Choremancing: is this the best way to date – or the death of romance?

Choremancing — a portmanteau of “chore” and “romance” — sounds bleak, but you might already be doing it: folding a date into an errand you needed to do anyway. If you’ve ever walked your dog with a potential partner, that counts as a choremance. Since the dating app Plenty of Fish included it as a trend in its annual report last year, the idea has taken off.

People are going on dates at the gym, on gardening dates and even turning the weekly shop into a date. The logic is simple. Life is largely made up of grindingly mundane admin — housework, lawn-mowing, paying bills, buying bin bags and toilet rolls — so it can be sensible to see whether someone is tolerable when it comes to those tasks.

Anyone can giggle coquettishly through a night out, but what if you marry them and discover they can’t put saucepans away properly? Practically, choremancing can look like folding laundry together, spending an afternoon assembling flatpacks from Ikea, or getting someone to clean your oven while you watch a football match.

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