udderiffic indulgence.

Yay! Someone articulated what I said last month.

Start them young.
Want more people to get married? It may help if boys and girls learn about love and life early.

By Ignatius Low

Listening to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s National Day Rally two weeks ago, my thoughts were not so much on babies but something more ‘upstream’ - falling in love and getting married.

As a kid in an all-boys school, I was horribly nerdy and there were really only two things that mattered to me.

One was turning in my homework on time and scoring well in exams and tests. The other was buying music magazines and listening to records after school with a bunch of close friends.

To make things worse, I had a medical condition that meant that I could not play any sports throughout my secondary school years.

Confined to the sidelines during PE lessons, I was a willowy boy who was all long hair, buck teeth and thick glasses.

It did not really occur to me, let alone matter, that I was totally unattractive to the opposite sex.

The only time I came into contact with girls was when I went for cathechism classes in church on Sunday mornings. My family lived in a three-room flat in Holland Drive so we ended up going to St Ignatius Church off Farrer Road.
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…I thought I’d take the time to talk about something that has always puzzled me. My interest in going back to this topic was piqued by something I saw someone say, which I’ve loosely paraphrased here:

If we go from being friends to lovers, I’ll lose you as my best friend. The best friend who hugs me when I’m down, who buys me Pi Pa Gao when my throat is whacked, who da baos breakfast for me in the morning, who lets me drop by his room at two a.m. to whine, who drops by my room at two a.m. to tell me lame jokes, which annoys me tremendously but which makes me laugh too. I don’t want to lose that.

My first thought upon reading this was: wait a minute, you mean a lover can’t/isn’t supposed to do that too? Or does it mean that the moment you make the transition from friends to lovers, you lose all that, in one fell swoop?

I’ve always thought that the only thing that differentiates lovers from friends is the added aspect of physical and emotional intimacy, so it confuses me when I hear people use the line about ‘not wanting to lose a friend’.

However, I’ve learnt from talking to other people that the line is simply a euphemism for ‘Acherlly, I’m not that into you’. So I’d understand if people don’t say it for what it is, because they just don’t want to hurt someone else.

Nevertheless, I think the friends/lovers thing can be quite a blurry line sometimes, and perhaps one of the ways to cross that barrier, if you ever do find yourself there, is by just being bold.

Wish me luck. For the English Language test that I’m boldly (adverb) sitting (verb) for in thirty minutes, that is.

But there are others who feel the idea may work - to a degree.

“Singles are becoming more open to various ways of getting attached and meeting people, so it may work,” says Mr Laremy Lee, 25, a trainee teacher.

“But it doesn’t solve the root cause of the problem: People do not have enough time to socialise, and they also do not know how to socialise.”

– Tessa Wong and Grace Chua, Mum or dad as Cupid? No thanks, say singles.

(Thanks, Tessa, for the well-written story.)

Thought I’d clarify my quote here, because the back portion got chopped off, possibly due to space requirements on the printed page, and I’m worried people might think I secretly think that all Singaporeans are automatons of the highest order.

Some ah, not all. Just kidding.

Anyway, what I meant by the last sentence is something along the lines of: quite a few Singaporeans don’t know how to socialise because they weren’t encouraged to date when they’re younger.

Seems to me that a lot of kids have always been told that they have to concentrate on their studies/CCAs etc. when they’re young, so by the time a lot of people start thinking about finding a partner, they’d probably have lost about eight to nine years of their youth studying/doing fieldcraft in NPCC etc. - time which could also have been spent exploring the different aspects of what it means to be in a relationship.

At the same time, I don’t think most parents or teachers, even, devote adequate time and space to talking to their kids about dating and relationships. Neither are they able to give adequate advice on dating and/or relationships, simply because the older people themselves may not have been very good at dating/relationships in the first place, a vicious cycle that I think must be broken sooner than later.

So within this environment, many Singaporeans are left to their own devices, and they sadly have to fumble along, trying to make sense of something that is as alien to you and me as walking - it’s probably something we know how to do innately, but nevertheless, it’s something we need to learn how to do before going on to run - or fly, even.

I think it’s something that we as a society need to address, because it has a bearing on a lot of other things (not just baby-making) and I think it’s something I’ll talk about on Saturday. Let me know if you have any other thoughts, I’d be keen to hear your point of view as well.