used marriage proposals as a memorable however theoretical instance. The actual international stage purposes of the algorithm (like college selection methods) are likely to have little to do with courting, for causes that I’ll elaborate on beneath.

What does this imply for these signing as much as FirstDate? Well, the algorithm is why FirstDate’s matching takes place in what its builders name “cycles” or “programmatic rounds”.

Presumably, the algorithm makes use of every person’s questionnaire solutions to rank all members of the other gender primarily based on compatibility. The algorithm then matches everybody till all {couples} are in secure matches (see above).

After you determine to say sure or no to your match, that’s it for the cycle. You’ll have to attend for the subsequent one to get a brand new secure match with a brand new pool of members.

From my perspective, there are three evident points that emerge when making use of this type of recreation idea to courting:

Problem 1: The algorithm was supposed as an answer to an identical downside the place there are two teams of those who must be paired with the opposite, such that no two folks would each choose one another over the companions they’re assigned.

This is not a assure that the match shall be a passable or comfortable one. It is barely a assure that they won’t choose another person who additionally prefers them within the pool. (Side observe: While the character of the algorithm would possibly indicate that same-sex pairings will not be potential, different dating-related implementations of the algorithm have allowed for same-sex pairings. It is uncertain that this may occur right here although, as a result of, nicely, Singapore.)

This is why the algorithm has been so helpful in contexts like matching medical school residents to hospitals, school choice systems, or matching US army recruits to their units. These are matches that members have dedicated to, even when the result isn’t their splendid or best choice.

All of that is additional difficult when there are outdoors choices. Like, say, different on-line courting companies or your office crush who isn’t taking part within the course of. Because there isn’t a dedication to the method (as a result of this isn’t your state-assigned waifu, thank god), the maths that underpins the algorithm doesn’t actually make sense.

We simply want to have a look at the most important instance of a courting app utilizing the Gale-Shapley algorithm: Hinge. The firm claims to make use of the algorithm, utilizing your previous behaviour to ship the “most suitable” matches that you just often see surfaced to the highest of your feed. Are they essentially the most suitable throughout the app? Possibly! Do you care? Probably not!

In quick, secure matches imply nothing when no person is dedicated and the very best choices would possibly exist outdoors of the matchmaking pool.

In 2024, I interviewed one of many people behind the Aphrodite Project, a university-based matching system that spits out simply one splendid match annually, utilizing a modified model of the Gale-Shapley algorithm. Their customers undoubtedly don’t expertise swiping fatigue, however, notably, even with simply the one algorithmically-determined match every cycle, folks nonetheless get ghosted.

Problem 2: The algorithm was designed to match folks by way of ranked preferences.

This turns into a difficulty when the questionnaire consists of open-ended fields and ambiguous questions with no clear goal indication of the way it interprets to choice, in that it typically conflates who you’re with what you need. For occasion, for those who worth humour in a associate, does that imply that you just’re an excellent match for somebody who additionally values humour in a associate?

If you’re a gymnasium rat, does that imply you additionally wish to match with different gymnasium rats?

Another signal {that a} questionnaire isn’t one of the simplest ways to know preferences is that the forerunner instance of the algorithm in motion had medical residents and hospitals submit their preferences after that they had performed interviews with one another.

Basically, the data gathering course of issues for figuring out what one’s preferences even are and it isn’t clear {that a} questionnaire is the best approach for daters to sign their preferences to one another (or on this case, an algorithm), regardless of what the creators of OKCupid and compatibility questionnaires in life-style magazines would possibly argue.

Problem 3: Finally, and most significantly, it’s not in any respect logical that courting efficiently is about discovering the one who most matches your acknowledged preferences. In this regard, FirstDate is admittedly not not like the web courting apps that it’s seeking to innovate on.

This level is so vital that it bears repeating: The downside with trendy courting is not merely an issue of mismatched preferences!

According to FirstDate’s web site, it “began with a query amongst a bunch of GovTech officers: does having extra potential matches essentially make it simpler to discover a appropriate match?”

This is an analogous analysis to what the parents behind the Aphrodite Project got here to, however I really feel that it captures an incomplete a part of the entire image.

The rise of on-line courting paralleled the rise of a specific mind-set about love that’s extra guidelines oriented than it’s holistic, the place daters more and more display their choices forward of time towards a predetermined record of inexperienced and crimson flags.

This guidelines of issues is, for my part, one of many largest points with on-line courting, in that it tends to amplify and exacerbate our private biases somewhat than inviting us to step outdoors of them. What’s the frequent denominator to being consistently unfortunate in love? Why that, pricey reader, is you.

How does a system for matchmaking folks account for the truth that the individuals who want matchmaking additionally are usually the worst at understanding what they really need in a relationship?

Let me paint you an image of what appears to be the frequent courting expertise in Singapore: You’re on a primary date with somebody in a series restaurant in a mall someplace in central Singapore. The dialog revolves nearly totally across the biodata and knowledge that HR and recruiters would gather from you.

Where do you reside? Where did you research? What job do you will have?

There’s nothing innately flawed with having preferences relating to those issues, however courting that’s all about these preferences betrays a deeply transactional and instrumentalist view of affection that sees different folks not as potential life companions, however pathways to potential life. Not lovers, however co-owners of a monetary enterprise. Not folks, however breeders of sought-after youngsters.

It’s a mindset that’s enabled by the market-driven logic of courting apps, the place we commodify ourselves to attain swipes. It’s additionally a mindset that provides intensely unattractive solely youngster power.

In Singapore, this transactional view is barely sharpened and strengthened by insurance policies just like the BTO system for public housing, the place the rational transfer for financially savvy {couples} is to use earlier than marriage, typically whereas one remains to be learning, in order that they will get the very best subsidies.

For these {couples}, it signifies that they’ll seemingly have spent no time in any respect residing with their partner-to-be, and navigating messy questions of the way you truly are in states of boredom and stress. Instead, they’re spending all their time planning for his or her monetary futures and screening their associate by way of their viability for a inflexible life path.

The algorithm does not repair or problem this HR interviewer mindset. It truly requires it and makes it the first lens by way of which to view love.

It says one thing that FirstDate particularly excludes these aged 36 and up, who’re too previous for loving, it appears. Or, as some commentators level out, too previous to breed and increase the fertility rate.

It can also be telling that earlier than the launch of FirstDate, its builders despatched out a survey to potential customers on CrowdTask (the federal government’s survey platform) asking them why they wish to be in a relationship.

The choices included “overcoming loneliness”, “making a household unit”, “monetary partnership”, and “social expectations” however not, you realize, LOVE. As in, the type of love that isn’t egocentric and completely centered round what your associate can do for you.

Perhaps that’s filed beneath “different” or “having fun with romantic intimacy”?

This isn’t me saying that shared values will not be vital. Studies do point out that the {couples} that do find yourself collectively tend to have similar values. But that’s not the identical as screening your companions primarily based on adherence to your concepts of what hobbies, love language, or dietary preferences they need to have.

What I’m saying is that maybe, we shouldn’t be treating our selection of companions with the identical mindset as how we method colleges and jobs, by way of the lens of competitors in pursuit of optimum selections. Or by way of an algorithm used for matching folks to their colleges and workplaces.

To be clear, I do assume that this GovTech pilot programme is an admirable initiative. More experimentation within the public sector is all the time a internet constructive, and I hope this doesn’t learn as me simply clowning on an excellent religion try at fixing what’s flawed with on-line courting.

There are clear advantages to a mannequin of on-line courting pushed much less by revenue incentives and shareholder worth, and pushed extra by person wants.

Notably although, this isn’t the primary try at a state-run matchmaker. I discover it hilarious that the earlier effort, the Social Development Unit (SDU), has a Wikipedia web page with a bit devoted to how folks used to joke that it stands for ‘Single, Desperate and Ugly’.

The similarities between FirstDate and the SDU (and later, the Social Development Network) transcend the involvement of the state. As this 1992 article from American libertarian journal Reason points out, the SDU too analysed its matchmaking pool’s responses to questionnaires to compute a listing of suitable dates. The Singaporean urge to quantify and computerise is a long-running one.

Still, if the aim of FirstDate is to make a greater product than courting apps, they’ve already succeeded (for hetero sinkies aged 21 to 35). But, thoughts you, the bar is in hell.

The courting app business has lengthy made the exploitation of the substitute shortage that it creates in on-line courting its main supply of earnings. This is coupled with the notion of perpetual abundance, the concept that there’s all the time someone higher on the market, so it could preserve dangling ever extra matches and paid-for options to woo them with. All of this so Tinder can milk as a lot revenue out of you as potential. Online courting is the archetypal instance of enshittification.

I’m not satisfied that a greater algorithm is the answer (although I’d be glad to be confirmed flawed). Really, the clamouring for it’s symptomatic of our redpilled and incel-inflected instances.

The fact is that we don’t actually know what precisely makes love work, such that we are able to articulate and implement it on a societal scale. It’s too messy, too advanced, too idiosyncratic, and too human. Anyone who claims in any other case in all probability has a course to promote you on negging and pickup artistry.

This is why even spending US$65,000 on the highest-end matchmaking is not a guarantee that you’ll find love.

The techno-solutionist concept that an algorithm will remedy love is borne of the identical mindset from which inceldom springs. This is a story that permeates a lot of the web discourse surrounding courting at present: I purchased the meals, spent a lot time providing my shoulder to them, gave a lot of myself to them, and so they nonetheless selected another person. This entitlement feeds into the self-victimisation: they’re all simply gold diggers, folks solely worth look, good guys end final.

People really feel entitled to like from the those who they need, seeing others not as ends in themselves, however a method to reaching some long-for happiness. This worldview is so persistent exactly due to the inherently market-driven logic of on-line courting. In at present’s social tradition, this logic has develop into inescapable, manifest in how previously fringe phrases like looksmaxxing and looksmatching have entered the mainstream lexicon.

It isn’t any coincidence that the hierarchical and self-commodifying nature of courting apps (and algorithmic matchmaking) is frighteningly just like the hierarchical and deterministic worldview of incels and pick-up artists. (I wish to scream: love isn’t a rank ordered record!!) After interviewing incels and former incels, I got here away with the sense that sure, the answer is to go outdoors and ditch courting by way of a display.

Rather than creating an off-ramp from a system of alienating self-commodification, FirstDate creates one other platform for folks to recreation.

There’s an excellent motive why Singaporeans are nonetheless – in response to surveys by the National Population and Talent Division at the least – extra prone to discover love by way of offline strategies (their colleges, workplaces, household buddies) than on-line channels.

This isn’t solely as a result of these are conditions the place one’s acknowledged preferences soften away to disclose their precise character, but in addition as a result of boredom, hardship, and chaos are the issues that reveal whether or not your personalities truly work collectively. This is in any other case often called chemistry.

What’s worrying is that each one of those offline strategies (except for social actions and locations of leisure) are declining as channels for assembly potential companions. That individuals are more and more assembly their companions by way of social actions is a promising signal although.

In my view, the issue of courting in Singapore has much less to do with what technical instruments can be found to us, and extra to do with the decline of the nation’s third areas, the nightlife scene, and locations for folks (each the youth and people aged 36 and up) to simply be. A greater resolution could be to put money into these areas.

The urge to quantify compatibility is comprehensible. This is Singapore in spite of everything, a rustic the place we simply can’t resist tying our self value to a rating. But, even an informal go searching you on the {couples} that do work would let you know that this impulse to quantify defies logic.

If the person I’m marrying in January had been to fill out this questionnaire, he’d in all probability fill it out like an introspective smooth boy and specific a choice for softspoken those who match into that life-style.

If I had been to fill out this questionnaire (as a queer particular person, that is strictly a hypothetical), I’d fill it out like a demon twink that desires a associate in crime to get together with on a regular basis.

The outcome would seemingly imply being matched as much as someone like our exes.

Instead, we met over Grindr, an app the place one has little to go off of in addition to look, distance, and sexual compatibility. And over the subsequent yr, he grew to become my plus one to all of the nightclubs and bars and events I write about as a life-style journalist. And he, in flip, drags me out to the fandom conventions and recreation jams that he loves (and that I admittedly am lukewarm on). I fell in love with him on the dancefloor, and he fell in love with me in the course of the quiet instances in between.

I’d argue this shock and unpredictability is essential to discovering chemistry.

And, additionally, that there’s one thing deeply unsexy about somebody setting you up with somebody who is ideal for you on paper. We spend so much time in the rat race, absolutely love ought to be the one house freed from optimisation in any respect prices.

So, right here’s my proposal: Let’s fund tradition golf equipment, theatre teams, online game conventions, music festivals, no matter!

Instead of selling them as locations the place folks can come to fulfill their potential companions (you’ll be accused of attempting to resurrect the Single, Desperate, and Ugly membership), let’s wager that comfortable and fulfilled folks with buddies and entry to thriving third areas will couple up in the event that they wish to.

Instead of ramming pro-fertility rhetoric down our throats, let’s focus as an alternative on eroding the limitations that so many individuals really feel on the subject of being a part of a neighborhood, just like the steep value of simply present in public in capitalist Singapore or the exorbitant value of late night time transportation or the fact that it’s arduous to have buddies over (not to mention a potential date) when one is predicted to reside with their household till their 30s.

Let’s give attention to broadening the extraordinarily slender horizon of social risk in Singapore, the place everybody complains that there isn’t a nature, no tradition, and nothing to do however eat and sleep and journey. Is it any surprise that an earlier prototype of FirstDate locations such an enormous emphasis on free first meals? What else is there to do?

If this appears like a radical resolution to you, it’s solely since you haven’t been paying consideration, as a result of it’s already taking place.

Take a take a look at the sober rave (and friendship festival) at Funan co-organised by the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) in 2025 that almost all members in all probability didn’t even realise was a government-led operation.

It gives an interesting window into what government-funded tradition actions which might be additionally not-so-secretly attempting to get folks to make infants may appear like. Festival attendees had been actually handed out bracelets to sign to different attendees their openness to a relationship, and but, the reception from everybody I spoke to was nearly unanimously constructive (in direction of the occasion, not the bracelets).

In a time of shuttering nightclubs, bookstores, theatre teams, and no matter else you’d think about a typical social house, I’d argue that this type of assist is badly wanted. And, I might wager that MSF’s wager on third areas is extra prone to produce comfortable {couples} (and infants, for those who care about that) than this.

If we should introduce some type of app-based resolution, have folks match themselves to the issues they wish to do, somewhat than the folks they wish to have. I might argue that that is way more revealing of 1’s character than a questionnaire, and likewise, far much less alienating.

Let the cosplayers meet their kindred souls on the government-funded con. Let the e book lovers meet on the speak on the indie bookstore. And let the nightlife fans meet on the sober (or not so sober) rave.

And for those who don’t get the love of your life out of it, nicely, at the least you’ll have had fun doing it.