Mating
The Choremance Dating Trend Can Be a Time Saver
How love can be a chore in a good way.
Posted January 28, 2026 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- A choremance is when a date consists of doing chores like shopping, cooking, cleaning, or gardening together.
- A choremance can take care of at least two things at once, eliminating the excuse of being too busy.
- Choremances can show what people are really like at their core and lead to deeper, more authentic connection.
- A choremance can be a preview of what the relationship future may look like between you and your date.
Some people claim that love shouldn't feel like a chore. But the choremance dating trend may say otherwise. Choremancing is about going on dates that consist of doing chores together. Yes, that's right, regular household, work, or daily life chores like going shopping, cooking, or cleaning together.
Now, assembling furniture may not be the first thing you think of when considering a date. And doing something you or your date has to do anyway may not initially fit the traditional image of doing something romantic. But there are advantages to engaging in all the hard chores with your date.
A Choremance Can Be a Two-For-One Special
For one, a choremance can take care of at least two things at once—namely, a bunch of chores and romance. It can eliminate the "chore-us" of excuses of being too busy to go out on a date. Plus, even if the date doesn't go well romantically, you could at least say that you got things done. This can be an attractive option if you are very busy professionally or have to take care of others, like kids or aging parents.
A Choremance Can Help Reveal What People Are Really Like at Their Core
Another thing a choremance can do is help get at what the other person is really like—what he or she is really, really like. It may be easy to maintain a fancy facade while both of you are at a fancy restaurant or silently staring at a theater screen. But through chores, you can see how both of you handle a little work and potential challenges like figuring out where the heck that blow-off valve is (instruction manual not included). You can see who a person really is—for example, helpful, adaptable, and resourceful versus selfish, inflexible, and easily frazzled.
If you do end up having a bad choremance, this doesn't necessarily mean that you are caught in a bad romance. You could either call it quits or figure out how to adjust things; this might allow you both to work together better. This brings us to the next advantage of the choremance.
A Choremance Is What Long-Term Committed Relationships Are Like
A choremance can be a good preview of what your future together would be like. If you think being a committed couple is all about going to the ballet, being showered with flowers, hot sex, or lying out on a Bali beach all the time, then you've got more than a couple of things to learn. A long-term relationship is typically a lot more mundane—filled with days upon days of navigating through life, supporting each other, and getting things done together.
At its core, any long-term committed relationship, like marriage, is a partnership. A great partnership can help each of you get more things accomplished in a more efficient manner than you could separately. By contrast, a bad partnership can make everything a lot more difficult. The trouble is that many people don't find out where their partnership, or lack of partnership, falls until they are already married. Before you make too many long-term plans with someone, it helps to find out their chore values, so to speak.
A Choremance Can Make Dating Easier
Speaking of planning, a choremance can be a lot easier to plan and execute. You don't have to spend as much time choreographing the whole night—like finding the right show to watch, getting tickets, waiting in line to get in, and figuring out when you are going to say, "If you were a song, you’d be the best track on the album." A set of chores, instead, can help determine what the two of you end up doing and can make conversation a lot easier. Natural conversation starters, for example, can revolve around the task at hand. All of this could lead to deeper conversations more quickly. Doing laundry could make you more likely to air your dirty laundry to one another.
Doing Chores Can Be Sexy
Finally, doing chores and feeling sexy are not mutually exclusive things. Being an Iron Man—meaning a guy willing to use an iron—can be very attractive. Similarly, showing that you can use tools can be the opposite of being a tool. In fact, an attractive trait in general—whether you are a man or woman—can be the ability to get things done. Doing a hard chore can lead to something hard-core. Putting together the bed can lead to something done in the bed. You get the picture, especially if you hung the picture very well.
Of course, this doesn't mean that dates and relationships should be only about doing chores. There's certainly value in doing all sorts of purely fun things. The choremance thing just means that you can mix things up a bit. It's okay to intertwine work with pleasure. After all, variety is the spice of life. That can also mean putting together the spice rack.
