“Law without enforcement is only good advice.” 

– President Abraham Lincoln

They wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space, and at times it made me feel quite small in my costume, like a young man must feel when he’s just coming of age, and he’s suddenly expected to carry the world under his arm like a football. And some women did find Ned too small physically to be attractive. They wanted someone, they said, who could pin them to the bed or, as one woman put it, “someone who can drive the bus.” Ned was too willowy for that, and came up wanting.

[…]

Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time, they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colors and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it, but feeling the pressure to be that other world-bestriding colossus at the same time made me feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men, not only because living up to Caesar is an immensely heavy burden to bear, but because trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex. What’s more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its particulars, to see and treat women as equals in every respect, he is on the other hand often still expected to be traditional at the same time, to treat a lady like a lady, to lead the way and pick up he check.

Expectation, expectation, expectation. That was the leitmotif of Ned’s dating life, taking on the desirable manly persona or shrugging off its dreaded antithesis. Finding the right balance was maddening, and operating under the constant weight of so much political guilt was simply exhausting. Though, in the parlance of liberal politics, I had operated in my real life under the burden of being a doubly oppressed minority – a woman and a lesbian – and I had encountered the deprivations of that status, as a man, I operated under what I felt in these times to be the equally heavy burden of being a double majority, a white man.

Source: Self-Made Man, Norah Vincent

Table: Proportion of Singles Among Singapore Citizens by Age Group, Sex and Ethnic Group

The most eligible category (ahem), also my category, records singles among Singaporean citizens as of 25-29 years of age. More than half of the single men among the Chinese, Malay and Indian race within the age group are single, while that number drops to less than half as the age group moves into the early 30s. As for the women, more than half of the Chinese and Indian women between 25-29 years of age are single, and this number drops to one-third and one-fifth respectively for Chinese and Indian women in their early 30s. Nevertheless, there are still more young single men than women milling about, it seems.

Yet, my eligible, beautiful and single friends – and myself – agree that it’s terribly hard to find someone to connect with in this tiny beautiful island. Why is this so?

Source: Table 3 Proportion of Singles Among Singapore Citizens by Age Group, Sex and Ethnic Group, http://www.singstat.gov.sg/pubn/popn/C2010sr1/cop2010sr1.pdf pg 21 of 198