Singapore – Nur Aisyah, a ۳۰-year-old civil servant, has spent the past couple of years looking for a partner, with little to show for it.
Nur rarely meets men through work or her hobbies and finds dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble “terrible”, with potential suitors either putting scant effort into their profile or struggling to hold a conversation over text.
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Nur is open to having children but also struggles to imagine raising them in a city where housing and childcare costs are high, and where the burden of childcare typically falls hardest on women.
“I feel slightly pessimistic about the future as a whole,” Nur, who asked to use a pseudonym, told Al Jazeera.
So when Singapore’s technology agency GovTech recently rolled out FirstDate, a dating platform for public servants that uses a Nobel-winning algorithm, Nur signed up out of curiosity
“It’s more of the mindset of ‘Why not?’” she said. “It makes quite a funny story if something did come out of this.”
Born out of GovTech’s annual hackathon, where staff develop and test new ideas, FirstDate is being piloted among single government employees aged ۲۱ to ۳۵.
Participants log in using their national digital ID and answer a survey about their interests, habits and values before being matched with one prospective partner at a time.
Sign-ups for the pilot closed on Monday.
GovTech has told local media that no decision has been made on whether to expand the service beyond employees at government agencies.
Singapore’s decision to get into the matchmaking game is its latest attempt to lift a birthrate that has sunk to historic lows.
Fewer than ۳۰,۰۰۰ babies were born in the Southeast Asian city-state in ۲۰۲۵, bringing the fertility rate to a record low of ۰.۸۷.
In August, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced a series of new measures to support families, including almost ۷۰,۰۰۰ Singapore dollars ($۵۵,۰۰۰) worth of financial benefits for every child from birth until age ۱۷.
For Singapore, whose six million citizens are practically the city-state’s only resource, the prospect of a shrinking, fast-ageing population is existential.
In February, Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong warned that without intervention, the citizen population could begin to shrink by the early ۲۰۴۰s, leaving fewer workers to care for the elderly.
Singapore already leans heavily on immigration to meet its workforce needs, with the government expecting to take in ۲۵,۰۰۰ to ۳۰,۰۰۰ new citizens annually over the next five years, a politically sensitive influx in a country whose ۶.۲ million inhabitants fill an area less than half the size of London.
Yet even as Singapore’s bureaucrats urge people to have babies, many Singaporeans have enthusiastically embraced a child-free lifestyle, preferring to reap the benefits of living in a double-income household with fewer bills or to lavish their attention on pets.
Singapore has never been shy about meddling in matters of the heart.
In a ۱۹۸۳ speech that sparked what became known as the “Great Marriage Debate”, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father and longest-serving prime minister, warned that graduates, especially women, were marrying late and having fewer children than the less educated.
The following year, Lee’s government introduced the controversial Graduate Mothers’ Scheme, which prioritised the children of university-educated mothers in school admissions.
Around the same time, the government established the Social Development Unit (SDU) to organise events where graduate singles could mingle, prompting some Singaporeans to joke that the body’s initials should stand for “Single, Desperate and Ugly”.
Critics called the agency elitist, and a separate body for those with only secondary school qualifications followed in ۱۹۸۵.
“We have a highly interventionist government, even in a private sphere of love and marriage,” Tan Ern Ser, adjunct principal research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies in Singapore, told Al Jazeera.
Tan said that although past governments’ attempts to play matchmaker were neither “significant nor cost effective”, Singapore’s current generation of bureaucrats is no less eager to involve themselves in the dating game, using the power of technology.
Still, Tan said, a government-backed platform does not mark a return to the era of arranged marriages, and “couples who are identified as compatible could still have a love match.”
FirstDate relies on the Gale-Shapley algorithm, devised by mathematicians David Gale and Lloyd Shapley in ۱۹۶۲, which pairs people according to the ranked preferences of each side.
Shapley shared the ۲۰۱۲ Nobel memorial prize in economics for discovering the algorithm, versions of which are used in school admissions and medical residency placements.
“This is a fundamentally different approach from most dating apps,” Jean Liu, an associate professor of psychology at the Singapore Institute of Technology, told Al Jazeera.
“It is more akin to offline matchmaking, with endless profile swiping replaced by a single match.”
That FirstDate grew out of a hackathon, Liu said, reflects “an appetite to innovate on the nation’s ‘hard problems’”.
Whether it will help people find love any better than mainstream dating apps is another matter.
Questionnaires have limited value in predicting whether two people will hit it off, and the matches are only as good as the pool of people who join, Liu said.
“The process may break down if too few people sign up.”
The app’s greatest value, Liu said, may be in giving the government an opportunity to evaluate and publish dating data, something app companies, which treat their algorithms as sensitive company information, rarely do.
Singapore is not alone in trying to pair up singles.
Tokyo’s metropolitan government launched Tokyo Enmusubi, an AI-powered dating app, in ۲۰۲۴, while the Seoul government’s “Seoulting” programme hosts curated blind dates at landmarks such as the Han River.
Online, Singaporeans’ reactions to their government’s latest bid to play cupid have ranged from scorn to amusement.
Some commentators have dismissed FirstDate as a waste of public money, while others have joked about “state-assigned spouses” and whether finding love will now be included among their work targets.
Jamie, a government employee who works in education, received the email inviting her to join the platform but has no plans to sign up.
“I think it’s quite cringe. It just sounds like someone is trying too hard,” Jamie, who declined to give her last name, told Al Jazeera.
“Our social skills have atrophied. I am so exhausted after work that I just want to go home and lie down,” Jamie said.
She said she does make an effort through community groups, but has yet to meet anyone who shares her values or is emotionally ready for a relationship, so “nothing happens”.
Jamie said she also wonders about privacy.
“What kind of data are they collecting in order for a match, and what are they doing with said data?” she said.
According to FirstDate’s website, profiles are visible only to a person’s match, contact details are shared only when both parties agree, and data will not be monetised or shared with third parties except where the law requires or permits.
For Teo Kai Xiang, a PhD student and former Straits Times journalist, dating reduced to a list of preferences reflects “a deeply transactional and instrumentalist view of love”, in which partners become “co-owners of a financial venture” and “breeders of sought-after children”.
That mindset, Teo said, is sharpened by Singapore’s public housing system, where the rational move for couples chasing subsidies is to apply for an apartment before marriage.
This algorithm “does not fix or challenge this HR interviewer mindset”, said Teo, who also questions why those aged ۳۶ and above are excluded.
Though he welcomes the experiment, Teo would like to see the government do more to revive the city-state’s third spaces and nightlife instead of “ramming pro-fertility rhetoric down our throats”.
The bigger barrier to dating, he said, is cost – from pricey late-night transport to high rents that keep many singletons living with their parents into their ۳۰s.
Singles cannot buy public housing, home to about ۸۰ percent of residents in Singapore, on their own until they turn ۳۵.
“The truth is that we don’t really know what exactly makes love work, such that we can articulate and implement it on a societal scale,” Teo said. “It’s too messy, too complex, too idiosyncratic, and too human.”
