What we know about long-distance couples

The idea that a long-distance relationship is bound to fail is solidly established. Research on the subject, notably by the American scholar Laura Stafford, does not find a difference in satisfaction or stability as clear-cut as the reputation would lead one to expect.

Several studies even record, among geographically separated couples, higher levels of idealisation of the partner and of reported satisfaction than among cohabiting couples. This result calls for cautious interpretation, and it is instructive.

A first explanation has to do with who ends up in this situation. Maintaining a relationship at a distance presupposes motivation, organisation and often means: the couples who take it on are not just any sample.

A second has to do with the nature of the exchanges. At a distance, time spent together is rare, planned, and devoted to the relationship. It contains neither domestic management nor shared tiredness, which removes a significant share of the ordinary sources of friction.

The work notes that the information available about the other is more limited and more favourable: one shows what one chooses to show, and imagination fills in the rest in the most flattering direction.

This mechanism makes the relationship pleasant during the distance and fragile at the moment it ends. It is the most counter-intuitive result in this field: the critical period is not the separation, it is the reunion.

Studies that followed couples at the moment they settle back together describe a difficult phase of adjustment, with a notable share of break-ups. A daily life that had been put on hold must then be discovered, and part of the autonomy that distance had installed must be given up.

That autonomy is the blind spot. Each has organised their life alone for months, and the reunion is also experienced as a loss, which nobody anticipates because expectation was turned towards the reunion itself.

Samples in this field are often made up of students, which limits the reach of the results. Definitions also vary: a two-hour distance and an intercontinental distance do not pose the same problems and are sometimes gathered in the same studies.

The cautious conclusion is twofold. Nothing establishes that a long-distance relationship is by nature more fragile, and nothing establishes either that it is more solid: what the data point to is a tipping moment on return, not a prognosis.