Understory was built on a simple belief — Dating and Matchmaking Services in Singapore deserves a clinical foundation it has never had.
A relationship therapist trained in multiple modalities including attachment science and the Gottman Method, reading every applicant personally before a single room is built.
About Understory
“Most of us have mistaken attraction for compatibility. The heart is not always wise. It feels a pull and calls it destiny.
Meeting people was never the hard part. The hard part is arriving into something we were never shown how to tend. Never taught what a real thing needs. Never given a name for what we were even looking for.
And so we do what the unguided do. We reach for what is green and close. We touch blades of grass and linger there — alive to their softness, blind to what they cannot become.
We wait, as though wanting were enough. As though two people pressing close might somehow fuse into something rooted.
It is not how growing works. And somewhere in us, we have always known.
No one showed us where the seeds were. No one left a shovel at the door.
And so we did what the age asked. We gave our wanting to the algorithm and trusted it the way our ancestors trusted fate.
But fate had mystery. This had only the promise of the next one. The faces, the conversations, the almost-connections that dissolved before they became anything real. And somewhere in the accumulation of it all, love — that thing that once made us feel we could bear anything — lost its power to compel us. We were not broken. We were just worn through.
You arrive with longing.
We arrive with the garden already in mind.”
Who Is Reading Your Application
Rene Tan is a registered counsellor with a Masters of Counselling from Monash University.
Attachment theory is the foundation of her clinical practice. Her training extends across various modalities, including the Gottman Method — one of the most extensively researched frameworks in relationship science and other couples counselling modalities. She maintains an active private practice in Singapore at Somatic Attachment Therapy, working with individuals on the relational patterns that shape their lives.
What she kept seeing in her practice was this:
People who were exhausted. Not because they lacked the desire to connect, but because the process had worn something away. The ghosting. The almost-connections. The relationships that formed not out of genuine fit but out of fear, or loneliness, or the simple relief of finally being chosen by someone — anyone. She watched good people get together for the wrong reasons and pay for it slowly over years.
She also saw something else. Underneath the fatigue and frustration, most of these people were not the problem. They were enough. More than enough. What they had never been given was a way to meet people that went beyond profiles and small talk, or a real opportunity to meet someone whose qualities actually matched theirs and are compatible in the ways that hold
What she kept noticing clinically is that people are drawn to what feels familiar to their nervous system rather than what is actually good for them. For many, pursuit was how love was learned. The chase, the uncertainty, the person who keeps you slightly off-balance — these do not feel like warning signs. They feel like love itself.
She has spent years in the therapy room watching people recognise — sometimes for the first time — the difference between what feels exciting and what actually holds. That distinction is what she carries into every Understory evening.
Rene speaks personally with every Understory applicant. She reads every application. She builds every cohort. She facilitates every evening. And she handles every introduction herself, privately, because she believes that the care taken at each step is not a feature of the process. It is the process.
Understory is her attempt to bring what she knows into a space where it has never really existed. She does not know everything it will become. She knows why it needs to exist. She is not interested in volume. She is interested in getting it right.
Rene has written about these patterns in the Understory Insights: on why people keep attracting the wrong person, on what anxious and avoidant attachment actually look like, and on what your parents' marriage may still be teaching you.