There's no shortage of long-distance relationship advice on the internet. Most of it boils down to "communicate" and "trust each other" - which, yeah, obviously. But that's like telling someone who's learning to cook to "use ingredients." Technically correct, not particularly helpful.
My girlfriend and I are long distance - different countries, several time zones apart. We've been doing this for a while now, and I've figured out some things that actually make a difference. Not grand gestures or complicated systems. Just small, practical things that make the distance feel a little less heavy.
1 Have a countdown - even if the date changes
This is the single biggest thing. Always have a date you're counting down to. Even if it's approximate, even if it might shift by a week, having a number to watch go down changes everything.
Without a countdown, the distance feels infinite. It's just... apart. Indefinitely. With a countdown, it's "47 more days." And tomorrow it'll be 46. There's an end in sight, and every day you're one step closer.
I originally built a little website that just showed our countdown. Nothing else - just the number. And checking it every morning became one of my favorite rituals. It's a small thing, but it genuinely helped on the harder days.
This is actually what turned into Together - the countdown is the heart of the app. You set your next meeting date, and it's right there on your home screen. Days, hours, minutes. Always counting down.
2 Check in on feelings, not just events
Here's a pattern I bet you recognize:
"How are you?"
"Good, you?"
"Good."
This is the default mode of long-distance communication and it's basically meaningless. You both said "good" and neither of you actually shared anything real.
The problem is that "how are you" is too vague. You need something more specific. Something that invites an actual answer. Not "how was your day" (which usually gets "fine") but "how are you feeling right now?"
We started doing mood check-ins - just a quick "here's where I'm at today" moment. Not a long conversation, not a therapy session. Just an honest one-word vibe check. Are you feeling loved, good, okay, low, anxious? It takes three seconds and it tells your partner more than twenty minutes of small talk.
In Together, mood check-ins work exactly like this. You tap how you're feeling, your partner sees it, and it opens the door for a real conversation - or just lets them know where you're at without needing one.
3 Keep a shared bucket list
One of the hardest parts of long distance is that you spend a lot of time missing the present instead of building toward the future. A shared bucket list flips that.
Instead of "I wish we were together right now," it becomes "when we're together, we're going to do this." It gives you things to look forward to, things to plan, things to get excited about. We have about 30 things on ours now - some big (trips we want to take), some small (a specific restaurant we want to try), some silly (matching Halloween costumes, don't judge).
Every time one of us adds something, the other sees it and it sparks a conversation. "Oh you want to do that? Let's look up when it's happening." It turns missing each other into planning your future together, and that's a much better use of energy.
4 Document your milestones
You think you'll remember everything. You won't.
When was your first trip together? The exact date? Where did you stay? When did you first say "I love you" - was it November or December? What about the first time you met each other's families?
These moments feel so monumental when they happen that you assume they're permanently etched in your memory. But details fade. Dates blur together. A year from now, you'll argue about whether something happened in March or April.
Write it down. Keep a timeline. Not a full diary - just the highlights. The date, a line about what happened, maybe a photo. Future you will be incredibly grateful. Scrolling back through your milestones is also one of those things that reminds you why the distance is worth it.
Together has a timeline feature for exactly this. Each milestone gets a date, a title, a note, and a photo. It turns into this visual story of your relationship that you can scroll through whenever you need a reminder of how far you've come.
5 Share the mundane stuff
This one sounds counterintuitive. Why would your partner care that you're at 12% battery or that you just got groceries? But sharing the boring, everyday details of your life creates something really important: a sense of presence.
When you're in the same place, you absorb this stuff naturally. You see them charge their phone. You watch them unpack groceries. You know their daily rhythms without trying. Long distance strips all of that away, and you're left with only the highlights - the big conversations, the planned calls, the events.
But relationships aren't built on highlights. They're built on the mundane. The small, stupid, unimportant stuff that makes you feel like you're actually sharing a life together.
We added battery sharing to Together for this reason. You can see your partner's battery level. It sounds silly, but knowing they're at 4% explains why they stopped replying. And knowing they just plugged in means they'll be back soon. It's a tiny window into their day that creates a feeling of closeness that texts alone can't replicate.
6 Have a way to say "thinking of you" without starting a conversation
Not every moment of missing someone needs to become a text conversation. Sometimes you just want to say "hey, you crossed my mind" and leave it at that.
Texting "thinking of you" works, but it often starts a back-and-forth. And sometimes - especially during a busy workday or when it's late in their time zone - you don't want to kick off a whole exchange. You just want them to know.
We use the nudge feature in Together for this. It's basically a poke. They get a notification that you nudged them. No message, no expectation of a reply. Just a little tap on the shoulder across the distance. It's playful and light and it works surprisingly well.
7 Keep private notes about your partner
This is a small one but it's made a real difference for me. Keep a running list of things about your partner - things they mention wanting, things they like, little details you want to remember.
Her ring size. That author she mentioned. The name of the coffee she likes from that one specific place. The inside joke from that night you can't remember the punchline to. The thing she said she wanted to do for her birthday.
These details come up in passing - during a call, in a random text, in conversation. If you don't write them down immediately, you'll forget. And then months later when you want to surprise them, you're desperately scrolling through old messages trying to find that one thing they said.
I built private notes into Together specifically for this. They're locked behind Face ID so nobody else can see them. They're just for you - a personal space to keep track of everything that matters about your person.
The bottom line
Long distance is hard. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. There are days where the timezone difference feels impossible and you just want to be in the same room.
But it's also not as impossible as people make it sound. The couples who told us "I don't know how you do it" - you just do it. One day at a time, one countdown at a time. And having the right tools and habits makes the space between visits feel a little smaller.
These seven things aren't magic. They're just small, practical adjustments that compound over time. And most of them are exactly why I built Together in the first place - because we needed them, and they weren't in one place anywhere.
