Long Distance Relationship Activities and Date Ideas

The video call starts the same way it has for weeks now. “How was your day.” “Fine, yours.” A pause neither of you quite knows what to do with. You are not fighting. You are not even bored of each other. You have just run out of things to do with the hour you have, and the calls have started to feel like maintenance instead of connection.

The direct answer is that long distance relationship activities work best when they give you something to do together, not just something to talk about. Conversation matters, but night after night it runs thin on its own; a shared task, however small, gives your attention somewhere to land besides each other’s faces on a screen, and that shift changes how the time feels. Research on shared activities points the same way. In three lab experiments, couples who spent seven minutes on a novel, active task together reported a bigger rise in relationship quality than couples given a more mundane one (Aron et al., 2000). Long distance takes away the easiest version of togetherness, sitting on the same couch, so it rewards couples who get deliberate about building the substitute.

Below are ideas sorted by how much time and overlap you actually have, an honest section on why calls go flat anyway, and a note on something to look forward to. For everything else that comes up when a relationship runs across two cities, see the Long Distance & Apart hub.

Long distance date ideas for a video call

These ideas share one property: they give the call a shape other than talking. Pick based on energy, not obligation. A rotation beats a routine.

Make something together

Cook the same recipe on video, timed so you both plate at the same moment, then eat “together” with your screens propped up at the table. Bake something that needs a resting or proofing step, so there is a built in second call later in the evening when the timer goes off. Draw each other, badly, for two minutes, then hold up the results, which is a reliable way to end up laughing at nothing in particular. None of this requires special equipment. It requires deciding, in advance, what you are making and when.

Play something together

Real time games work well at a distance because they demand shared attention in the moment, not a report on it afterward. Try a word game, a simple card game played with two decks and a shared scoresheet, or a trivia round where you each write ten questions about the other and grade the answers out loud. Chess over a call, played slowly across an evening, gives you long stretches of comfortable silence that do not feel like dead air, because you are both still doing the thing. For games built around talking rather than scoring, the couples communication games list travels well over video.

Learn something together

Pick one skill neither of you has and start it in parallel: a language, a stretching routine, a card trick, basic knife skills. The point is not mastery. It is that you are both bad at the same new thing at the same time, which produces a shared experience, the fumbling, laughing, comparing notes kind, that is otherwise hard to manufacture across a distance.

Go somewhere together on screen

Walk your partner through your city on camera during an evening walk, narrating as you go. Watch a live feed from somewhere neither of you has been and talk over it the way you would in a car; the U.S. National Park Service, for one, runs live wildlife webcams, including a bear cam at Brooks Falls (National Park Service, n.d., checked September 2026). Looking at something together, rather than at each other, takes the pressure off holding eye contact through a hard week and lets conversation happen sideways instead of head on.

Long distance relationship activities when your schedules barely overlap

Not every long distance couple gets an overlapping evening. Shift work, opposite time zones, and demanding seasons at work or school can leave you with a real time window measured in minutes, some weeks none at all. The activities above assume a call. These do not.

Asynchronous connection runs on the same shared attention, spread across the hours. A shared photo thread where you each post one image a day, no caption required, builds a visual record of two lives that neither of you has to narrate in real time. A shared document where you each leave one line before bed, a thought, a complaint, a small win, gives the other something to wake up to that is not a wall of texts demanding a reply. Short voice notes let tone carry what a typed message flattens.

Dana and her girlfriend, both nurses on opposite rotations in different cities, keep a single shared note where each of them leaves a line at the end of a shift. Neither expects an answer before the next one, and on the rare evening they do overlap, the note gives the call somewhere to start.

The trick with asynchronous activities is to remove the expectation of an immediate reply, because a same day response standard on top of a genuinely mismatched schedule is a recipe for one of you feeling ignored and the other feeling chased. Set the expectation once, out loud: “I might not see this until tomorrow morning, and that’s fine, leave it anyway.” Written channels are not a lesser version of a call, either. In a survey of 114 people in long distance relationships, Dainton and Aylor (2002) found that every channel they measured, face to face time, phone calls, letters and the internet, was positively associated with relationship maintenance. It was a one time survey, so it shows association rather than cause, but it gives no reason to treat a line left in a shared note as second best. If the mismatch itself, not the activities, is the real bottleneck, a separate guide to making long distance work across time zones covers it.

Watching, reading and listening together

Watching the same show does not require the same room, and there is research that makes a case for taking it seriously. Across two studies, Gomillion et al. (2017) found that sharing media with a partner, the same TV shows, books or movies, was linked with greater relationship quality, especially for people who did not share a circle of friends with that partner. Their argument is that shared fictional worlds can partly stand in for a shared social world. The studies were not about long distance couples, so the next step is our inference rather than their finding: couples living in two cities often have two separate friend groups, which is exactly the gap the authors think shared media helps fill.

The practical version is simple. Pick one show and treat it as yours, something neither of you watches ahead. Start it together on a call, or start it separately and text through it in real time if a full video call is not realistic that night. A shared audiobook or podcast, listened to apart during a commute or a chore, gives you a built in topic for the next call that is not “how was your day,” which takes pressure off both of you to generate conversation from nothing.

It is easy to feel that watching television together does not count as quality time. Shared media looks like a genuine relationship activity, not a placeholder, and one of the easier ones to keep up on a bad week.

Novel long distance relationship activities that borrow from the research

Aron et al. (2000) combined a newspaper questionnaire, a door to door survey and three lab experiments. In the surveys, couples who reported doing more exciting things together were more satisfied, and relationship boredom helped explain the link. In the experiments, couples who completed a seven minute novel and arousing task together, arousing here meaning physically and mentally activating rather than anything romantic, showed a bigger rise in experienced relationship quality than couples given a mundane task. None of those couples were studied at a distance, so the finding does not transfer directly, though the idea is at least plausible across two cities.

What it suggests for a long distance pair is to occasionally reach past the comfortable rotation of calls and shared shows for something you have never tried together: a video call escape room, a joint art project neither of you is any good at, a themed scavenger hunt one of you builds for the other’s city. The goal is enough newness that neither of you can run it on autopilot.

There is also a reason to expect closeness can survive the screen. In a diary study of dating couples, Jiang and Hancock (2013) found that long distance partners, compared with couples living near each other, disclosed more about themselves and held more idealized views of each other, and both patterns fed into intimacy, with the size of the effect varying by the kind of medium they used. That is a reason to expect a new shared experience can land over a call, not a claim that a call works like sharing a room.

What the research does not show

None of these studies tested date ideas on long distance couples and then tracked how the relationships fared. The novelty and shared media findings come from couples who were not living apart, and the long distance studies are surveys and diaries that show associations, not causes. Nothing here says long distance couples do better or worse than couples who live together; that picture is mixed. Little of this work looks at same gender or nonbinary couples specifically, so evidence for them is thin.

When you are bored in a long distance relationship

Boredom in a long distance relationship gets talked about as one thing when it is usually one of three.

The first is an update mode lull. Most of your calls have become a report: what happened today, what is scheduled tomorrow. This is not a crisis. It is what happens when the main channel is a status update instead of an experience, and the activities above answer it by replacing reporting with doing.

The second is a settled routine, which looks similar from the outside but feels different from the inside. You have found a rhythm, a regular call time, familiar topics, comfortable silences, and it is calm rather than flat. Routine is not a failure state in a long distance relationship. Some stretches are meant to be steady rather than exciting, and trying to manufacture novelty every single week is its own kind of exhausting.

The third is a real signal, worth naming honestly rather than talking around. The closest research here comes from Tsapelas, Aron, and Orbuch (2009), who followed married couples and found that boredom in the marriage predicted lower satisfaction nine years later. That sample was married, not long distance, so this is a borrowed finding, not a long distance result, and it reads best as a hint rather than direct evidence about your situation. What it does suggest is that persistent boredom, as distinct from calm or contentment, is worth noticing rather than waiting out.

A lull feels like it would lift if the calls had something new in them. Routine feels settled, not restless, with both of you fine with the shape of things. A real signal tends to come with a specific feeling underneath the boredom: dread before calls, relief when one gets cancelled, a sense of going through motions that used to feel easy. If that is closer to what you are noticing, the guide on how to feel closer in a long distance relationship is the better next read.

If it is a lull or routine you want to name out loud, the ask does not need to be heavy. “I miss doing things together, not just talking, can we try something new this week” is a request, not a verdict on the relationship, and far easier for a partner to hear than “I think we’re getting boring,” which sounds like an accusation even when it is not meant as one.

Planning the next visit as an activity in itself

Looking forward to something can carry a surprising share of a relationship, and long distance couples are unusually well positioned to use this on purpose. Across five experiments, Van Boven and Ashworth (2007) found that people reported more intense emotions while anticipating an event than while looking back on it afterward, which means the weeks spent planning a visit are not just administrative time before the good part starts. They are part of the good part.

Kumar, Killingsworth, and Gilovich (2014) add a finding about what kind of anticipation pays off best: waiting for an experience tends to be more pleasurable and exciting than waiting for a material purchase. Applied here, the takeaway is straightforward. Do not just book the ticket and go quiet about it until the departure date. Build a small shared planning ritual around the next visit, a running list of what you want to do, a countdown either of you checks in on. For the days themselves, there is a full set of things to do when visiting a long distance partner, and if the next visit is the very first one, the guide to meeting a long distance partner for the first time covers what that day tends to feel like.

The weeks before a visit are not empty time to be endured. They are an activity too, once the planning is something you do together rather than something one of you handles alone.

Picking the next one without it becoming a chore

A list like this can quietly become one more thing to manage. Merolla (2012) built a model of how long distance dating couples maintain their relationships and found that what helped depended on timing, before a separation, during it, or after a reunion, and on style, whether the effort happened in one partner’s head, between the two of you, or through friends and family. The practical reading is that no single activity fits every point in the cycle. What works in the lonely middle of a stretch apart may not be what you want the week after a visit.

A simple fix: keep a running list somewhere visible, five or six ideas at a time, and let whoever has the lighter week pick. Swap something out the moment it starts to feel obligatory, and borrow from the small daily connection rituals couples use at home when a whole activity feels like too much. If picking even feels like too much some weeks, the fun and play prompts in the Relationship Check In can hand you a starting point instead of leaving the choice open ended.

Some weeks the honest answer is a fifteen minute video call and nothing else, and that is a fine week too. Most weeks, the relationship does not need a bigger idea. It needs one thing to do together that is not another status update.

Read deeper

• How to feel closer in a long distance relationship
• Things to do when visiting a long distance partner
• Meeting a long distance partner for the first time
• Couples communication games
• Daily connection rituals for busy couples
• Long Distance & Apart hub
• Making long distance work across time zones

Sources

• Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273–284. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.273
• Dainton, M., & Aylor, B. (2002). Patterns of communication channel use in the maintenance of long-distance relationships. Communication Research Reports, 19(2), 118–129. DOI: 10.1080/08824090209384839
• Gomillion, S., Gabriel, S., Kawakami, K., & Young, A. F. (2017). Let’s stay home and watch TV: The benefits of shared media use for close relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 34(6), 855–874. DOI: 10.1177/0265407516660388
• Jiang, L. C., & Hancock, J. T. (2013). Absence makes the communication grow fonder: Geographic separation, interpersonal media, and intimacy in dating relationships. Journal of Communication, 63(3), 556–577. DOI: 10.1111/jcom.12029
• Kumar, A., Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilovich, T. (2014). Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory consumption of experiential and material purchases. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1924–1931. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614546556
• Merolla, A. J. (2012). Connecting here and there: A model of long-distance relationship maintenance. Personal Relationships, 19(4), 775–795. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2011.01392.x
• National Park Service. (n.d.). Webcams: Watching Wildlife. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/watchingwildlife/webcams.htm, checked September 2026.
• Tsapelas, I., Aron, A., & Orbuch, T. (2009). Marital boredom now predicts less satisfaction 9 years later. Psychological Science, 20(5), 543–545. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02332.x
• Van Boven, L., & Ashworth, L. (2007). Looking forward, looking back: Anticipation is more evocative than retrospection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136(2), 289–300. DOI: 10.1037/0096-3445.136.2.289