Kill the dream of becoming a high‐flying executive, stat. Half of the bachelors and the bachelorettes surveyed are no longer impressed by trivial things such as job titles and career status. They want to know how you maintain a work‐life balance, not inbox zero. And don’t brag about all the hours you work overtime. This is now a red flag to more than one in five Singaporeans, who are avoiding workaholics like the plague. No, your Type A personality is not the flex you think it is.

Invite your date for a break at a five‐star island resort and show them how easy it is for you to do absolutely nothing. Win them over with all the meditation apps on your smartphone (after deleting the productivity ones, of course) and pack a book on Zen Buddhism that you can pretend to read just like a The White Lotus character. What about your lingering ambition, your undying entrepreneurial spirit? Try to inspire those things in your partner once you’ve tied the knot. Starting a business with your spouse doesn’t count as work, right?

Read more: Work-life balance: Expert advice on why it matters and how to achieve it

We’re afraid we have bad news for your parents: their future daughter‐in‐law or son‐in‐law will likely be a four. Or a six, if they’re lucky. We’re talking about appearance, of course. More people are now looking past their physical ideals, which means that the height listed on your dating profile is no longer a bragging right. What do the singles of Singapore want then, if not the sculpted abs that you slaved away at the gym for, or the flawless face that you spent thousands on? Almost 70 per cent of those surveyed are seeking partners with emotional maturity, so don’t cancel your therapy sessions just yet.

You can also tell your parents to hold off on calling in their favourite feng shui master. In 2023, singles are venturing beyond their types and who they’re “supposed” to be dating. Have an open mind when seeing other people, just like you did when you invested in cryptocurrency. No more probing for your date’s zodiac sign to check your compatibility or looking up their LinkedIn profiles to see if they have an Ivy League university education. Pick a wild card and introduce them to your family over dinner. If your parents disapprove, then he or she is pretty much your soulmate, according to the logic of romantic comedy movies.

Think of the current dating landscape like the hippie movement of the 1960s—minus the orgies. More people are taking a freewheeling approach to sex and intimacy, throwing about terms that sound like they’ve been coined by a divorce lawyer: “consensual non‐monogamy”, “polyamory”, “open relationships”, et cetera. Today, we can easily avoid a scandal by reframing our affairs as “experiments of intimacy”.

Pleasure is also becoming a hot topic; more people are opening up to their romantic prospects about their favourite positions, and often just as soon as they’d tell you their favourite colour. But before you start worrying about where on the kink scale you lie, or whether it’s time to be in a throuple, consider this statistic: despite all that verbal intercourse, almost half of the Singaporeans Bumble surveyed are not engaging in coitus, and happily so.

A majority of Singaporeans are now dating with intention, and that’s with a capital “I”: they’re establishing their needs and boundaries from the start, and some of them are even doing so through their own FAQ documents, as though they were a business.

It’ll be good to start thinking about relationships like a conservative investor. If you want steady returns in the long run, you should look past appearances and find out exactly what you’re investing in. If your prospective partner can’t pitch anything to you about your future together, then they have no place in your romantic portfolio. On the other hand, be wary of “pump and dump” scammers and their false promises that are often too good to be true. Finally, face the facts of your situationship: it’s a stagnant stock and it’s time to pull out.

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