Listening to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's National Day Rally two weeks ago, my thoughts were not so much on babies but something more 'upstream' - falling in love and getting married.

As a kid in an all-boys school, I was horribly nerdy and there were really only two things that mattered to me.

One was turning in my homework on time and scoring well in exams and tests. The other was buying music magazines and listening to records after school with a bunch of close friends.

To make things worse, I had a medical condition that meant that I could not play any sports throughout my secondary school years.

Confined to the sidelines during PE lessons, I was a willowy boy who was all long hair, buck teeth and thick glasses.

It did not really occur to me, let alone matter, that I was totally unattractive to the opposite sex.

The only time I came into contact with girls was when I went for cathechism classes in church on Sunday mornings. My family lived in a three-room flat in Holland Drive so we ended up going to St Ignatius Church off Farrer Road.

The church was located in a fairly well-to-do area, so the girls in class were typically rich, brash and confident.

Or at least they seemed that way to me. And a bunch of them 'ruled' the classroom.

I dreaded those lessons. For that one hour a week, I felt like such a wallflower. I didn't have the wit or charm that seemed to come easily to the more good-looking boys.

One day, the girls finally turned their attention on me.

In the middle of the lesson, they looked my way, whispering and giggling to each other. One of them scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it to me.

I unfolded the note, which read: 'You really, really should comb your hair!'

A loud burst of giggling erupted from the girls and I turned red. I panicked, wondering what on earth I should do.

After what seemed like a lifetime, I took out my pen, wrote a response and passed the scrap of paper back to them.

Utterly defeated, I had written: 'Thank you very much.'

Eventually, of course, I learnt to co-exist with girls, befriending them and later dating them.

For me, the turning point was when I switched from a pure science to a humanities course in junior college. There were just six guys in a class of 24, so I had no choice but to get over my inhibitions quickly.

And when I went overseas to university, I also found that there was no room for shyness in the mixed student accommodation I stayed in.

Crushes, break-ups, surprise sleepovers and other such scandals were part of a tableau that everyone was familiar with and these were endlessly discussed.

Consequently, it was in these formative years that I learnt important life lessons about love and sex, the importance of grooming and self-image, the fleetingness of some relationships and the magical permanence that marked others.

I was lucky because things could have turned out very differently.

I could have stayed in the predominantly-male science stream and hung out mainly with my guy friends.

I could have gone to a local university here where living in a hostel isn't compulsory. I might have avoided mixing with girls altogether, kept to myself and gone home straight after lectures and classes every day.

This isn't so hard to fathom considering Singapore's achievement-oriented school system.

Both parents and students see exams, degrees and diplomas as essential parts of a child's education process.

Boy-girl relationships, on the other hand, aren't compulsory at all. In fact, they are messy and distracting, and are best avoided.

The result is that it's actually quite okay to be uncool (and unattractive to the opposite sex) in local schools and universities.

In many Western school systems, these nerds and geeks are outcasts. In Singapore, they're just 'focused'.

Now this, of course, might be perfectly all right, if not for the fact that the nation is waging a desperate campaign to get people to marry early and have more babies.

If people didn't have the time or inclination to learn how to interact properly with the opposite sex in school, how much opportunity would they have when they are working at full-time jobs that leave them exhausted every day?

And the older people get, the more set in their ways they become. It becomes harder for them over time to change themselves and accept another human being into their lives.

So you can enhance matchmaking services for working adults to make them cheaper and more widely available, but this won't necessarily mean more socially inept singles will get hitched.

To put it plainly, there is no way of getting round the problem. If you want more people to get married, the chances are higher if they have some experience with having relationships and falling in love.

And if you want them to have relationships, you can always teach them theory in a classroom (as the Government is already thinking of doing) - but nothing beats putting boys and girls together and letting the sparks fly.

Instead of designing yet another set of marriage or procreation tax incentives, why not channel the funds to Singapore's universities so that they can build enough hostel rooms to house every student for at least one year?

Why not make it compulsory for all university students to live in mixed student quarters and within close range of the opposite sex? In fact, universities should build the cost of one-year's on-site accommodation into their fees.

It's also a fact that many of our top schools remain single-sex schools.

Why not cluster these schools by region and have boys and girls do team projects and engage in other co-curricular activities after school?

To be sure, more hearts will be set a-flutter and broken. There'll be more laughter and tears, higher highs and lower lows in the average student's life.

But they will emerge more self-aware and better equipped not just for working life, but living life.

In the many relationships that will come and go, there will be more than a few that will take root and blossom.

When I look around at my friends, I can't help but notice that it is always the high school or university sweethearts who always best fulfil the nation's baby-making ambitions.

They got married the minute they landed stable jobs, and kids followed soon after.

Now, that's the kind of certainty worth investing in.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Aug 31, 2008.