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Can long distance work? The research is more hopeful than you'd think
Aral, Tomurcuk's developer, wrote on our site about his partner moving to Milan for a year:
Our phones are good for many things, but sadly they are still no match for distance.
Pretty much everyone starting a long-distance relationship has some version of that thought. What will the evenings be like, what replaces a hug, can this even work? The people around you usually don't help much. "Long distance never works."
The research is more optimistic than your relatives.
The good news: closeness isn't measured in kilometers
In 2013, communication researchers Crystal Jiang and Jeffrey Hancock compared 63 young dating couples, some living apart and some in the same city. For a week, the couples logged every conversation they had with each other, whether by phone, text, video or face to face. The result surprised a lot of people. The long-distance couples talked less often, but they felt more intimate in each conversation than the couples who lived close by (the study).
The researchers point to two reasons. First, long-distance partners shared more about themselves when they did talk; with less time together, they made the time they had count. Second, they saw their partner as more open than the partner said they had been. In other words, they idealized them a little.
But idealizing comes with a bill
That second reason has a flip side. From far away, you see your partner at their best: planned visits, carefully chosen words, short and intense time together. You don't see much of their dull Mondays, their messy kitchen or how grumpy they get on a bad day.
When the distance ends, that picture meets reality. In a study of college students at Ohio State University, about a third of the long-distance relationships that continued after the couple moved to the same place ended afterwards, most of them within three months of the move (the study). What the participants described will sound familiar: less room of their own, trouble dividing their time, more conflict and jealousy, and getting to know sides of their partner they'd never seen from a distance.
Read that as a warning. Not assuming everything will fall into place on its own once you're together makes that stretch much easier.
Habits that help
You don't have to spend hours on video calls every day. A little but regular tends to go better than long but rare. Ege, Tomurcuk's co-founder, describes the most tiring part of his own long-distance stretch like this:
At some point I noticed that between all the "how are you"s, there was no time left to actually wonder about each other.
The cure is having something fresh to talk about. Concrete details from your day, a new question, a film you watch at the same time. Sometimes one good question is enough to break the "how are you, fine, you?" loop, which is partly why we wrote 40 questions to ask your partner.
Always have the date of the next visit settled. A day on the calendar turns the weeks in between into something with an end. The same goes for the bigger picture: have at least a rough plan for when and how the distance will end. "We'll see" and "let's be in the same city in two years" are very different things to live with.
If there's a time difference between you, we wrote about that separately. Jealousy tends to grow with distance, and it has its own post too.
Make one day of each visit ordinary
When visits are short, you want every minute to count: restaurants, trips, special plans. They're lovely, but they leave something out, which is each other's actual lives.
Spend at least one day of every visit being ordinary. Grocery shopping, laundry, an evening when they come home tired from work. These scenes aren't romantic, but they're exactly the life you'll be living when the distance ends. Seeing it now shrinks the bill for all that idealizing.
Before the distance ends
One of the long-distance questions in the Tomurcuk bank sums up this whole post: "When this time apart is over, how do you imagine our first month?" Answer it separately, then compare. Seeing how far your pictures overlap shows you what to talk about before that first month arrives.