Three calls into the week, there’s no news left to report. You’ve already texted each other about lunch, the commute and the weird thing your coworker said. So the call opens with “how was your day?” and ends twenty minutes later with “okay, night.”

Try bringing one good question to every call, and keep a few rituals that don’t need you in the same room. Below are long distance relationship questions that work over video, grouped by the kind of call you’re having.

Every question here comes from Lolo Cards - 4,700 conversation cards for iPhone.

What can you ask instead of “how was your day?”

“How was your day?” gets “fine” because it asks for a full report. A narrower question gets a story.

The second question is for the small stuff that piles up between calls, like a song you heard or something a stranger said. On the couch you’d mention it in passing. On a call it gets lost unless someone asks.

How do you make a question of the day work?

A long call can’t happen every day when time zones and work shifts get in the way. A single question fits into any day.

  1. In the morning, one of you sends one question by text.
  2. You both think about it during the day, without typing the answer.
  3. On the evening call, you answer it out loud, where you can see each other’s faces.

Take turns picking. Two good ones to start with:

The first one gives you tomorrow’s question. The second is worth asking early, because the answer tells you what to do on the days when there’s no call at all.

How do you plan a date night over video?

Pick one evening a week and make it a date for just you two. Put the phone on a stand so nobody holds it at arm’s length. Cook or order the same dinner on both ends, or start the same movie on a count of three and pause it halfway to talk.

If you want something lighter than a heart-to-heart, would you rather questions work as well on a screen as across a table. Another easy option: each of you scrolls back through your camera roll, picks one photo the other hasn’t seen and tells the story behind it.

Which memories are worth going back to?

Distance pauses new shared moments for a while. The old ones are still there, and talking them through is the next best thing to sitting next to each other.

Save the missing-me question for a good night. After a rough day it can sting.

How do you talk about the future when you live apart?

Long-distance couples hear “so, when is one of you moving?” from everyone. It helps to have talked about it with each other first. Start with the big picture and let yourselves dream a little, then get concrete when you’re both ready.

If your answers don’t match yet, write both down and come back to them in a month. Plans across two cities rarely get settled in one call. For more questions like these, try our deep questions to ask your partner.

How do you end a call without it fizzling out?

Don’t let the call end on a battery warning. A couple of minutes before you hang up, ask one quiet question:

If it’s morning for one of you and bedtime for the other, try this one instead:

When you run out of questions of your own, our questions for couples go from easy ones to the kind that run past midnight.

What does research say about long-distance couples?

Distance is hard, and it doesn’t automatically make a relationship weaker. Two studies are worth knowing:

Neither study predicts how any one couple will do. The diary study does hint that fewer conversations can still feel close when you share more in them.

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