Singapore Has More Single Adults Than Ever. Tinder's Data Explains Part of Why.

Let's start with the number that surprises people who don't live here.

Roughly 31.5% of adults in Singapore are currently single, and the number of singles in the city-state has climbed for two decades straight. This isn't a small, quiet island of people who can't find dates. It's one of the more prominent singlehood hotspots in Asia, sitting alongside cities that are having the exact same conversation Tinder just had with its own investors.

Here's the detail that matters more than the headline number. Only around 24% of Singapore residents say they've ever used a dating app at all, and even among Tinder's own users in Singapore, the largest single group, 61%, describe themselves as "social daters" simply looking to meet new people or make friends, not necessarily romance. Singapore isn't swiping less because people aren't interested in dating. It's swiping differently, because a huge share of the population never fully bought into the premise that an app was where a relationship would come from in the first place.

Tinder's own numbers back this up globally

Match Group, the company behind Tinder, spent its most recent earnings call telling investors that the company's growth plan barely involves the app anymore. Tinder's direct revenue came in at $457 million for the quarter, down slightly year over year, with monthly active users down 7%, the slowest decline the company has posted in over two and a half years, but a decline nonetheless.

The company's answer was Events, an in-app feature surfacing real, in-person things to do, trivia nights, pottery classes, group hikes, letting singles show up together instead of messaging into the void. In the Los Angeles pilot, 71% of users between 18 and 24 engaged with it, and just over half came back the following week. Tinder is racing to expand the feature to 26 cities by the end of this month and 75 by year's end, though its rollout so far has stayed concentrated in the US and Europe.

Tinder's own Chief Product Officer said it plainly: when people already have something in common, an actual connection comes more naturally, and that's what keeps a dating app relevant at all. Singapore's own matchmaking industry, quietly one of the more established in Asia, has been building on that exact premise for over two decades.

Why Singapore's version of this problem is different

Violet Lim has spent 21 years running Lunch Actually Paktor Group, watching Singapore's dating culture shift from in-person introductions to full swipe culture and, more recently, back toward something more deliberate. Her read on the biggest obstacle facing singles here isn't a lack of options or a lack of interest. It's time. Singapore's long working hours and career-first culture leave many professionals with genuinely little bandwidth to prioritise dating at all, on an app or off one.

That's a distinct problem from a city with a supply shortage or a bad gender ratio. Singapore has plenty of eligible singles. What it doesn't have is much spare time for any of them to sort through options, build a profile that reflects who they actually are, or sustain the kind of slow-burn messaging that dating apps tend to reward. Add the added layer of family and societal expectations around marriage timelines, and dating in Singapore becomes less about meeting someone and more about fitting meeting someone into a life that's already full.

That combination, career pressure, time scarcity, and a swipe culture that a large share of residents were never fully sold on, is exactly the environment where curated, human-led introductions tend to outperform an app, because someone else is doing the time-consuming filtering work a busy professional doesn't have hours in the week to do themselves.

More events isn't automatically the fix here

Here's the distinction worth sitting with. Tinder Events puts strangers in a room around a shared activity and hopes a few of them click, and for cities with real supply problems, that's a meaningful improvement over a photo grid. But Singapore's core constraint isn't supply, and it isn't even really discovery. It's time and intentionality. Adding another event to browse doesn't solve the problem for someone who barely has an evening free this month, let alone this week.

A matchmaker in Singapore is solving a narrower, more specific version of the problem: not "here's an event, go meet someone," but "here is one specific, vetted person, already filtered for compatibility, on a night you actually have free." That's a meaningfully different offer for a population working the hours Singapore's professionals tend to work.

Tinder is finally building, at scale, a rougher version of something Singapore's matchmaking industry has quietly understood for two decades. The instinct, that real, curated connection beats endless scrolling, is right. What's still missing from the app version is the part where someone with real local expertise has already done the filtering before a single evening gets spent on it.

If Singapore's problem is too little time to sort through your own options, the fix probably isn't another event to add to your calendar. It's someone who already narrowed the list for you.