The government of Singapore launched a matchmaking service called FirstDate this week that is supposed to help government employees between 21 and 35 years of age to find romance.
The plan was conceived because not enough Singaporean babies have been: national births fell to a 60-year-low in 2025.
FirstDate ostensibly offers a “different approach to dating” because it only matches its clients to one potential partner at a time and it uses a system known as the Gale-Shapley Stable Matching Algorithm to hook people up.
The Gale-Shapley algorithm is not an exciting new discovery that has never been tried before. It was developed in the 1960s and eventually helped to win a Nobel Prize in Economics for co-creator Lloyd Shapley in 2012.
The algorithm has been used in many earlier dating services, and also for non-romantic matching tasks such as matching university applicants to the most ideal schools. It is sometimes known as the Stable Marriage Algorithm, because matching men and women into lasting marriages was a metaphor for the statistical problem the algorithm was meant to solve. Its methodology essentially involves matching people in rounds, and then giving the matched participants other offers to consider, until everyone has a match that they prefer to all other possible matches.
The algorithm is not infallible, which led some critics of the FirstDate program to think the government was making unrealistic promises to help all of its employees find a permanent marriage partner.
Others complained that it was unfair to limit the service to only government employees, or criticized the narrow age range of participants as obvious evidence that FirstDate is more like a breeding program than a dating service. Some social media users denounced it as “dystopian” in character.
“At the end of the day, I think the experience of meeting someone through an application doesn’t change much across the applications. But it is nice to know that the likelihood of being scammed is much lower. We’re all public servants looking for a partner, right?” an optimistic young employee of the Singaporean defense ministry told the BBC on Wednesday.
“They are only doing this to raise the total fertility rate. They don’t actually [care] about whether we find a partner otherwise,” grumbled a less optimistic commentator on social media.
The BBC noted Singapore has a long history of concocting government programs to stave off demographic decline, including government-organized social mixers and agencies to promote marriage.
The Financial Times (FT) on Wednesday reported FirstDate was created during an “annual hackathon” sponsored by Singapore’s technology agency, which was tasked with creating a system that would avoid the “swipe right fatigue” afflicting clients of casual dating sites.
Instead of casting singles adrift in a turbulent sea of potential mates, FirstDate is supposed to steer people toward compatible matches and then suggest activities they can participate in. An early version of the program offered a government-subsidized “first date meal” to each couple. The current version will not offer any other matches to a couple until they either reject each other or have a first date, and they become invisible to all other users.
“Limiting the choice set resets the dating environment to one that is more manageable by human brains,” Singapore Management University psychology professor Norman Li explained to Fortune.
The imprimatur of a government service was considered important because Singaporeans are comfortable with computers but “particularly vulnerable to scams,” as FT put it.
Like other Asian countries, and indeed many developed nations around the world, Singapore is grappling with low fertility rates and an aging population – and like other countries, it has discovered that merely offering subsidies for childbirth is not enough to reverse the decline.
“In 2025, Singapore’s total fertility rate fell to 0.87 births per woman, from 0.97 in 2024 and well below the population replacement rate of 2.1.,” the Washington Post noted.