Last month, my friend Isabelle rejected a man after two dates by saying, very calmly, “He has strong seed-stage energy but I don’t see a path to profitability.”

Nobody at the table laughed.

Not because it wasn’t funny. Because we all understood exactly what she meant.

Welcome to dating in Singapore, where the men are well-groomed, over-scheduled, and increasingly discussed by my friend group as if they are early-stage ventures requiring due diligence. Somewhere between our promotions, our investment podcasts, and our collective emotional exhaustion, we appear to have lost the ability to describe men in normal romantic terms.

Nobody says, “He’s sweet.”

We say, “The fundamentals are there.”

Nobody says, “He’s kind but confusing.”

We say, “Mixed signaling in a volatile market.”

Nobody says, “He texts like he’s interested and then disappears for 36 hours.”

We say, “Poor operational consistency.”

This is not healthy, obviously. But it is extremely efficient.

My friends and I are in our late twenties and early thirties, which means we are old enough to want seriousness and young enough to still occasionally confuse it with branding. We work in consulting, tech, finance, design, and vaguely strategic jobs with titles our parents still don’t fully understand. We have calendars, tote bags, lower back pain, and opinions about matcha quality. We also, unfortunately, have a shared language for men that now sounds like a venture capital panel.

The categories are getting more refined.

There are men with excellent decks but no product. These are the ones with beautiful dating-app profiles, elite schools, thoughtful playlists, and exactly zero emotional follow-through in real life.

There are men with strong founder energy and terrible governance. Charismatic. Visionary. Mildly intoxicating over drinks. Catastrophic in any structure requiring accountability.

There are men who are clearly overvalued by the market. Usually handsome, professionally adjacent to finance, and operating on confidence unsupported by performance.

Then there are the dangerous ones: men with great early traction. The first three weeks are seamless. He books restaurants. He asks questions. He remembers things. He uses words like “intentional.” Then suddenly you discover he has unresolved ex-girlfriend debt, no emotional cash flow, and an alarming dependence on female labor to maintain basic stability.

I realize this makes us sound cold. I prefer precise.

Besides, men have been using market logic on women for centuries. They just called it “eligibility.”

What makes our version different is that it’s less about social rank and more about risk management. We are not sitting around asking whether someone is marriage material in the old-fashioned sense. We are asking whether he has hidden liabilities. Whether his behavior is scalable. Whether he is genuinely stable or just well-lit. Whether we are looking at long-term upside or a beautifully packaged burn rate.

One of my friends keeps a running classification system in her Notes app.

Categories include:

• high charisma low retention
• premium positioning weak empathy
• emotionally liquid
• too much founder syndrome
• strong family values suspiciously under-tested
• good unit economics

The phrase “good unit economics,” in this context, means he is attractive, responsive, employed, and not secretly deranged. Which, in this city, is apparently a unicorn metric.

Singapore may be especially good at producing this kind of dating language because it is already a city fluent in evaluation. Everything here feels measured somehow: schools, condos, careers, neighborhoods, trajectories, skin, salary, rest. Efficiency is so deeply embedded in the culture that even romance starts sounding like a portfolio review if you leave ambitious women alone with espresso for too long.

And to be fair, the men are not helping.

Too many of them present like polished consumer products. Good shirt. Clean haircut. Calm voice. High-functioning calendar. You think, ah, mature. Then by date four you realize you are dealing with a man who has outsourced his emotional development to podcasts and can only discuss vulnerability as a concept.

That is not a boyfriend.

That is a white paper.

Of course, every once in a while, someone surprises the market.

A man who seemed boring turns out to be deeply funny. Someone with awkward messaging is much better in person. Somebody you initially flagged as low-growth and operationally stiff turns out to be kind, reliable, and emotionally solvent — which is less sexy as a pitch, perhaps, but far more compelling over time.

This is the flaw in our whole system. Love is not actually a startup. It does not reward optimization in the way we pretend it should. The best people are often not the best performers in early rounds. Some men are not scalable because they are, in fact, human. Some of the most promising ones come with weird packaging. Some “high-value” men are just expensive to maintain.

Still, I don’t see us dropping the language anytime soon.

It is too useful. Too funny. Too revealing.

Just last week, I asked a friend how her Hinge date went.

She sipped her drink and said, “Honestly? Good market presence. Terrible emotional liquidity. I’m not moving forward.”

And I knew exactly what she meant.

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Chloe Tan is a Singapore-based writer in her early 30s who covers ambition, dating, status, and the strange ways professional language leaks into modern life. Her work for The Asian Diaries explores how urban Asians perform desire, self-protection, and adulthood in cities built around optimization.