Is modern dating in Singapore broken?

**Natasha Ann Zachariah** (0:07)
I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 65, blue eyes. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Hi guys, I'm Natasha, and welcome to another episode of The Usual Place, the podcast where we have real conversations about the headlines. So a recent Straits Times survey of 1,000 unmarried people explained the dating scene plainly. So it's bleak, it's hard to meet new people, dating can be expensive, and there are unrealistic expectations of love and relationships. Now the number of marriages in 2025 is that it's lower since 2020 Now I have a theory on why we're in the state. It's just because we're bad at dating. Now to help me explore this, I'm speaking with two people who study Singaporean data in different ways. So on today's episode, I have Liu Zhiqun, the co-founder of Kopi Date, and the other founder is your wife, Jing Lin. And your aim with Kopi Date is to humanize the dating experience, so moving beyond swiping and gaming the algorithm. So on Kopi Date, potential dates answer questions, and then your team creates one-on-one dates. For them.
Sounds very helpful.
Actually, you get them to the starting point before they hedge about it and then don't even make it, right?

**Liu Zhiqun** (1:12)
Precisely.

**Natasha Ann Zachariah** (1:13)
Alright, so next to you on the couch, I have Dr. Kenneth Tan, an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. Now, what you research essentially is relationships from end to end. So that's from singlehood to why relationships end. Sort of like a relationship scientist, right? Alright. So you guys have all the answers to why we date the way we date. But I want to start with how on this podcast, we often talk about marriages and parenthood. We've talked about it a couple of times, but we often gloss over the starting point, which is getting people together, right? So singles actually do want to date and get married, and surveys do tell us that. But Zhiqun, has dating actually become harder in the last decade?

**Liu Zhiqun** (1:53)
Wow.
I think that's a difficult question to ask, to answer. But I think, in short, it depends, right?
Fundamentally, I believe that dating and building long-term relationships is a skill, right? So if someone is more skilled at it, it's not as difficult, right? If someone is less skilled at it, it becomes more difficult. If you look back into the dating landscape, right, over the past decade or so, right, I think all of us probably dated in a bit over the past decade. But for myself personally, I think I've used a fair share of dating apps early on, right? And in the past, the challenge of dating is mostly around the idea of meeting people, right? It's harder to meet people in general. There are common places to do so, in schools, in churches, maybe in a workplace, right? But outside of that, it's a little bit more challenging. So it's a more logistical kind of like a problem and challenge, right? As we move towards the later part of the decade, there's explosion of, you know, technology, information, and it comes with expectations as well, right? And endless options, right? So the challenge evolved along the way from a logistical one to a more psychological one, right? Because of higher expectations, people find it more challenging to navigate those challenges along the way. But all in all, I think fundamentally, if you look at dating, it's really two people, two flawed individuals coming together, right? With sky-high expectations of the modern dating world, right? And yet, not that much understanding of themselves yet, right?
And what they really want in the relationship. If all these ingredients come in together, it becomes really a, you know, having to deal with the complexity of human emotions, of rejections, of judgment, etc. That makes dating incredibly hard overall.

**Natasha Ann Zachariah** (3:55)
So, I hear it's a skills issue, skills, user skills issue, which is what Kenneth actually studies. So, you want to weigh in here. What exactly is the hard part of dating right now?

**Kenneth Tan** (4:06)
So, first of all, I think thanks for having me on the podcast. I think what we are facing, one part of it is, like I said, it's a skills challenge, but I do think that there is a lot more expectations that have been brought in into understanding what relationships mean.
In some recent surveys that we've conducted in our lab, we've seen that about 40 percent of the singles in our sample have not been in a relationship before, and so they are sort of lacking the experience and the know-how to even navigate situations with connection, with people that they might be interested in.