People ask me all the time: “How have you managed to make a long-distance relationship work for over 7 years?!” (My wife and I just moved in together, finally – hence why I just moved to New York. Wish us mazel tov!)
There are a few points I always make when I answer this question – it helps to have compatible communication styles and to figure out the sex stuff ASAP, for example – but perhaps the most important one is that when my partner and I were long-distance, we spoke on the phone for hours, at least a few nights a week, every single week.
I really think those phone calls were the thing that made our LDR sustainable – because they felt like having actual conversations with my actual partner. Texting, by contrast, is usually asynchronous and sporadic, and it’s easy to lose the nuance of tone that way, especially when talking dirty and/or navigating conflict. Phone calls feel so much more connective. At this point I can’t imagine how I’d ever have a long-distance relationship again without regular, leisurely phone calls to keep us feeling close.
There is a middle ground, however, between texting and phone calls, and that’s voice notes: little audio clips you send back and forth. I used to wish there were more dating apps which offered this functionality, because I always found I could get a sense of someone much quicker if I heard their voice – not just its tone and timbre, but the way they speak, the words and phrases they use, the inflection and unique musicality of their speech. Still to this day, whether I know someone very well or not at all, I feel closer to them when I can hear their voice – sometimes in a really hot way. It’s common for me to exchange little voice memos with far-away people I’m flirting with; it concretizes our connection, making it feel bigger and more vivid, even if our entire relationship technically exists only within our phones.