The first date is just the start of what may turn out to be the largest spending spree of your life. With the average courtship before a marriage lasting about two and a half years, dating is an increasingly expensive venture.

Flowers, presents, dinners, and movie tickets are just the start of the list of items single men need to factor into their budgets, dating and relationship experts said.

And don't even get us started on the costs of maintaining a long-distance romance.

By the time you head down the aisle, you can easily have spent more than $40,000 on vacations , jewellery, wedding expenses, and meals out, according to our calculations .

Money Makes Up for A Lot

That's not to say money isn't high on most single people's priority lists. Nearly 70% of women and 50% of men said they were interested in marrying for money, according to a Prince & Associates survey of 1,134 men and women earning $30,000 to $60,000 a year.

The courtship period is the ideal time for couples to make sweeping statements about how much they care for each other through the purchase of lavish gifts and expensive dinners.

Crazy for Love

For example, the average amount spent by a jewellery buyer in 2007 was $3,267, with men spending nearly twice as much as women, Danziger said.

"Love is a big business in the retail industry," Grannis said. "Small gifts such as a sweater, apparel , or flowers or even large gifts, such as expensive jewellery or a trip to someone's favourite spa, or even sports tickets, really speak volumes when it comes to showing someone how much you appreciate them."

Buying Your Bride

Indeed, most people tend to view the amount of money they spend while dating as an indicator of a long-term future together, said Catherine Surra , a professor and chair of the department of human ecology at the University of Texas who studies the development of romantic unions, including marriage.

This is especially true for men, she noted.

Those first few months of dating are prime splurging opportunities, said the University of Washington's Schwartz.

To impress their dates, men will do such things as ordering a bottle of the restaurant's most expensive wine or tipping lavishly- even if they can't afford it.