\n<\/p>\n
Eventually, I made a choice. I decided to stop treating our differences as a liability, and start seeing them as part of what made this relationship worth pursuing.<\/p>\n
For instance, we realised how deeply grateful we were to have the wholehearted support of both our families from the start. Not every couple navigating cultural and religious differences is afforded the same generosity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The warmth with which her family welcomed me, and mine welcomed her, turned what might have been a tense, complicated negotiation into something that felt more like a joyous expansion of love.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t lose anything of our individual families. Instead, we both gained a new, bigger family.<\/p>\n
We dated for exactly three years, three months, three weeks and three days.<\/p>\n
On Nov 30, 2025, after dating long-distance and flying back and forth, Anh Hoang and I got married.<\/p>\n
In 2025, Singapore saw 24,687 marriages \u2013 a 6.2 per cent drop from 2024, marking the third consecutive year of decline.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When I tell people here that my wife is Vietnamese, a free-thinker, and that we met at a sporting event in a foreign country, it\u2019s not unusual to see surprise flicker on their faces \u2013 a furrow of the brow, a widening of the eyes, a downturned mouth. The unspoken question of how two people so different on paper ended up together.<\/p>\n
We live in a society that is extraordinarily open in many ways. And yet, when it comes to love and marriage, we can be remarkably cautious.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I watch my peers in the dating pool filter potential partners by race, by religion, by educational background, by income bracket. We wait for the perfect mix of the perfect conditions: stable career, sorted finances, the \u201cright\u201d timing, whatever that means.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We are so careful that sometimes, I suspect, we filter out the very things that could surprise us.<\/p>\n
I was doing the same because I, like so many young adults, thought that\u2019s what I was supposed to do \u2013 follow the recipe for perfect results. Then I went to Vietnam for a triathlon event, stood in a buffet line, and had a conversation with a stranger.<\/p>\n
No algorithm. No profile picture. No carefully curated list of interests. Just two people reaching for food at the same time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Eventually, I made a choice. I decided to stop treating our differences as a liability, and start seeing them as part of what made this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-headlines","wpcat-2611-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/56514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}