, 28 May 2021

Technology has made long distance relationships easier than ever - or has it? How long distance relationships have changed in the 30 years of the internet.

When Jim* was about to start his senior year in college, he met a woman at his school’s commencement. They hit it off — really hit it off — and decided to become a couple. The only problem? She’d graduated a couple years previous — and she was moving across the country.

It’s a common story, right? Boy meets girl; boy likes girl; girl likes boy; girl or boy moves far away. But the next part of the story changes dramatically depending on when it takes place. And that’s because long distance relationships have radically transformed in the 30 years since the birth of the internet.

Jim met his college girlfriend in 1990, which was the year before the world wide web was released to the public. His campus had computers and an email system that worked within the college, but there was no internet as we know it. Instead, Jim racked up massive long distance phone bills on the one phone in his shared off-campus house.

“When I would talk with her, I’d typically be calling after 11 Eastern time, because that’s when the rates dropped,” Jim tells Avast. “And I have to explicitly set context and remind people that when we say ‘phone,’ we’re talking about a device with mechanical push buttons that sat in the house.”

Jim would pick up the phone from the headset and stretch the cord for some privacy in his room with the door shut. But after a year of late night phone calls and a couple of cross-country trips, his girlfriend just stopped calling. And she didn’t respond to the messages she left on his answering machine. 

It was a lot easier to ghost in 1991.

Long distance relationships before webcams

I’m a bit younger than Jim — when he was meeting his college girlfriend, I was still in preschool — but I also had a long distance college love who I met during the summer before my senior year. We spent a hot Vermont summer together and then, in the fall, I went back to school in the Hudson Valley while he took off for Spain. 

The year was 2007 and that semester was excruciating. I’d only known Gabe* for a couple of months, but I’d fallen for him in that way you only can when you’re 19 and you meet a beautiful boy with blue eyes and floppy hair who plays flamenco and tends bar. But he was in Spain. And I was in New York. And the only reason we were able to stay “together” was because we had something Jim and his girlfriend didn’t: The internet.

Gabe and I communicated mostly through email and scheduled Skype voice calls. My Dell laptop — a warhorse that made it through all four years of university with me, only to die an ignominious death in Brooklyn a year after graduation — didn’t have a webcam and I didn’t have the fifty bucks to buy an auxiliary one. Plus, I’m not convinced the crappy internet in my dorm room could have handled video calling, anyway.

When Gabe came back from Spain for the second semester of senior year, he was still up in Vermont and I was in New York. We added each other to our “friends and family” list for cheaper rates and texted throughout the day, then chatted on Gchat when we were home and near our computers. We both had flip phones and video calling was definitely not an option on those clunky little bricks. For the rest of the year, we had to settle for him driving down for periodic visits and me making my way north when I could if we wanted to see each other’s faces. 

Long distance relationships without wifi

Sarah* met her eventual husband, Matt,* in 2009 after her friend went up to him in a bar in San Francisco and said, “Can I have your number? I think you might be my friend’s soulmate.” They started emailing —she had only his business card — and she remembers the moment when Gmail decided they were messaging enough to have him pop up on Gchat. 

“I remember seeing him pop up there and being like, ‘Can I message him? Does that mean it’s fair game?’” Sarah tells Avast.

About six months into their relationship, two major long distance impediments came up. The first was that Sarah got into grad school in New York. The second was that Matt and his brother bought a sailboat and planned on sailing around the world for an undetermined amount of time. 

“For better or worse, I’m really stubborn,” Sarah says. “I didn’t think that life changes and big moves were a reason to break up something so good, so I pushed to stay together. Matt was less sure — not because he was ambivalent about me but because he was concerned long distance would cause us to fall apart in a way that taking a rational break wouldn’t.”

Their first year apart was bicoastal, with Lauren attending NYU and Matt back in San Francisco. They texted all day and talked on the phone every night, even though neither of them was very good at it. Sarah says she felt like it was just what they were “supposed” to do.

“It didn’t bring out the best in either of us,” she says. “I would do this horrible thing where I wanted him to say ‘I love you’ first before we hung up and then he wouldn’t. Then I’d call back and be like, ‘I just want to say I love you.’” 

When Matt and his brother took off in their sailboat during year two of his and Sarah’s relationship, they had to figure out whole new forms of communication. Once the brothers left the coast of California, texting just wasn’t an option. There was satellite email on the boat, but it took a long time — and once was even interrupted by a sunspot affecting the satellite. They could catch up on the phone, sometimes, but only when he was on land.

But, weirdly, Sarah felt less anxious about this spotty communication than she’d felt when they were bicoastal. 

“Because he couldn’t be in touch, it took a lot of anxiety out of it,” Sarah says. “You can’t stress over something that’s not possible. When I didn’t hear from him for days and days, it wasn’t like, ‘He doesn’t love me.’ It was like, ‘He can’t communicate because he’s out at sea.’”

Staying connected in long distance relationships 

Now, in 2021, Jim is in another long distance relationship. He’s been with his current girlfriend since 2019, with an entire country (and a pandemic) between them. But unlike 30 years ago, Jim and his girlfriend have actual options now.

They still talk on the phone regularly, but there’s no more landline being stretched for privacy. They chat on Signal throughout the day and have virtual dates where they watch Netflix or Amazon together remotely. Sometimes they video chat. And since the pandemic started, they’ve also been checking out museum exhibits online and participating in virtual physical fitness challenges together.

When looking back at his college relationship, Jim knows that advancements in technology have made it significantly easier to keep a bicoastal relationship going.

“When you’re both working and you don’t work in the same place and you can chat by Signal, whether that person is in the same city or other coast is immaterial,” Jim says. “The technology abstracts that distance.”

But while a younger Jim might have jumped on new tech toys to communicate, Jim in 2021 feels like he’s “been there, done that, got the t-shirt.” At this point, he says, technology is most valuable to him when it “supplements and enables the connections we have in person.”

When you’re far away from the person you love, there’s going to be some level of anxiety involved. What are they doing? Are they having too much fun without me? What if they meet someone else? In the 30 years that we’ve had the world wide web, technology — from landline phones to the internet to the web to flip phones to online chat to smart phones and video calls — has made it easier and easier to stay in touch over long distances. And some relationships, like Jim’s current one, simply wouldn’t have been possible without the internet.

But, on the flip side, the proliferation of communication methods can cause real anxiety. When it’s theoretically possible to be in constant, 24/7 contact, it’s all too easy for our brains to run away without us. Sarah realized that when Matt was out of contact and, to some degree, when Gabe came back from Spain I did as well. 

So while it’s undeniable that the internet has made some aspects of long distance relationships easier, the narrative just isn’t that simple. Technology — and especially the tech we use for communication — ultimately amplifies both the best and the worst of humanity. On the one hand, you have love connections across a continent. On the other, the disconnect between being in contact but not being in touch — as in actual, physical touch — shorts out our brains. 

Texting isn’t talking. Talking isn’t video chatting. Video chatting isn’t touching. And one thing all of the couples I’ve talked about here exemplify is: You have to touch at some point.

*names have been changed for privacy