Singapore has launched a government-backed dating app for public servants as the city-state seeks to address a record-low birthrate and a shrinking, ageing population.
FirstDate is being piloted among single government employees aged between 21 and 35. The platform uses the Gale-Shapley matching algorithm, developed by mathematicians David Gale and Lloyd Shapley, to pair participants according to their ranked preferences.
Users sign in with their national digital identity and complete a questionnaire covering their interests, habits and values. Rather than allowing users to browse an endless stream of profiles, the service introduces one potential partner at a time.
The pilot was created during GovTech’s annual hackathon, where staff develop and test new ideas. Registration closed on Monday, while the agency has said no decision has been made on whether FirstDate will be extended beyond government employees.
Nur Aisyah, a 30-year-old civil servant who uses a pseudonym, joined after spending several years looking for a partner. She said she rarely met men through work or her hobbies and found dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble “terrible”.
“It’s more of the mindset of ‘Why not?’” she said. “It makes quite a funny story if something did come out of this.”
Nur is open to having children but said the prospect of raising them in Singapore was daunting because of high housing and childcare costs, as well as the burden of childcare typically falling most heavily on women.
“I feel slightly pessimistic about the future as a whole,” she said.
Singapore’s search for matches
The government’s matchmaking experiment comes as fewer than 30,000 babies were born in Singapore in 2025, taking the fertility rate to a record low of 0.87.
Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced almost 70,000 Singapore dollars in financial benefits for each child from birth until the age of 17 in August. Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong warned in February that, without intervention, the citizen population could start to decline by the early 2040s, leaving fewer workers to care for older people.
Singapore already relies heavily on immigration to meet workforce needs and expects to take in between 25,000 and 30,000 new citizens each year over the next five years. The country has about 6.2 million inhabitants in an area less than half the size of London.
Not all Singaporeans, however, see parenthood as a priority. Many have embraced a child-free lifestyle, choosing the financial benefits of a double-income household with fewer expenses or devoting their attention to pets.
Singapore has a long history of government involvement in relationships. In a 1983 speech, the country’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, warned that graduates, particularly women, were marrying later and having fewer children than less-educated people.
The following year, his government introduced the Graduate Mothers’ Scheme, which gave priority in school admissions to children of university-educated mothers. It also established the Social Development Unit to organise events for graduate single people, although critics described the agency as elitist.
“We have a highly interventionist government, even in a private sphere of love and marriage,” said Tan Ern Ser, an adjunct principal research fellow at Singapore’s Institute of Policy Studies.
Tan said previous attempts to encourage relationships had not been “significant nor cost effective”, but that the current generation of officials remained keen to use technology in the dating sphere. He said a government-backed platform was not a return to arranged marriages, as compatible couples could still develop a “love match”.
Jean Liu, an associate professor of psychology at the Singapore Institute of Technology, said FirstDate was closer to traditional matchmaking than most commercial dating apps.
“It is more akin to offline matchmaking, with endless profile swiping replaced by a single match,” she said.
But she cautioned that questionnaires had limited value in predicting whether two people would get on, while the system would depend on having enough participants. “The process may break down if too few people sign up,” she said.
Liu said the platform could nevertheless give the government an opportunity to assess and publish dating data that commercial apps generally keep private because their algorithms are treated as sensitive business information.
Reactions online have ranged from amusement to criticism, with some commentators calling FirstDate a waste of public money and others joking about “state-assigned spouses” or whether finding a partner would become a workplace target.
Jamie, a government employee in education, received an invitation but does not intend to join. “I think it’s quite cringe. It just sounds like someone is trying too hard,” she said.
She questioned what personal information would be collected and how it would be used. FirstDate says profiles are visible only to a person’s match, contact details are shared only when both people agree, and data will not be monetised or shared with third parties except where the law requires or permits.
Teo Kai Xiang, a PhD student and former journalist, said reducing dating to a list of preferences reflected “a deeply transactional and instrumentalist view of love”. He argued that partners risk being treated as “co-owners of a financial venture” and “breeders of sought-after children”.
Teo said Singapore’s public housing system intensified that pressure, with couples seeking subsidies encouraged to apply for a flat before marriage. Singles cannot buy public housing independently until they turn 35, despite such homes being where about 80 per cent of residents live.
He said the greater barriers to relationships were the cost of dating, including late-night transport and high rents, and a lack of social spaces and nightlife. “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,” he said. “It’s too messy, too complex, too idiosyncratic, and too human.”
