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37 long distance date ideas that are not just video calls

Almost every list of long distance date ideas is the same list: watch a movie together, cook the same meal, play an online game. Those are fine. They are also three ideas stretched into thirty. Here are ideas sorted by what they actually cost you, including ones that work when you are eight hours apart and never awake together.

Fifteen minutes, no planning

For a normal weeknight when you are both tired and neither of you wants a project.

• Narrate your walk home to them, live, like a nature documentary.
• Take a photo of the same thing at the same moment: the sky, your desk, your feet. Compare.
• Read them the first page of whatever is on your bedside table.
• Go through each other's camera roll from last week and explain every photo.
• Order each other's dinner. They pick, you eat it, no vetoes.
• Do a joint grocery list for the shared kitchen you do not have yet.
• Send a voice note instead of texting for one whole day.
• Show them your fridge. Genuinely. It is more interesting than you think.
• Both write down three words for how the week has been, then compare.
• Give them a tour of one room, but only the things with a story attached.

An evening, some planning

These need a shared hour and a bit of setting up. Worth putting in the calendar.

• Cook the same recipe at the same time, but neither of you gets the full method. Each of you has half the instructions and has to talk the other through it.
• A museum date: one of you screen-shares a museum's online collection and gives the other a guided tour, making up everything you do not know.
• Play a board game over video with two physical copies. Slower than an app and much better.
• Get ready together. Both actually dress up, both go somewhere afterward, even if it is separately.
• Watch something one of you loves and the other has never seen, and take it personally when they are unimpressed.
• Learn a small thing on a video call: a card trick, ten words of each other's language, how to fold something properly.
• Draw each other from memory. No reference photos. Compare, then argue.
• Do a blind taste test with snacks you posted to each other in advance.
• Take a personality test as each other, then see how badly you both did.
• Build a playlist in real time, alternating tracks, with a rule that each song has to answer the last one.
• Take a virtual walk: one of you picks a random street on a map service, the other navigates and narrates.
• Plan a trip you cannot afford yet, properly, with dates and a real budget.

Works across a big time difference

The genuinely hard case. If your evening is their breakfast, anything that needs both of you awake at once is already a scheduling negotiation. These do not.

• A letter you both write and neither reads until a night you have both agreed on. The waiting does the work.
• Write a letter tonight and post it so it lands on their mat in the morning, their time. No receipt, no typing dots, nothing you can do to hurry it. It is a different thing to read a letter that was written while you were asleep.
• Leave a note where they will find it when they wake up. Every day for a week.
• Talk each other through a place only one of you can see. One of you has the map, the other is in it. It is the only game shape we know of that is better at a distance than in the same room.
• Take turns adding one item to a shared list of things to do when you are next in the same place. No discussion allowed, just additions.
• A running photo thread with one rule: only things you think they specifically would like.
• Asynchronous chess, or dots and boxes, one move a day.
• Record a voice note of your ordinary morning and send it. Not the highlights. The ordinary parts are the ones they are missing.
• Set the same book going and stay roughly in sync, leaving each other notes in the margins.
• A word puzzle where the answer unlocks a date idea you have picked for them.
• Keep a shared jar of questions. Either of you writes one whenever it occurs to you, and you pull one out when you are stuck.

If the post is too slow for tonight, make them a letter that opens into flowers and send it so it is waiting when they wake. They tap the envelope, the screen fills with flowers, and your letter is underneath with your song ready to play. If the words are the hard part, here is what to write.

Bigger, occasional

• Send each other on a task in your own city, chosen by the other. Photo proof required.
• An anniversary rewatch of the first thing you ever watched together.
• Both type the date you made it official, on the same evening, without saying it first. If you match, you have a monthversary and it comes round twelve times a year instead of once. If you do not match, you have a much better evening than the one you had planned.
• Post something physical for no reason. A postcard beats almost anything digital, purely because it took days.

What actually makes a long distance date work

Three things, after a lot of trial and error.

It has to be doing something, not just talking about something. Calls where you are both only talking run out. Calls where you are both making dinner, or losing a game, or trying to draw each other, do not run out in the same way, because there is a thing happening that neither of you is fully in control of.

It has to survive a bad week. Any plan that needs both of you at your best is a plan that quietly dies the first time one of you is exhausted. The ideas at the top of this page exist for that.

Anticipation counts as part of the date. A thing you have both been waiting for since Tuesday is a different experience from the same thing done spontaneously. This is why sealed letters and scheduled nights work so well, and it costs nothing to add waiting to something you were going to do anyway.