Okay im here to promote my friend, Daniel Ho's english. i think his speech really damm interesting, here goes (:

Dating: Self-discovery, finding love

When i was in Secondary 4 i asked a girl i liked out on a date, I stood in front of the whole class to do it. Ah, yes! Do you remember the time you met your significant other? The world went hazy, your eyes met across that crowded room and everything but her faded into the background, all of the sudden 'How Deep Is Your Love' by the BeeGees started playing in your mind, she smiled and roses and butterflies fluttered before your eyes. Then long walks on the beach holding hands and perfect silences filled with nothing but contentment. Do you remember?

No, you don't do you? Because dating is a difficult, horrible, tense and stressful affair. Be honest - the first time you met your other half, you fumbled over your words, sweat sprinting down your neck, and then you performed some horrific blunder that embarrassed you to your very core. I know i did. The teacher came in half way through my romantic proposal and put a stop to it before the BeeGees had even finished a verse. The shock of finding a teacher behind you, listening rapt to your professions of adoration for your first love is going to, at least, truncate your further forays into the area. Dating, bah! Emotional and physical stress to complete and already stressful day of study. Of course, it would help is relationships were just about love, a focus on that spark you feel and nothing else; but with the pressure to find that special someone Cupid has retrenched and dating agencies are gaining a foothold in the dating market. If there ever was much romance in dating, it was now completely gone. Dating is now a supervised, romantic appointment initiated by our failulre to sucessfully navigate the murky depths of finding love, and sudden;y we find multitudes of dating services popping up all over Singapore like daisies in spring.

A dating agenvy, the ultimate investigation into self-discovery. First we set up a profile introducing ourselves to the management so that those people can look for strangers for us to date:
Single 17 year old, rugged good looks, likes sushi, cycling and movies, seeks like-minded girls for friendship and maybe more.

I condense myself into 50 words or less, and the generic statement i ended up with after hours of consideration is exactly like everybody else's. My identity has been lost in a city of cliches. This done, i surrender a vital aspect of my life to an agency i do not know. I trust that the organization will have someone for me and i dont have to face the rejection of directly asking someone for a date. I end up, without any tense, embarrassing follies, with a completely compatible partner, spending 3 hours pretending to be interested in her conversation and wondering why there is no spark.

One local agency, 'Lunchactually',simply requires their customers to come down for one screening and then just show up for the date. The agency arranges everything, from the location to the 'compatible partner'. How romantic is it to know that where you are dating, is not planned by your partner but by a company out there to earn cash from love! I mean, imagine an industry built upon playing the roles of Cupid valued to be 250 million US Dollars in the States alone. It is no wonder Cupid took up the job in the first place.

Or, maybe i should just log on. There are 4 major dating websites in Singapore alone. Now i wont even need to leave the house to find someone and the distance between myself and my potential object of desire further reduces my chances that i get rejected. But, how do i know the nimble 17 year-old Emily from Serangoon is not actually 40 year-old balding Jim from Geylang?

And it is not just the person on the other side of the match who is out there to scam you. Some dating agencies also use the Internet to their advantage; agencies have been known to use made up profiles to boost their membership, also known as 'date bait'. In fact an agency in the US was sued in 2005 for 'date baiting'. The firm, matches.com, has more than 15 million members, each member paying 30 US Dollars a month. A lawsuit was filed stating that there have been occasions whereby mathces.com staff turned up for dates with the clients to prevent a loss of interest when they are unablt to find a match.

So why use agenceies at all? Are we really so shy that wew need someone to act on our behalf? One reason why people just head straight to the agency says PhD holder, Tom G. Stevens, is because they fear a rejection to their offer for a date; the impersonal nature of an agency, or the chance to hide behind a computer profile distances us from the strong emotions associated with the pain of love, the pain of rejection.

To distance us from the intense emotions of love and rejection? Isn't that what love is all about? And isn't dating supposed to be a way of finding love? To feel your heart beat faster and your tongue get tied, to know you like someone so much you cannot speak when they are around, to make mistakes in front of them - to experience stress, awkwardness and embarrassment. to laugh about it later. To fall in love. This is what makes the whole experience worthwhile. To avoid it because of a fear of rejection is to misunderstand the whole concept of love, the romanticism of risking rejection for another. the girl i asked out in front of the class and unknowingly the teacher, was mortified by my question; embarrassed at my forwardness and flattered by my complete faith in the romantic nature of love. And actually, she said yes because of these strong emotions. But she would never use dating agencies, and she would never go online to find love. If i had been completely modern in my approach then i would have missed her completely. It's the spark that sent me over to her and it was the embarrassment, and the reaction of the teacher, that gave us something to talk about on our first date.


Idk about all of you, but i think his speech was nice and rather funny as well (: so, i studied for my chemistry test and i only scored 6 out of 16. i could have passed if not for my careless mistakes -.- sucks. i swear i have to score super well for my chemistry otherwise, promoting might really be a question worth prondering already. Back to studying with charine and daniel, pictures another time (: OH btw, i think i look good with short hair, but of course is those cool type yea? show you guys the picture another time :D Tiffany, i cannot cut la otherwise when i go out with you, like 2 guys going out together, not nice (: tiffany, daniel wawnts to see you haha because i mentioned you to him alot of times, not only because you look alot like winston, and and also because the both of you have really close shopping habits (: