On the scale of difficult things to do, navigating the world of dating and sustaining a healthy relationship over time are surely up there with persuading a 12-year-old girl that Justin Bieber did not create the universe and everything in it. Thankfully, some people know more about it than most. We rounded up the leaders in the field and presented them with some fiendishly difficult real-life scenarios. Suffice it to say that all of us can learn from their answers.
 

Meet our experts:

Dr. Martha Lee is a certified sexologist with a Doctorate in Human Sexuality and holds sex and intimacy workshops through Eros Coaching (www.eroscoaching.com), which she founded.

David Tian, Ph.D. is a leading lifestyle and dating coach in Singapore. Since 2007, he has personally coached hundreds of people to success in reaching their dating and relationship goals and now serves Singapore’s Aura Dating Academy (www.auradating.com) as head mentor.

Dr. Norman Li (www.normli.com) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Singapore Management University and is a leading scholar on human mate selection and strategies from an evolutionary perspective.

Mrs. Ivy Singh-Lim co-owns a 10-acre farm called Bollywood Veggies (www.bollywoodveggies.com) with her husband, the former CEO of NTUC Fairprice. When they decided to get married, one was desperate and the other was drunk; even so, they have been happily married for 28 years.

Violet Lim is the co-founder of lunch dating company Lunch Actually (www.lunchactually.com), as well as Eteract, Asia’s first online speed dating portal. Lim is also an established speaker, sharing tips on dating and relationships at selected seminars, workshops and even weddings.

The Real-Life Scenarios

Question 1:
After a heated argument with my boyfriend of three years, I ransacked his overnight bag and found receipts from men’s spas and gay bars. I also found pictures on his phone of him posing with a rather good-looking man. How am I supposed to react to this? Answer

Question 2:
I work in PR, which means I should know how to read women’s signals very well, right? Well, I don’t know if I’m just unlucky or if women these days are getting more complicated. Two weeks ago, I asked this girl I’d met on Twitter to watch some DVDs at my place. Halfway through a movie, I placed a hand on her thigh and she freaked out. That’s not the only time something like this has happened. A girl I’d only known for five minutes at a club asked me for coffee after a night of dancing and when I leant in for a kiss after sending her home, she snubbed me. What the hell is going on? Answer

Question 3:
My girlfriend is just the sweetest person ever. Everything’s going peachy except the sex. It took me awhile to admit this because I didn’t want to look like an asshole; I believe everything takes time. But it has been six months now! I know what the problem is—she’s lazy. She expects me to do all the work for her and just lays there like a fallen log. How do I get her to put a little more effort into sex without offending her? Answer

Question 4:
I’ve been with the same man for a year now and though it hasn’t been that long, I can safely say that I know him well. I know he’s cheating on me—I can feel it in my bones. But every time I question his whereabouts, he accuses me of not trusting him. I end up keeping my mouth shut because I feel guilty and swallow my suspicion only to have it rear its ugly head again when he acts up. Should I start spying? Answer

Question 5:
I’m a woman but I feel an intense physical attraction to my female colleague, who is married with three children. I think she feels the same way. Should I do something or would I just be causing trouble for everyone? Answer

Question 6:
One day, over breakfast, my girlfriend casually brought up incorporating something bizarre into our sexual routine. I was surprised but thought it would be fun to try, and she suggested sploshing. However, I’m not keen on the idea of eating my breakfast off her, especially when it’s, say, my favorite meal of nasi lemak and coffee. I could pretend to enjoy it but I have an extremely strong gag reflex. How do I talk to her about this? Answer

Setting up shop amid the seedy karaoke joints and noisy Korean eateries of Tanjong Pagar says something about you as a proprietor. In the case of newbie art-bookscafé space The Pigeonhole, it’s that you’re not afraid to do things differently.

Pre-loved books, furniture and fresh flowers dress an otherwise raw alcove carpeted in fire-engine red. There’s a drum set in a corner, a wooden counter displaying unconventional beers, a self-sufficient terrarium, and the entire shop is bathed in low lighting. The Pigeonhole, which recently hosted its official launch party, is the kind of hybrid establishment that you might expect off Arab Street or in Little India; not here. But this area around Duxton Hill is currently in the midst of a full-blown renaissance, and so what better place to set up an alternative space like this?

“Right now, the café is not open for business because of licensing issues. But if you come by to see the place for yourself and have a chat with us, of course we’ll serve you drinks. It’s the same when we open. I’m not going to push you to order something. If what you like is to sit down and work on your laptop with just a glass of water, we’re fine with it,” says co-owner and former lawyer Ave Chan.

Her boyfriend Rayner Lim, erstwhile film editor, explains how the space was put together. “Everything you see here, from the things we offer to the décor, reflects all the things we like. We source all the books from India and the UK. There’s no specific genre. We just show our picks to each other and agree on them.”

Their taste is certainly eclectic. On the shelves can be found Selected Works of Kim Il Sung, Vol. IV, The Book of Miso: Food for Mankind and Does Pornography Matter?—definitely not your average book titles. The owners’ eye for bargain collectibles also extends to the furniture. “This green lounge chair is a crowd favorite. We got it at The Salvation Army for $70 or $80. It’s amazing what you can find when you take the time to go to each outlet and scour their stuff,” Lim reveals. “Our friends also like the baby chairs, all bought from The Salvation Army.”

But this multi-faceted establishment is not just a place for people to hang around and sip drinks, browse books and daydream (although it’s definitely perfect for that). It also hosts events such as their Sunday Eclectica flea market (2nd and 4th Sunday of each month), Music Camp SG (Mar 19, 2pm), the ingenious Powerpoint KTV (Mar 31, 7:30pm), as well as talks co-organized with NGOs. “The key word here is ‘collaboration’,” says Lim. “We want to collaborate with event partners, not just rent the space out to them. I envision this to be a place where artists from various fields come together to meet and share ideas. We also want to participate in movements with NGOs, like in our Wednesday discussions with Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2).”

All of this was borne out of simple frustration. “I’d only been practicing for less than two years and was complaining incessantly about my job when Rayner suggested I quit,” says Chan. He asked me to think carefully about what I’d always wanted to do and this was it.”

The Pigeonhole is located at 52-53 Duxton Rd. Standard operating hours have yet to be announced. Contact them via [email protected] or through www.facebook.com/ThePigeonhole.

You can’t run fast in heels no matter how hard you try, you know. Not even Angelina Jolie, who has a trailer and works like, five minutes a day. The stuntmen in Hollywood might slow down for her but Dinesh, Uncle Cheong and Carl are not going to slow down for me! I know how they are.

New York is the city of broken dreams. I always get very horrified when I see 45-year old women still waitressing and waiting for their big gig. By my eighth or ninth year there, I was already like, “What am I doing?!”

The American mentality perpetuates self-belief so you always think that you’re going to make it. They never think that they might suck. We are always told that we suck, we’re no good and we can never do it but there they’re like, “Oh you’re great, you can definitely do it.”

People here have it too easy. They live with their parents, which means they never have to worry about their rent.

What gives you the impression that I’m a drama queen? There are a lot of actors like that but I try not to hang around them because they drive me crazy.

I have terribly stubborn, stick-straight Asian hair. It just doesn’t curl. When shooting Point of Entry, I told them, “Look, I just cannot have curly hair.” It looks good on screen and all, and I know men have this obsession with curls but it was such hell! My hair went back to being straight every two hours!

Vain men don’t do it for me. Definitely not actors because they’re all vain even if they refuse to admit it. I also don’t like people who talk a lot. I have a terrible sense of humor. What most people find funny I don’t. If you keep joking all day, it would severely annoy me.

I always thought I’d have an easier life as a guy. First of all, guys don’t have to hide behind all that makeup and high heels. Much as I love beautiful clothes, I think the whole shopping experience is traumatic. As a woman, you have to compete with everyone else in terms of appearance, which I think is a complete waste of time.

My male cousins would always bully me by doing things like throw my bag into the dustbin. And because I had to be such a guy about it I had to pretend to be okay. I was always competitive with the boys. I thought whatever they could do wasn’t so much better than what I could. I never felt like I was one level below.

I hate the sound of plastic bags crinkling. My mom, who is a plastic bag fanatic, likes to pack things inside a plastic bag inside a plastic bag inside a plastic bag. When I go on a trip with her, in the hotel room, all I hear is the crinkling of plastic bags! It really drives me insane.

I was vegetarian for five days. I didn’t realize that my options were so severely limited. Anyway, I did it and it’s over. How I felt throughout the experience? Very hungry.

I swam with weights under water for a film and almost drowned. I have this tendency to forget to zip my fly. My friends are the ones who always notice but I have very thick skin so it embarrasses them more than it embarrasses me.

How do you feel about Congratulations?
My favorite thing about it is that we really captured what it felt like to record as a side piece band in California and it still takes me to that moment. It’s the first time I’ve ever been involved in something, finished it and felt like I totally nailed it. I was a lot happier with this one.

So it’s a lot different than when you finished Oracular Spectacular?
When we finished that, it was more like, “thank goodness it’s over.”

We heard you guys wanted to call the second album Congratulations even before it was finished. Do you reckon you made the right choice?
Yeah, I think so. A lot of people were saying that it wouldn’t be a commercial success like the first album. It’s cool when good pop music becomes successful but I don’t think that’s the end goal for it. If being popular happens, it happens. It’s more about making music we like. I think we made a good album. I like it.

Your title track has a sort of mournful sound to it. And it’s dedicated to pop culture? Tell us more about that.
That song is most obviously about us as a band. The music and lyrics were written when we were pretty disillusioned about touring. We were sort of burnt out after finishing the first album. It was kind of depressing, I guess. A word that describes it would be “jaded." But it’s fun performing that song now because our attitude is so different.

A lot of us here are catching you live for the first time. What can we expect?
It's basically just us standing there playing our instruments. It’s not very theatrical music; it’s more about playing the music well as a live band. We have a friend of ours doing digital stuff on screen behind us, which is really cool. It feels really neat to get wrapped in the whole audio-visual thing.

What's the craziest crowd you've ever played for?
The show we just played in Argentina was right up there. We played a show on a huge beach and there were like 30,000 people or something. It felt like a real rock concert. People were going crazy.

Tell us about life at home.
I like New York—it’s a huge city and I hadn’t lived in a big city before I moved here. It’s so big that you kind of have to find your own smaller version of New York. You can’t really deal with the whole city all at once. My life here is simple and I can live it anywhere. I have my apartment set up like home the way I like it and I pretty much don’t leave.

Don’t miss MGMT & The Whitest Boy Alive on Mar 24, 8pm at Suntec International Convention & Exhibition Hall 603, Suntec City, 1 Raffles Blvd., 6337-2888. $138 from Sistic.

Run350 (Apr 17, Singapore)
Thankfully, this isn’t the ultra-endurance event it sounds like. Rather, it’s a 10k run that promotes the notion of reducing the global carbon footprint to a more sustainable 350 parts per million, with a portion of the proceeds also going to the Garden City Fund’s Plant-A-Tree program. You’re quite literally running for the future of mankind. No pressure, though. Register for $25-35 at www.run350.com by Mar 20.

Borneo International Marathon (May 1, Malaysia)
Runaway to one of the region’s top holiday destinations, Kota Kinabalu. The scenic town makes the perfect backdrop for a half or full marathon and this world renowned race slots in between the famed Penang and Singapore Marathons to keep all you runners in top racing condition. Register for MYR15-110 (S$6-46) at www.borneomarathon.com by Apr 23.

The Great Wall Marathon (May 21, China)
Widely regarded as one of the world’s toughest regular marathons, this is your chance to put your training to the test by attempting to overcome the 5164 steps of the Great Wall. Plus points: The surrounding countryside is breathtakingly scenic. Negatives: You could run up and down Bukit Timah for weeks and still not be ready. For information on race & international tour packages, log on to www.great-wall-marathon.com. (Filling up fast)

Sundown Marathon 2011 (May 28, Singapore)
All of you that grumble about running in the heat of the day here just ran out of excuses. With 10k, half- and full marathon options (the latter doesn’t even start until 10pm), it’s also a great opportunity to see the city in a different light. What with after-dark running and an F1 night race, perhaps it’s time we forget about daylight hours altogether and embrace being nocturnal. Register for $55-85 at www.sundownmarathon.com by Apr 21. (Filling up fast)

Standard Chartered KL Marathon 2011 (June 26, Malaysia)
The Big Daddy of Malaysian races. As with other Standard Chartered marathons you can be assured of a professionally run event; though previous participants have complained of having to run alongside traffic, and bemoaned the absence of spectators. Still, it’s a great warm up for the Singapore event later in the year. Register for $35-60 at www.kl-marathon.com by May 31.

Gobi March (June 26, China)
The RacingThePlanet series consists of rough country footraces at some of the most remote and exotic locations in the world. The Gobi March is one of the world’s top 10 endurance events; and at 250km, spread over seven days it’s no wonder. You’ll need to carry your own equipment and food, and be prepared for tough conditions. Still, if 21 year old Chue Zheng Yang (this year’s youngest compeititor, and a Singaporean no less) is willing to sign up, so can you. Register for US$3,300 (S$4,200) at www.4deserts.com.

Grassland Extreme Marathon (July 2, Mongolia)
Runners of all ages and levels of fitness are welcome to participate in the scenic 10km, 21km and 42km races across the sweeping Mongolian hills surrounding the city of Xiwuqi. While you’re there for the race, don’t miss the chance to absorb the traditional local culture. Stay overnight in one of their yurts, go horse riding and wrestling as well as visit famous landmarks such as the Genghis Khan Imperial City. Register for 150-300RMB (S$29-59) at www.nordicways.com by June 24.

Fuji Mountain Race (July 22, Japan)
One for the super fit, or mentally unbalanced. Scaling one of the most beautiful snow-capped peaks in the world, Mount Fuji, is certainly a nice idea; but running the 21km to the summit takes a special sort of person. Temperatures will also be below freezing. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Register for the Summit or 5th Station Race for ¥8,000-10,000 (S124-155) at www.fujimountainrace.jp by Mar 28.

What continues to shock me the most is how prudish Singaporeans are (well, the media is) in terms of censorship of sexually related material. It’s really at odds with what is otherwise a pretty worldly sort of place.

They pixilated the word “ass” as in “kick ass” on a blackboard in the background of some Jamie Oliver show I was watching on TV, yet advertise violent movies before the feature when I take my kids to the cinema. Bizarre!

I’m definitely pushier on the train here than I used to be, but I do swear a lot less. I walk slower, and therefore sweat less. I’ve lost my Australian phobia for queuing up, and have started assuming that if there’s no queue, there’s no point.

I’m also better at working out if sales promotions offer value for money, and care more whether they do.

I use acronyms more, but don’t know what they stand for. I have found myself walking around while texting; no major accidents yet though. And I lower my voice when talking about the government.

I don’t carry an iPad. I don’t really need to spend more time in the attention deficit world of screen-based media—I get too much of that anyway between my laptop and smartphone (I need to own up to an Xbox also, I guess).

I prefer to be less connected and spend more time reading a paper book, cooking something or trying to get some sort of exercise.

If I could, I would produce either a TV series or a video game rather than write a book. I reckon the best kind of storytelling is a drama series a la HBO. Sustaining characters and stories over 10 hours of content per series really gives depth and detail that is substantial and satisfying, as well as a depth of involvement that’s very immersive.

People who use the guru word, or even allow someone else to use it about them really make me cringe! Brand gurus seem to be a dime a dozen, and the implication that there is some kind of secret enlightenment that only the guru can offer devalues the significance that brands can have.

The bullshit factor in this industry is very high. So many people claim expertise in “brand,” and most of them confuse having something useful to offer with buzzwords, a clever PowerPoint deck and a punchy insight or two—normally something to do with digital media or what makes Gen X/Y/Z tick.

When it comes to first impressions, if you look like a buttoned-up suit then order a Pina Colada, that would get a laugh out of me. If you look like a tattooed skate punk, then a cup of tea might be a nice counterpoint. Just not a Diet Coke. That’s a drink with zero credibility in my books!

I stay curious and fresh by pushing myself into new things. No good brand is static, and people are just the same. Having a predictable spiel isn’t good—you need an unfolding narrative, not a worn-out one-liner.

Happiness is a successful new business pitch in the afternoon, followed by a dinner out with the family, including a nice bottle of pinot!

The buzz: Pilates is widely known to alleviate aches and pains but the Pilates Fitness Studio is among the first in Singapore to customize specific fitness programs.
The vibe: This clean, no-frills space provides little distraction from your workout— always a good thing. There are no gimmicks here—just rows of mats and Reformers set against a mirrored backdrop. It’s all a Pilates studio should be.
The goods: If your main concern is weight loss, you’ll be doing more high intensity reps in each session, focusing on core strengthening and improving your posture. Representative Candice Chin claims you’ll be able to see marked changes especially around the belly, butt and thighs after the first few sessions. There are also programs for golfers and runners, focusing on enhancing the body’s mechanics to increase strength and flexibility, and reduce the risk of common sports-related injuries. And then there’s the Pilates Jumpboard class, an advanced workout session for hardcore Energizer bunnies. A 55-minute Pilates Junkie class (group classes on the Reformer) costs only $13.50—among the cheapest in town.
Why you’ll be back: You don’t want to pay for a one-on-one but you don’t want to do the reps everyone else is doing either. Here, you can work out according to an individual program while enjoying the high level of motivation a group fitness session offers. It’s a win-win situation.

434 Telok Blangah Rd., 9184-7622, www.singaporepilatesfitness.com. No fixed opening hours, appointment-based.