Long distance date ideas that are not just another video call

The problem with most long distance date ideas is that they are just a video call wearing a hat. You sit, you look at each other, you both feel vaguely like you are failing at something. But the dates you remember from when you lived near each other were rarely about talking. You were doing a thing, and the talking happened around the edges.

So the trick is to give yourselves a thing to do. Something with a beginning, a middle and an end, where silence is comfortable because you are both busy. Here are the ones that genuinely work, with the fiddly setup details included, because "watch a film together" is useless advice without them.

Watch the same thing at the same second

Not "we both watched it, text me your thoughts". Actually synced, so you gasp at the same frame. Use a watch party extension or a streaming service's built in party mode, keep a voice call running on your phones instead of the laptop audio, and agree on the rule up front: talkers or non-talkers? Both are valid. Some couples want live commentary, some want silence and a debrief in the credits. Mismatched expectations here ruin more film nights than bad films do.

Better than picking a random film: run a season. Six weeks, one series, same night. It gives you a standing appointment that is not "we should call more", and it gives you an inside language. You will be quoting it for years.

Cook the same recipe, badly, at the same time

This is the best one and almost nobody does it. Pick a recipe, both buy the ingredients, get on a call and cook it together. You will burn different things. One of you will not own a sieve. It is genuinely funny and it produces the closest feeling to being in the same room of anything on this list, because kitchens are where couples talk.

Make it a competition if you are both like that: same recipe, photos at the end, an impartial judge (a flatmate, a sibling, a group chat). Or go easier and do a shared cocktail or a dessert on a weeknight when neither of you has ninety minutes.

Play something with a shared board

Skip the games where you take turns being bored. Look for things you play simultaneously and cooperatively:

• Co-op puzzle games where you each see half the information and have to describe it. They are basically communication exercises disguised as fun, and they get loud.
• Online jigsaw puzzles. Sounds sleepy. Is weirdly lovely. Two cursors nudging the same piece, low stakes chat for an hour.
• Drawing and guessing games for a group date with friends on both sides, which is underrated. Meeting each other's people matters.
• Chess or word games played slowly across a day, one move each whenever you have a second. This is the asynchronous date and it fills the gaps between the real ones.

Take a tour of somewhere neither of you is

A lot of the world's big museums have free virtual walkthroughs, and street view lets you walk basically anywhere. Two good versions of this:

• The museum date. Share a screen, wander, and make the rule that you each have to pick one favourite piece and defend it. The defending is the date.
• The nostalgia tour. Take them down the street you grew up on. Show them the shop, the bus stop, the terrible school. You learn more about someone in twenty minutes of this than in a month of texting.

Read the same book, one chapter ahead of nobody

A two person book club with no schedule pressure. Read the same chapter, then talk about it. Or read to each other on a call, which sounds twee and is in fact the single best way to fall asleep together from another continent. Audiobooks work too, played in sync while you both do the washing up.

Fall asleep on call

Not a date exactly, but it belongs here. Call, stop performing, let the conversation die, and just leave it running while you both drift off. Hearing someone breathe is a form of company. It is also the closest an LDR gets to the ordinary domestic quiet that couples in the same house take for granted.

Build a shared playlist that means something

A collaborative playlist with one rule: you can only add a song if you would explain why. Then explain why. It becomes a document of the whole relationship, and it is there on the train when you miss them. Related: send the song that made you think of them today rather than saving it for a conversation.

Plan the next visit as the date

Open a map, argue about the itinerary, book one thing. The anticipation is real closeness, not a consolation prize, and it turns "when do I see you" from an ache into a project. If it is a big one, see our guide to celebrating an anniversary long distance for how to make the visit itself the gift.

The bit between the dates

Here is the honest thing: the dates are the easy part. What wears an LDR down is the fourteen quiet hours in between, when you are both just living and neither of you wants to send another "what are you up to". That is a presence problem, not a date problem, and you cannot schedule your way out of it. See checking in without texting for the small version of this.