Let me share with you a little anthropological marvel, one that may or may not be related exclusively to the realm of online dating. I will call it the 'coffee and cake' phenomenon.

Some years ago, before online dating, when it was still the cultural norm to meet someone in the real world, spontaneously, with some expectation it might go somewhere, I'm pretty sure there was no such thing as an arrangement to meet for coffee and cake. Not ever.

I mean, it's kind of a weird thing for a guy you have managed to move on to the 'Shall we meet?' stage to suggest that you do together. I mean, how many men do you know that like sweet things, anyway? Cake-desiring, and cake-eating, is the singular preserve of the female. Like chocolate. Like high heels. Like wanting children.

Men are essentially beasts with a taste for the savoury. Microwave pizzas in front of the motor racing, the roadside-van bacon sarnie, the late-night kebab. Theirs is the territory of the petrol station sausage roll, my friend, but rarely the Victoria sponge, the pastel-frosted cup cake. In the absence of all savoury items, a man might be pushed into chomping on a flapjack, but, to be fair, it's made of oats, and since it is best negotiated with one's hands than a very tiny fork, it cannot legitimately be considered a member of the cake family, in my view.

So, there has to be something else going on here. Why are men on the make suddenly so interested in patisserie?

I've done a little research. And I found something interesting about one of mankind's very close chimp relatives, the Bonobo. We share something like 97 per cent of our genetic make up with the Bonobo, and I'm beginning to see the similarities. For example, they have sex for pleasure as well as reproduction, and they like it face-to-face, pretty unusual among primates, although they won't turn their noses up at doggy style, masturbation, oral or same-sex couplings, either.

But most interesting for my purposes, is the food-related foreplay. Because, what really gives them the cream horn is the prospect of a meal. Indeed, according to Dr Waal, who knows a lot about these things, the very sight of food triggers a 'binge of sex', and 'the more food you give them, the more sex you'll get'.

What Dr Waal also observes is that fthe female Bonobo rules the 'business' of sex and food. 'It's a good species for feminists', he says. Basically, if a male Bonobo wants to get it on with a female, proferring her some food she really likes is pretty much akin to a sure thing. After all, if he doesn't come up with the goods, she's as likely to go behind a tree for a session of 'finger loving' with her female associates (in human terms, that broadly translates as 'shopping').

Men have done the 'hunting for food to impress women' thing since they went about wearing leopard-skin thongs, and judging by the selection of undies in Ann Summers, little has changed. Except the invention of lycra, and that stuff that makes g-strings edible.

It's really the fault of Nature. Men and women are encoded this way. Food and sex are linked emotionally in the brain. Fundamentally, if the woman is going to conceive and carry a child, she needs her man to keep her stocked up with goodies. I'm shamelessly pilfering the line here, for which apologies to the author concerned but it's too good to pass by, this roughly translates as 'picking up the tab' at dinner.

Or indeed, coffee and cake.

Because in the age of the corporate coffee house, coffee and cake is the new dinner. And, you know what, not only do men know that women dig cake (they eat it all the time with their friends, right before they masturbate each other - sorry, clear out the new Kate Moss range at Top Shop), it's quicker and cheaper than dinner, requires a lot less conversation, and, if he decides he doesn't want to shag you after all (unlikely, since, like the Bonobo male, discrimination is not in his vocabulary), he can wolf down his flapjack and be out the door in ten minutes.

And, you know what's funny? Men think the 'coffee and cake' date is a great and original idea, and that no-one else thought of it, least of all the one-million other guys attempting to pull online. And most definitely not the one-million-and-one women sitting at home, smiling the secret smile of the Bonobo female.

Why are they smiling? Because, finally, after a zillion years of evolution, men still haven't realised the one simple thing, the thing their Bonobo male counterparts knew long ago. Women like sex. They like it a lot. And many of them pursue it for the purposes of pleasure alone. Except now they get to eat their cake, and have [sex] too.