If you are fortunate enough to live in a city like Hong Kong, then you know that it is the home of the brave. With hard work and dedication, you can reach many achievements and find success in your efforts.
However, working late nights and sometimes weekends can have a damaging impact on the love life of many city dwellers.
Hongkongers are increasingly finding it difficult to find love amid long office hours and a very busy schedule. More so the rising popularity and usage of dating apps like Tinder and Coffee meets bagel mean that people have reduced the quality of effort put into building meaningful relationships. After all, the next best thing is just one swipe away.
The statistics shed a better light on the situation of things concerning love and relationships: in 1986, the median age women wed was 25, while men were 28. But in 2016 women were 29 and men 31. This indicates that not only are more people living single lives, but the average age of marriage is also increasing.
Combining this piece of information with a worsening gender imbalance in the city paints a more torrid picture: the male-female ratio is now down to 852 men for every 1,000 women, particularly in the 20-39 age group.
It is also becoming more likely that some people in hong kong will either take much longer to get married or never tie the knot at all. The Women and Men in Hong Kong Key Statistics 2017 report stated that people older than 15 who have never married increased by 61% for women and 14% for men.
The grim realities of singlehood often cast a dreary shadow on the personalities of those affected. It is very easy to allow the feeling of emptiness to affect your interaction with those around you. Some people have been known to become very irritable as a result of countless hours of feeling unloved and inadequate, consequently, they project their frustrations on everyone around them: colleagues, friends, and family relatives which makes them even more undesirable.
Successful people have also been known to struggle with attracting romantic relationships. This is simply because successful people approach forming relationships the same way they would approach achieving a target, more often than not this will end up in frustration as relationships are built by learning how to connect with others rather than trying to prove to the other person that you are ‘up to the task’ of dating them.
Our advice? Take a chill pill…
While it is an awesome feeling to have someone to call your own, relationships aren’t exactly a piece of heaven. They require a lot of time and effort to nurture and can be terribly inconvenient sometimes. A clear majority of people who feel miserable because they are single do so because they think they are missing out on something. It’s the feeling of losing out that makes you think there’s something wrong.
Sometimes being single might just be the best thing for you right now, and if you don’t think so, consider the massive failure rate of marriages worldwide. 50% of marriages are destined to end in divorce, and a good portion of those who stay married do so for reasons ranging from religious beliefs or financial conditions to hanging on for the sake of their children. That being said, finding love and being in a meaningful relationship can be one of the most fulfilling experiences you could have. What is most important is being in the right space, mentally and emotionally to take on a journey that could lead to remarkable self-discoveries and experiences.
If being hooked up with someone is a way to find out new things about yourself, then surely being single is the holy grail of self-discovery. Singlehood is not entirely a bad thing when you look at it from the right perspective, as humans we are naturally engineered as social beings, therefore it is normal that we will gravitate towards other people and build different levels of relationships over time. So there’s no reason to get worked up because you are not attracting the kind of people that you want. Rather take the time to maximize the opportunities that being single presents you to explore your true essence to the fullest.
Now that you are not laden with the burden of expectations from a partner, you have the opportunity to fully explore the world through your own lens, and in the process arrive at finding yourself. It is only when you achieve this that you can identify a potential match in others. Take this time alone to indulge in wanton wanderlust and explore all the magic that is in you!
It’s Valentines’ day in a week, and all the radio channels and TV stations are soon to be bombarding you with all kinds of shindigs for the lovebirds in town and you are about to sit on your couch with watery eyes feeling like your life is such roadkill.
Well, you will not!
What you are going to do, is book a spar treat in a fancy resort for one and enjoy the ‘lovers’ day loving and treating yourself to things that please your senses. Who knows? You just might meet someone interesting and strike up an enjoyable conversation that could lead to a wild romance or even better, a deeply sensual connection. Bottom line is, keep your mind open, people have been known to find love in the most unlikely circumstances.
One other positive that comes with being single is the fact that you can stay in touch with many of your friends and even build beneficial friendships. Relationships can be a slippery slope sometimes in the sense that if you end up dating an insecure or needy person, there is a tendency that he or she will always want your attention. And there’s nothing more tumultuous than trying to keep attention-seeking lovers happy and staying connected with friends at the same time. In most cases, one has to give.
So, before you find yourself in such murky waters, why not take advantage of your current single status to mingle with as many contacts as you can and build a network of friends that can be beneficial to you sometime in the future?
Finding love can be akin to catching a bird: you never get a hold of it by chasing, you must make yourself attractive to it, then it will walk right into your hands, the same is true with love. If you really want to get hooked with your crush, you will not get them by appearing needy or being too forward. You need to inspire curiosity, to be interesting, to make the other person want to know more about you, and this cannot happen until you know more about yourself.
So you see, you’re being single is not such a terrible thing, this is your golden opportunity to pursue self-discovery, to understand yourself so that you can share the magic that is in you with that special other people.
Happy Valentine!
The Destiny Team