‘God sent me someone who wasn’t my type’: why this line set off a national debate

If you’ve been scrolling through Singapore TikTok or Reddit recently, you’ve probably already seen (or at least heard) of this. A girl named Sharmaine Lee posted something on Instagram titled “What if God sends you someone who isn’t (exactly) your type?”, and within days it had somehow become the internet’s favourite thing to have an opinion about.

The post that started it all

Here’s the gist: her boyfriend ticks basically every box she’s ever wanted in a partner. He’s kind, and he’s the type who actually listens when she talks. However, when it comes to his physical appearance, she noted that he wasn’t quite “her type.” By her own account, he only checked one physical box (his fit body, if you’re curious).

Now, what made the post resonate, at least initially, was how openly she wrote about the internal tug-of-war that followed. She admitted she couldn’t get past the physical attraction gap at first, even though she knew, deep down, that character was supposed to matter more. That admission spiralled into self-doubt and she started to wonder if she was being too materialistic, too shallow, too caught up in appearances to appreciate a genuinely good partner. Eventually, she turned to prayer, and over time, she said she stopped fixating on what he lacked physically and started noticing how well his character complemented hers.

Wholesome, right? Turns out, half the internet did not agree.

Why the backlash was instant

Over on Reddit (r/SingaporeRaw), people were not having it. Comments ranged from calling the whole thing “cringe” to outright pitying the boyfriend, with several arguing he deserved better than being someone’s compromise.

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Even content creators like Dewy Choo weighed in publicly too, essentially saying that if you’re not fully happy with someone, you should let them go so they can find someone who’ll appreciate them properly.

And naturally, because this is the internet, the discourse quickly spiralled into a full-blown meme cycle online for many users.

Sharmaine eventually posted a follow-up acknowledging she could’ve worded things more carefully, and that she never meant to embarrass her boyfriend, even if it came across that way. Her Instagram has since gone private, though the original post continues to circulate, screenshotted and reshared across group chats and comment sections.

But was it actually a red flag?

Was this genuinely a red flag, or did the internet just overreact? To find out, we asked Dr Annabelle Chow, a clinical psychologist at Annabelle Psychology, to unpack what’s actually going on beneath the discourse, and surprisingly her answers make a strong case for rethinking the whole thing.

Attraction matters, but it’s not the whole equation

The first thing worth knowing is that attraction genuinely does matter, especially in the early stages of a relationship. It’s part of what draws two people together in the first place. But according to Dr Chow, it isn’t what keeps a relationship going long-term. The things that actually predict lasting happiness are far less glamorous: feeling appreciated, trusting a partner’s commitment, and simply not fighting all the time.

Even more surprising, she points out that the “ideal partner” most people picture in their heads doesn’t really exist in practice. Most people are quietly making trade-offs between qualities like warmth, ambition and looks, whether they consciously realise it or not. The goal was never finding someone who excels at everything, but it’s figuring out which qualities are non-negotiable, and which imperfections can genuinely be accepted.

There’s a real difference between “working on it” and settling

This is where Dr Chow draws the sharpest, and arguably most useful, line in the whole conversation. Working through a bias means staying open long enough to see whether your feelings can genuinely change as you get to know someone more deeply. Settling looks different. The feelings themselves never actually shift, but they get suppressed, tolerated, or quietly overridden out of fear, guilt or pressure.

The tell, according to Dr Chow, is whether that openness leads to real connection or to repeated self-denial. One leads to curiosity while the other just gets better at ignoring discomfort. And as she puts it, relationships built on tolerating rather than genuinely feeling rarely end well.

The backlash was never really about attraction

There’s also a theory on why this specific post blew up the way it did, and it isn’t really about physical attraction at all. According to Dr Chow, most people weren’t reacting to the fact that Sharmaine had doubts. They were imagining themselves in the boyfriend’s position, and recoiling at the idea of being loved “despite” something rather than “because of” it. Feeling genuinely and uniquely desired by a partner, she notes, is a major contributor to feeling secure in a relationship. Hence, the idea of being someone’s compromise struck a nerve.

On top of all of that, this wasn’t a private diary entry tucked away in a journal. The moment something like this goes public, the question stops being “is it okay to feel this way privately” and becomes “how would it feel if your partner said this about you online, for thousands of strangers to read.” Even if the intent was to highlight personal growth, many readers understandably focused on how the post might land for the boyfriend himself.

Is there a gendered double standard here?

Then there’s the question of gender, because let’s be real, if a man had posted the same thing, would the reaction have been the same? Dr Chow’s take is that it’s less a straightforward double standard and more a case of differing cultural expectations. Research does show that, on average, men tend to weigh physical attractiveness more heavily than women do when choosing long-term partners. Historically, women have been expected to invest more in their appearance, while men have been afforded more social value through status and achievement.

Pop culture has quietly reinforced this for decades. For instance, stories like Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame celebrate women learning to love beyond a man’s appearance, while equivalent stories asking the same of men have been far less common. So depending on who’s saying it, the same sentiment tends to land very differently. Men risk being called superficial, while women risk being called ungrateful or unable to look past looks at all. Neither reaction is entirely fair; it’s less a double standard than two very different sets of expectations colliding.

How to actually know if it’s a fantasy or a genuine incompatibility

The most useful part of the conversation, for anyone actually going through something similar, is what Dr Chow says people should be asking themselves. Not “should I be attracted to this person,” but “what is my actual, lived experience of this relationship?” Is there a genuine desire to be close to them? Is that feeling growing as emotional intimacy deepens, or is it something being endlessly hoped for rather than felt?

She also draws on an important point here: mourning the absence of a fantasy is not the same as identifying a real incompatibility. They’re two very different problems that happen to feel almost identical in the moment, and the difference matters enormously when deciding whether to stay or walk away.

Is there such a thing as being too picky?

And for anyone wondering if they’re just being too picky in general, according to Dr Chow, checklists are actually pretty bad predictors of who people end up genuinely liking in real life. The qualities that seem to matter most on paper aren’t always the ones that spark real chemistry in person.

She also points to something dating apps have quietly done to modern romance: having an endless stream of potential matches to evaluate at once tends to push people into a “rejection mindset,” where the instinct becomes hunting for reasons to eliminate someone rather than reasons to give them a genuine chance. Someone who seems unusually selective while endlessly swiping, she notes, may simply be responding to the environment rather than revealing a fixed personality trait.

Her advice isn’t to lower standards. It’s to separate the standards that genuinely protect wellbeing like respect, trust, and real attraction, from the preferences that are really just protecting an idealised version of a person that exists only in someone’s head.

The bigger picture

Going in, the easy take was to side with the internet on this one. But maybe the real question was never whether Sharmaine was wrong to feel this way, but it was whether she was being honest with herself about it. And if Dr Chow’s right, that’s a far harder question to answer than a Reddit thread ever has room for.