“Okay, my legs are actually starting to feel soft,” Sheila laughs when the wicker basket we’re in — it’s about the size of a small car — starts to float slowly. The basket is divided into four sections and the two of us with our photog are in one while the other 15 passengers are split into the other three. We try not to think about how our lives are literally hanging by a thread, okay fine, not thread, but steel cables. “Actually, D was worried about the hot air balloon flight and didn’t want me to take it but no way am I going to miss this,” Sheila smiles when she thinks of her 37-year-old beau, whom she famously met on a dating app. They had dated for six months before he proposed last New Year’s Eve on a ski slope in Hokkaido.
It’s 7am now and most of the city is still asleep, not knowing that we are floating over their houses, playground, schools. With nowhere to run, I figured it’s my best chance to pry into her relationship with her husband-to-be, who works in finance. “He is very simple and very honest,” she says when I ask her what she loves about D. “‘Kind’ is a very lousy word to use to describe him but he is kind. We are both very traditional and he is very family-oriented, which is what I love about him. He’s simple in the sense that he doesn’t drink smoke, club, which I guess makes him… it’s hard to find someone like him in this day and age. He’s a breath of fresh air ’cos I was a model, where everything was very fancy. And he is so disconnected from fashion and TV, so being with him is like being in another life. He’s husband material.”
She says her fiancé has never gotten starstruck when he meets her celeb pals like Chen Hanwei and Dennis Chew. [FYI: Sheila loves that he had no idea who she was before he swiped right on her profile.] “You can tell when someone is secretly starstruck. They will casually ask about a celeb, but not him,” she says. “Sometimes he doesn’t even know who some of [my colleagues] are (laughs). You can say that he is as interested in my other friends as he is in my celeb friends.”