Name: Choremancing.
Age: About four months.
Appearance: The future of dating.
A portmanteau of “chore” and “romance”? How bleak. What if I told you that you’re probably already doing it?
Am I? Have you ever been on a date where you’ve walked your dog with a potential partner?
For the purposes of the article, let’s say yes. Aha! That’s a choremance! You’ve folded a date into an errand you needed to do anyway. You sly old choremancer, you.
Wait, that’s it? Sure it is. And ever since the dating app Plenty of Fish included it as a trend in its annual report last year, it appears to have kicked off in a big way. People are going on dates at the gym. They’re going on gardening dates. They’re even turning the weekly shop into a date.
This is so depressing. Where’s the romance? That’s the point. If you find The One, is your life going to be a glamorous nonstop procession of swanky dinners and cocktails?
I mean, hopefully yes. Get your head out of the sand. You’re destined to spend the bulk of your existence doing grindingly mundane admin. Housework. Lawn-mowing. Making sure the bills get paid. Buying bin bags and toilet rolls. When you boil it down, that’s basically what life is.
Yikes. The point is, wouldn’t it be sensible to find out whether the person you’re interested in is tolerable when it comes to this? Anyone can giggle coquettishly through a night out, but what if you marry them and discover they can’t put saucepans away properly?
That would ruin my entire life. Exactly. That’s why choremancing is so ingenious. It’s the ultimate compatibility test.
Good, because for a minute there I was worried that it was a horrible indictment of the societal pressures that have transformed love into yet another tick-box on a constantly updating to-do list. Well, yeah, that too.
Either way, I’m convinced. Where do I start? Great. Maybe you could invite someone over to fold laundry together.
Flirty, I like it. Or maybe you could both go on an Ikea trip, and spend the afternoon assembling flatpacks?
That’s a bit more of a test, but OK. Or maybe you could get them to come round and clean your oven while you watch a football match on the sofa.
I’m not sure that’s … Or, actually, how about this? You get them to look through your calendar to see if there are upcoming family birthdays, and you make them remember the dates and eventually buy presents and write cards for them. I think there’s some wrapping paper under the stairs.
Why are you just describing married life to me? Because that’s what you want, right? That’s the logical endpoint of choremance. Isn’t it brilliant?
Do say: “We jet-washed the patio together, it was so choremantic!”
Don’t say: “Coming soon: emotional labourmance.”
