Going against stereotype, Microsoft's MSN Singapore took matters of the heart into its own hands in a town struggling to find romance. The portal hijacked the city's largest shopping and entertainment destination, Suntec City Mall in a bid to smash Guinness Book of World Records for the largest-ever heart bouquet - all in time for Valentine's Day.
Who knows whether MSN's bouquet, measuring 40-feet, did eventually beat the world record of 70,000 flowers? It's going to be a messy counting job for someone.
Still, even if MSN doesn't make the Guinness cut, its efforts to play Cupid must have at least won it brownie points with a Government desperate to boost the falling birth rates. So desperate that in this city of campaigns - don't litter, be courteous, speak Mandarin etc - a new one was launched: the month-long Singapore Romance campaign. It's all part of the effort to encourage Singaporeans to fall in love, get married and start a family.
One romantic took the message to heart and proposed to his sweetheart while standing bang in the middle the MSN bouquet.
As for the rest of the city's singletons, love is nothing but a four-letter word. Rival Yahoo found in its survey that half of Singapore's population spent Valentine's day alone. There's more: 43 per cent of Singaporeans felt their love lives 'don't exist', while 26 per cent said it 'could be better'. Only 30 per cent said they were satisfied that their love life was 'going great'.
But, what's especially worrying is that 48 per cent of Singaporean men couldn't define 'romance'.
But the Government is hopeful that private sector firms like MSN will help inject some passion back into workaholic Singapore.In fact the Government has even established fertility resorts off Singapore for couples too shy to get in touch with their sensual sides.
