We’re doing dating wrong! Forget coffee – go furniture shopping

I’m a married mum of two who dates outside my marriage, writes Franki Cookney, so my social time is at a premium. And what better way to kill two birds with one stone than take a potential partner to a furniture warehouse?

‘I tried to convince a recent match to come shopping with me,’ writes Franki Cookney (Getty)

“Do you want to go to Ikea with me?”

The response is short and predictable. “Lol”.

I try again. “No, seriously. I need to pick up some storage baskets. Want to join me?”

The person I’m chatting to is clearly baffled. The conversation begins to peter out not long after and she doesn’t attempt to pick it back up again. I can’t say I blame her. It’s not exactly the dream location for a first date.

I first heard about the trend for combining your social life with running errands back in 2021, when a social media post extolling the low-key intimacy of the “errand friend” went viral. But a recent piece in The Atlantic decrying the adult tendency to very intentionally “catch up” rather than engage in playful, even improvised, activities together, sparked new discourse about how going for coffee is bad, actually. This time around, I started wondering whether the same logic could apply to dates.

Lord knows we need some fresh ideas. Survey after survey shows people are feeling burnt out from dating, stuck on the swipe-chat-drinks treadmill, and fed up with the amount of time, energy, and often money they have to put in. With the cost of living crisis hitting dating too, it’s no wonder people are shying away from expensive nights out. Data from earlier this year shows that 84 per cent of singles would prefer a casual date over dinner and drinks.

Now, I’m not single. I’m married. I am ethically non-monogamous, but I’m also a mum of two, so it’s fair to say I don’t date nearly as often as my single monogamous friends. Going for drinks is almost always fine with me. It’s not as though I’m out every night of the week these days. A dinner date is a treat. But still, I can’t pretend the idea of combining dating with ticking off a few items on my never-ending to-do list holds no appeal.

All of which led to me trying to convince a recent match to come shopping with me. If you want to really get to know someone, what better way than to drag them around a furniture showroom? Sadly, it seems I remain alone in that view.

Flatpack isn’t for everyone, but there are loads of other mundane but potentially really enjoyable things we could do together that don’t involve spending loads of cash on tapas and wine while trying desperately to move the conversation on from what exactly Oppenheimer got wrong about post-war America. As part of their recent drive to encourage people to put their phones away on dates, dating app Hinge released a host of suggestions for “different” dates, including smashing a pub quiz together, volunteering for a beach clean-up, and visiting a psychic.

Instead of trying to carve out a whole evening for a date, we could also try asking them along to something we already have planned, as sex and relationship therapist Esther Perel recommends. “What if we invited dates into our lives instead of being yanked out of them to go see if there’s a connection?” she suggested to an audience at London’s Eventim Apollo last month. It’s a radical proposition. As I flick through my Google calendar trying to decide whether it’s weirder to invite someone trick-or-treating with my kids or to be my plus-one at a panel talk about consent, I text one of my single friends and tell her what I’m doing.

“I really like this idea,” she says. “I like the idea of not just telling somebody who you are, but actually showing them.”

It helps that being invited into her life sounds quite a lot more chill than being invited into mine. “A lot of my regular social activities revolve around seeing my mates down the pub,” she says. “I really like the idea of a low-stakes date where this new person can see your life and see who you are, unguarded. To be able to get to know someone in that way could be really cool.”

I wonder what her friends would make of it. It’s one thing to invite a date to the pub, it’s another thing to ask your mates to sit through what is essentially an auditioning process; to enthusiastically include a total stranger in their Friday night, someone that – let’s be honest – they may never see again.

Personally, I won’t bother trying to combine dating with life admin again. For me, dating provides a very welcome break from chores, and I’d much rather listen to a podcast while running errands than attempt sparkling conversation with a potential romantic interest. I’m always down for thinking outside the box when it comes to date activities, though, and have already started compiling a list of alternatives to “getting drinks.”

As for inviting people to existing events, if anyone wants to join me on Saturday morning to take my kids to the library and then to their swimming lessons, my DMs are open.

Franki Cookney is a journalist who specialises in sex, relationships and society