It is an unusual option for a January date, but after meeting twice, 42-year-old Sasha thinks she is ready to take things to the next level with the man she has just started seeing. She is planning to take him for a sea swim near her home in East Sussex, followed by a beachside sauna. “I’m just putting it out there: here’s my body. It’s not the body I had when I was 20 but it is what it is.” They have chatted a lot, first online and then in person, but have never been out to dinner together. “Oh no, I would never go out for dinner with anyone. It’s just so intense and awkward. If someone asked me out for dinner or the cinema, I know they’re not for me.” Asking someone to dinner is “unimaginative and boring”, says Sasha (not her real name). “I just think: snore alert.” She may, she admits, be unusual in her choice of date venues, but she is not alone in shunning dinner. Whether for financial reasons, the pressure of time or because today’s daters want something more daring, dinner dates, it seems, are dead. A survey by the dating site Match suggests the financial crisis is playing a large part, with 40% of those it polled saying the cost of living crisis meant they were going on fewer dates, and more than a fifth saying they would be put off if someone suggested an expensive dinner, as it would mean they weren’t compatible financially. Once used as shorthand for the start of a relationship, asking someone to dinner is just not how it’s done these days. Rachel, 35, has recently returned to the dating scene after a six-year relationship ended, and says the landscape is very different from when she was in her late 20s. “Thanks to dating apps, people’s dating throughput is so much higher. You might have three different apps on your phone, you’re matching several people every day. “And I would say that dinner dates – you just don’t want to invest in that. Not just the money, but the time as well. At least until you really know you’re going to have a good time – because obviously, you can’t leave early if it’s awful.” Then there’s the always awkward question of who pays, which, if you’re straight, is made even harder to navigate by changing gender expectations, says Mike, 31. He has only ever had one dinner date: “When the bill came, she kind of expected me to take it. And I said, don’t you think it’d be fair to split it?” The woman told him it was “kind of unsexy” that he hadn’t offered, but they eventually each paid their share. Things didn’t go any further. “A dinner date just sounds to me like I’m wearing a suit without a tie and she’s wearing a dress, and I pull out the chair behind her,” says Mike. “It’s not something I have ever done or would do.” Changes in dating habits may seem inconsequential, but they’re anything but, says Dr Julia Carter, a senior lecturer in sociology at UWE Bristol who researches romantic relationships. “It’s not trivial because it tells us something about what’s happening in society. “The idea of a dinner date feels quite traditional to us now, that idea of a man asking a woman out. Actually a lot has happened in our society [since that was the norm]. Dating is one of those aspects where women are starting to assert themselves much more than would have been expected in the past.” Dinner is also very public, she says. “One of the changes we talk about sociologically is that dating has become much more privatised. Thanks to dating apps, people tend to be sitting in their rooms on their own flicking through profiles, where in the past you may have had a social group where you’d all chat [about who you are dating]. So perhaps more private activities are preferred when you go on a date. Going to the park is much more private than having a meal in front of an audience in a restaurant.” For Corinne, 51 and back in the dating game after the end of her marriage, “there are so many similarities between dating and finding a job”. If thousands send in a CV, she says, “the first step is like a screening, when the headhunters call you up just to check you out. You want to quickly assess whether this is something that is worth exploring or not. And an initial drink is the quickest way to get that over.” In that situation, she says, you definitely don’t go to dinner. “That’s because you’re meeting strangers, and you don’t know whether you’re going to like them. You want a situation where you can quickly move on.”