You want a date?

Please, don't use Kopi Date. 

TLDR? They are a premium, white-glove version of your Tinder, Hinge, CMB. If you can't get matches there, the $540 may guarantee you meeting someone, but it won't guarantee you having a relationship with that person. You're better off developing the skills that allows you to grow relationships.

You've been warned. 

In my early review of this service, I used it once and wrote effusive praise (which you can read below.) But after the 7th date, I realised there were two main problems. 

1. They push you out of the door for the first date. But they do not seem to ensure that it's well curated. For example, despite telling them that I exercised every day, I was 'curated' with people that did not seem to place fitness as a big priority. If you'd like a sample size, 5 of 7 were not ladies I was physically attracted to. And yes, physical attraction definitely doesn't last. But it matters for that initial spark that makes you eager, to want to meet them again. And no, this isn't just about being sexually attracted, but about being interested and willing to take the conversation forward. 
2. Their rating system of stars, will make you feel like a Grab driver. 
3. Yes, they can be moderately better than swiping on dating apps, but I'd still encourage you to perhaps just try to grow the balls to meet people organically, and ask them out. Go to church, conferences, learning workshops, and have the courage to ask. Paying $540 may help you ease some of that pain, but what would ultimately help you in sustaining a relationship isn't easiness. It's courage, conviction and commitment. If you don't develop the courage to ask, how would you eventually take the relational risks to repair ruptures in relationships?

You can read more about the honest (bad) review here.

If you want a better dating service, try Table for Two. The founder there, Joanne doesn't try to sell you. All she wants is to match you for life. She doesn't even take upfront money until both sides agree. 

The initial good review (that later turned bad)

There’s a better dating agency in town.

And it’s not called Lunch Actually.

Screw them, actually.

Sign up for Lunch Actually and their business development representatives will message you over WhatsApp, call you multiple times, until you reply and tell them you’re not interested.

It’s horrid.

Don’t even try them.

You’ve been warned.

Someone recommended Kopi Date to me.

And having nothing to lose (okay I did have to pay $540), I went for it.

Hate texting? Try this.

Kopi Date has an interesting proposition. They style themselves as the anti-texting, anti-swiping app.

I hate texting.

And you probably do.

If you take a step back and look at the whole idea of texting your dates, you might think of it as pretty dumb.

Come on.

Do you really like telling your date your day?

Do you like writing essays over Telegram, or the dating app?

Especially when meeting is so much faster, and more efficient?

Then we must ask ourselves why we still do this.

One. Because our dates ask us to. Some dates tell you that they prefer to know someone over text before they commit to an in-person date.

You must be kidding me.

How much can you find out about someone from texting? And who’s to say he’s not just a weirdo that can text well?

Second - because we put up with it.

We think that as a result of the modern day context of text-driven relationships, we have to play to that game.

That’s why Kopi Date (kinda) works

If you look at their philosophy, it does work for people who don’t enjoy texting and find it a real drain.

Deep down, it probably does the same for you.

But you’ve put up with it because you think there’s no other option.

There is.

From the get-go, there is actually much more thought that goes into the experience than I first imagined.

They actually have a barrier to entry.

They say that not everyone is accepted into the community, and I think they do curate the community based on the initial responses you give.

Secondly, before you even spend a single cent (but you’ve already inputted your credit card details), they spend 30 minutes trying to understand

1. Your previous experiences
2. Who you are
3. What you like

It makes you more open

What’s crucial for me is that this made me a little more open to meeting someone I would traditionally not meet.

We have our biases. Those biases would affect the way you choose.

And Kopi Date engineers the serendipity that can sometimes be missing from our usual adult, working lives.

If you look at the traditional dating app, people use two approaches.

1. They swipe everyone so that they match with as many as possible (one person once told me that he’d swiped at least 500,000 women in Singapore across 4 different dating apps)
2. They pick and choose based on looks (and later the responses).

After all, there’s genuinely little else you can pick from.

The date day is well-organised

Frankly, I was scared.

And I’m normally worried about meeting new people.

Especially when my previous role as a social worker put me regularly in the face of angry, upset people who might scream at me.

But this blind date made me scared.

They did give me a heads-up 9 days in advance of date day.

The day before, there was a reminder email to tell me about the upcoming date.

And on date day, there was even a guide.

That told me not to talk about previous dates.

Oops.

I had complained about so many previous dates, so many times.

Is it too expensive?

If you compare to your free dating app, $45 per date, across 12 months, totalling $540 is a little crazy.

But if you think harder, $540 is really not a lot to pay for a partner.

I mean - well, if you put it that way, yes $540 is not a lot.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not objectifying or placing a dollar value on a wife, or partner.

But you get the idea. $540 is really not that much for (hopefully) lifelong happiness.

And if you compare the usual time you would spend on a dating app swiping, texting, and we average that out to 1 hour a day, is 30 hours a month worth more than $45?

I think so.

That’s why it is quite cheap (for me).

The hardest part?

It might just be the waiting. In a world of instant gratification, where you have “20 bagels!” screaming at you daily from your dating app, it might seem stupid to wait for a slow, curated date where they find a good match for you from the supply and demand of ladies, and men they have on bank.

At least I’d hope so.

It took 3 weeks for me to get the first date. And 6 weeks before I met the next one.

The waiting time made me go through all kinds of self-doubt, such as whether I was good enough.

But honestly, I appreciated the wait.

It does take the pressure off you needing to text, or swipe in order to find a date.

Or the times when you get rejected by yet another person you meet at an event, to ask for a number, only to get a ‘no’.

But we are unfortunately in an economy today where the real-world, spontaneous, connection you want just doesn’t happen that easily.

We live in a time where people expect that deliveries are one-day, where you can stream immediately what you want, and that the next show you pick, is unfortunately, the best yet that you get.

And this dating game, unfortunately is not that simple. It requires patience, and it requires little expectations of the other party, but the highest, ever, expectations of yourself.

That even when people reject you, you still believe, deep down, that you have something worth loving within you.