Top image: Stephanie Lee / RICE File Photo
The Overachiever’s Guide is a new monthly column dedicated to excellence and accomplishment in all aspects of life in Singapore. Whether it’s essential life skills or questionable life choices, we help you to stay ahead of the bell curve.
Previously, we brought to you a guide to ass cleanliness. Now, as Valentine’s Day draws near, this one’s for those who haven’t yet secured a date. There’s no need to feel shame. Instead, own your Proud Single™ status.
Being single is one of the worst things that can happen to you in Singapore.
First, HDB locks you out of the lucrative BTO market until you’re a ripe old prune at 35.
Then, you are forced to endure the useless advice of both nosy aunties at CNY and condescending couples at dinner parties.
Colleagues live vicariously through your Hinge profile, only to abandon your unattached ass when they leave at 5 PM to pick their kid up.
However, the only thing worse than being single is dating.
They say there’s plenty of fish in the sea, but the ‘sea’ is filled with herrings who can’t commit, sharks who don’t reply, and eels who slither away when you suggest splitting the bill.
Worst of all, you can be 100 percent sure that your dating profile will end up as a screenshot on some random group chat where every pixel and pimple will be relentlessly CSI-ed and picked apart for laughs.
This is why 2025 is THE year to embrace singlehood. Instead of sacrificing your dignity one swipe at a time on the Aztec temple of platform-enhanced chastity, you should follow my completely-sane, very-enlightened, and totally-not-bitter guide to being a Proud Single™.
Step 1 – Go to the gym
Going to the gym is essential if you’re a Proud Single™ because the gym makes you fit and hot. When you are hot, people will assume you are single by choice rather than by chance.
Instead of pitying you, they will make unfounded assumptions about your non-existent sex life. They will envy your life beyond the squat rack, even if your life is mostly ordering creatine on iHerb and watching 25-minute Jeff Nippard tutorials on how to shoulder press.
Will being attractive and fit land you a partner? What if it actually… works?
Based on personal experience and scientific consensus, your mileage may vary. I run 18km every other weekend, but the only woman in my life costs $175/hour. She’s a physiotherapist, and we met because of a left gluteal sprain caused by overexertion.
Step 2 – Solo travel
Staying at home alone is sad and pathetic. Travelling alone is brave, romantic and empowering. Nobody knows how this works, but it works. Once you grab a passport and leave the country, ‘friendlessness’ becomes solitude and ‘aimlessness’ becomes wanderlust. The same Ippudo you ate at City Hall is transformed magically into an experience worthy of the IG highlights reel.
The trick is to choose a destination that’s exotic enough to be interesting but safe enough to survive. Most Singaporeans pick Japan but don’t let the popular consensus stop you from pushing the boundaries and going to Taiwan instead.
Step 3 – Hiking
Hiking is one of the most boring activities known to man. However, it is ideal for the Proud Single™ because it lends an aura of spirituality to the otherwise mundane activity of stepping over rocks.
The hiker is, after all, not merely a walker who has spent too much money on Arc’Teryx or a runner who can’t stay in Zone 2. The hiker is a superior, higher lifeform, with a tenuous connection to ‘mother nature’ and an ability to transcend pedestrian concerns, like a craving for hotpot or a need to poop indoors.
An added advantage is how it removes you from modern ills like TikTok, vapes, or showers—or at least until you reach a spot with enough Wi-Fi to dump your content for instant validation.
Step 4 – Capitalism
One of capitalism’s most enduring strengths is its ability to create solutions for its own problems. The isolation engendered by social media platforms such as Instagram spawned a rise of Onlyfans or Twitch, which provides IaaS (Intimacy-as-a-Service).
We haven’t yet found a cure for the relationship recession, but don’t let it stop you from blaming capitalism. If the app-based dating system is not working out for you, the most straightforward answer is to pretend that you’re too busy working to participate in the app-based dating system. Pre-emptively ghost your prospective partners by feigning total and utter dedication to your career.
After all, you are not ‘hopeless’; you are just ‘career-minded’. You’re not hurt by Cheryl ghosting you because pfft it wasn’t serious and it’s not like you had time to meet this weekend anyway.
Step 5 – Hobbies
Hobbies are a great way to meet your potential partner. Or so I’m told by people who met their partners at school, work or Tinder.
Nonetheless, they’re not wrong. Having a hobby such as photography or pottery is an excellent way for the Proud Single™ to show that they are a well-adjusted person with a healthy interest in the wider world and an even healthier bank account to support those interests.
It’s also a means of finding fulfilment outside of a relationship. Instead of channelling your months of salary and years of life into a relationship that doesn’t work, you can channel it into a hobby that no one understands.
Instead of boring your potential partners on dates, you can bore your friends, family and colleagues with indecipherable tangents about the best mirrorless camera, A24 movies, or Arsenal’s chances of coming in second.
Step 6 – Writing
I got paid $1,6001 for this article because I am exceptionally talented and good-looking. Most of you would not be able to command such a premium but don’t let it stop you from rebranding your celibacy into a journey of growth and self-discovery.
The prevalence of self-publishing platforms means that anyone—literally anyone—can embark on a journey of protracted self-delusion. With a shift in perspective and a Substack account, it’s easy to transform your insecurities into introspection and your relationship angst into reams of unreadable prose.
Jokes aside, relationships aren’t everything in life. There’s a case to be made for being single by choice if the alternative is a toxic relationship or changing who you are as a person for the sake of getting hitched.
The Singaporean dream wants you to graduate, BTO, marry, reproduce, and freehold, but there are diverse pathways to happiness outside of a heteronormative property-incentivised coupling. It is okay to believe in this linear progression towards contentment, but it’s just as okay to opt out and be a Proud Single™ .
And if such enlightenment and self-discovery don’t work out, just remember that RICE Media operates a highly profitable sideline in modern existential angst. You can always monetise your bitterness by writing to my editor-in-chief Ilyas.
- *Editor’s note: No, I did not pay this idiot $1,600. ↩︎
