When Hazelle Teo announced her engagement to pianist James Wong in June 2025, many people were surprised as she did not share that they had been dating.
The local DJ-host, who turns 32 in April, revealed why she kept their relationship under wraps in the latest episode of The Couple’s Classroom podcast released on March 28.
Hazelle and James, 26, both decided to only go official on social media after their engagement, as she had “learnt this lesson the hard way.”
As someone who likes to share about her life, she had gone public with her previous relationship. After they broke up, however, Hazelle was left in an awkward situation.
She said: “I am not upset over the breakup or anything, we are still on talking terms… But I do feel the awkwardness when listeners or followers start to ask me what happened to my relationship…
“It was a bit difficult for me to answer. It’s so weird to tell them that we broke up… I didn’t like that feeling of having to answer to other people over my own decisions.”
Before she met James in 2024, Hazelle’s Instagram posts showed that she was dating someone who was not in showbiz.
After that experience, she decided she would only announce her engagement.
“That carries more weight… People will feel like this is a person that I want to build a life with. The public sentiment is a bit different, which is what I want. I want people to treasure [my relationship] as much as I do. I want to share this happiness with everyone and for them to feel it as meaningful as I think it is,” Hazelle explained.
James agreed with her, sharing that he believed that if they had gone public earlier, outsiders’ opinions would have clouded their judgement of their relationship.
“I want us to be able to come together as a unit to really get our foundations right before putting it out there for people to judge and to have their public opinions on this matter,” he said.
James also shared about the time when they were almost caught by a kiss cam during Hong Kong singer-songwriter G.E.M.’s Singapore concert in March 2025.
During the concert, G.E.M. sang her Cantonese song Hei Foon Nei (I Like You) onstage while a kiss cam was filming the audience.
At one point, the camera focused on Hazelle and James, showing him mouthing, “Oh my god”. The couple, who hadn’t announced their relationship then, held up their fingers in a heart sign.
James recounted that he had asked Hazelle what if they were captured by the kiss cam, and Hazelle told him that the odds of that happening were low as there were many people in the audience.
“Just as she finished saying that sentence, I looked up and my face was plastered on that screen… I was so shocked,” he said.
While they were only on the screen for about three to four seconds, James said the incident felt like an hour, and Hazelle described it as an “awkward” moment.
After the couple made their relationship public, they also had to deal with negative comments online.
Hazelle said: “They don’t really affect me too much, but I’m still afraid that it’d affect my loved ones, like our mothers who might be reading the comments or our future kids, stuff like that.”
She also shared that she doesn’t read negative comments on other platforms, saying: “The people who love us only left positive stuff on our personal platforms, and I didn’t go and read the comments on other platforms.
“So that’s a way I navigate, I don’t allow myself to indulge in those negative emotions.”
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yeo.shuhui@asiaone.com
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