The answer to that lies with 28-year-old Bernadeth who’s single, and enjoying Chickenjoy with her cousins, Eden and Christine, when I approach them for a chat. Given that Eden’s a 34-year-old single mother while Christine’s a 41-year-old married mother, Bernadeth’s the most available bachelorette of the three Filipino domestic workers.

But Bernadeth doesn’t think about finding a boyfriend in Singapore, “Because mostly the guys here are not interested.”

“Yeah you can see, most of the guys here are naughty—I’m not saying that you are, but most, right?” she says as she glances around the area, eliciting laughter from the rest of us.

Bernadeth isn’t hopeful of her chances with local Singaporean men either.

“I don’t know if they will like me!” she says, her self-deprecating tone drawing further guffaws.

“She’s trying but it’s difficult. Sometimes relationship is very difficult to find,” Eden chimes in.

“I’m not picky but—I’m just securing myself, yeah like that,” Bernadeth explains.

When it comes to love, these ladies value commitment and serious engagement. But the men they encounter often don’t have these in mind. Even if Bernadeth were to meet someone while out, she’d ignore him.

“They want to say ‘can I get your number’, they talk like that, they don’t engage.”

After all, she’s been the target of unwanted inappropriate propositions.

Men have said to her, “I give you fifty, come with me, I give you fifty”.

While she’s heard of other foreign workers meeting through Facebook, she’s doubtful of the sincerity of such relationships.

“True love haha, they say true love, but I don’t know,” Bernadeth muses.

Romance, however, isn’t completely absent from her life. When I ask if she’s tried Tinder, she talks animatedly about her encounter with a German man she recently matched with. They had only met once, in the company of Eden and Christine.

Smiling effervescently, Bernadeth recounts, “I thought that guy will not come because we are a lot, my friends. But he’s very brave, we still met. And that time, rain was heavy and there was thunder but he still come.”

The story quickly takes a sour turn: “And then I block him because you know, he’s high … person like that, and I’m just … working in a house like that, so I feel like I’m down, something like that,” she confesses.

She quickly brushes it off, but I can only imagine how painful it must be to come to that kind of conclusion about your own romantic prospects.

Further elaborating on what she expects of a potential boyfriend, Bernadeth says she would simply want him to go to church with her, and meet her family and friends.

As for physical intimacy, the ladies agree that there’s a lack of space and time to have that with a boyfriend.

This is despite the fact that I’d argue that casual and purely physical relationships are a matter of individual preferences and priorities; it’s easy enough for those who want it to find the time and space in the sanctuary of budget hotel rooms.

Ultimately, Bernadeth is rather level-headed about her singlehood: “I can live without guy, because long time ago I haven’t been in relationship.”

“But I know for others maybe, very difficult for them not to have a boyfriend.”

Night Scenes at Desker Road