I am officially 25 years of age, and on my very first day of being 25, my dad wasted no time in reminding me just how old I was.
"Son ah, why haven't you found a girlfriend?"
This is the kind of question you do not want to answer at 7am in the morning when you are groggy and comatose in your dad's car on the way to NTU. But there was no letting up this time. He went on to give his usual lecture.
"When you are in uni, you have lots of choices. So you must find one, preferably in your final year before you go out to work. Once you go out, your choices will be very limited. Most of the girls will be married, or attached already."
I think he conveniently forgot that just as I have a lot of choices, so do girls. I shall now offer my oldest joke.
"Girls are like parking lots. The good ones are taken, the ones left are handicapped."
Of course, this is a gross generalisation. I know many girls who are unattached who are great people. I am inclined to put this line in because if I do not do so, I can imagine the number of girls who will make me the target of their ire.
But yes, my cause was not helped by the fact that the radio DJs on 958FM were talking about the exact same topic, which must have inspired the train of thought. They were talking about why girls and guys could not find partners. The reasons offered were chemistry, both sides being demanding, guys being huge MCPs, and a lack of choice.
Damned DJs. Couldn't they have picked another topic. This is their favourite topic precisely because they can talk till the cows come home and nobody will ever have an answer as to how the mysterious system works. They probably chose this topic because they had run out of things to say. Note how it is during the most lazy mornings (aka Mondays) that this topic trawls up most often.
For someone who studied chemistry all the way up to A levels and did well in it, you would think that he would have figured out how it works by now. But herein lies the irony. The better you are at chemistry, the less likely you are likely to be good at generating it. After all, talk about alkanes, peptide bonds and hydrolysis reactions is unlikely to make any girl look at you and think "Hey, this guy looks like somebody I can create sparks with."
As for the MCP thing, many guys are MCPs but I really don't think I am one of them. I could be wrong, but most people who know me would probably agree I'm closer to mild-mannered than chauvinistic. Or maybe girls secretly hope that guys are MCPs so they can have some way of bashing them to make themselves feel better. I honestly don't know, should I be an MCP then?
However, the lowest blow came when they suggested that people who remained unattached had "a character problem." Yes, that was precisely what they said. They were actually suggesting that not settling down and producing little terrors was a fundamental character flaw.
Terrorists have character problems. Convicts have character problems. Rapists and animal abusers have character problems. People who are single, most of the time, they are just single. Perfectly nice and honest-living people. How many people do you know that are single have character problems? Some of them are probably your best friends. In fact, sometimes it is those who are attached who have character problems.
I really wanted to throw something at those DJs at that point for suggesting something like that. It only gave my dad ammunition to suggest that I had a problem, again, something you do not want to answer at 7am in the morning, plus a minor headache now from brainspoil.
This is precisely the kind of suggestion that produces many unhappy marriages, because people give up their ideals to marry someone they don't love, out of pressure of not wanting to be classified as "having a problem." The social stigma can be quite great, and it only gets worse as you get older, evidenced by how relatives try to pair you up with random people every Chinese New Year. As such a victim, I perfectly understand it.
Really, I have many female friends. If I have a character problem, perhaps it is how I choose not to go for girls I don't feel that kind of connection for. That is not a problem, it is the right thing to do. And I don't enjoy people on radio proclaiming that I have a problem for doing the right thing.
In conclusion, the DJs suggested that the solution was to go out there, meet people, and you will find someone. Again, a wholly inconclusive answer that summed up this whole stupid topic. Most of the people whom I know are attached, they didn't find somebody who was "out there." They simply picked someone who was "around." So I have no idea where this theory even came from. I meet a ton of people from everywhere, but if you don't have something in common, it's hard to make the connection stay. I think people who have been in this situation will know exactly what I mean. For love to happen, it has to be mutual. You can meet all the people in the world, and try your very best, but if it isn't reciprocated, it doesn't matter.
To me, the answer is really simple. If you are an apple and girls like oranges, you can be the juiciest apple in the world, and it doesn't matter. And you can't be an orange because you are an apple. You could spray a coat of orange paint over yourself, but inside you are still an apple. And the most difficult thing in the world is to be someone you are not.
You just hope and pray and somebody wants apples, and until someone does, there is really no point in wondering why it isn't happening. I certainly don't think I'm ineligible, but if I listen to all these people, I might just think I am.
It only matters that I stay true to who I really am, and ignore all those people out there.