I am in a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend, who is studying abroad. I initially struggled with separation anxiety and worried about the relationship changing because of the distance. I researched long-distance relationships and found that many couples break up because of similar challenges. So as a designer, I wonder if there is a way for them to see the evidence of love, I believe they will become more trusting of each other.
<aside> 🚩 A solution for Long Distance Love couples.
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Personal side project
Sep 2022 -Dec 2022 (4 Months)
UI/UX Designer
Research | Brand strategy | Interaction & UI design
1 UI/UX Designer
Last year my boyfriend went abroad to study and we started a long distance relationship. At first, I had very severe separation anxiety, because of the jet lag, our conversations became much shorter, he could not reply to me in time, and I was always worried that his love would change. So I read some articles about long-distance couples on the Internet, and saw that many couples broke up because of the same problems. So I started thinking about why long-distance relationships break up so many couples. I think due to the distance, you can not touch your lover or look at him/her face to face, which means to some insecure people they can not see the evidence of love.
So as a designer, I wonder if there is a way for them to see the evidence of love, I believe they will become more trusting of each other.
<aside> 🔘 How do we deal with communication issues between couples?
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<aside> 🔘 How do we resolve the information gap in communication between couples?
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<aside> 🔘 How can we increase the interaction between couples?
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<aside> ✅ Increase conversation and encourage couples to try different things.
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<aside> ✅ Guided sharing, encouraging couples to share their thoughts and feelings.
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<aside> ✅ Organize monthly activities to encourage couples to complete together, or add interactive mini-games to increase the interaction between couples.
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<aside> 🚩 A solution for Long Distance Love couples.
</aside>
Despite what many people believe, LDRs do not break up at any greater rate than more traditional, geographically close, couples.
Multiple studies comparing LDRs to geographically close couples find the same rates of breaking up over time.
Rates of Break-up for LDRs Versus Proximal (Close) Relationships (PR) from 5 Studies
Not a statistically significant difference (i.e., rates are statistically equal) (pubmed)
The most challenging aspect of a long distance relationship is maintaining the feeling of simply being part of one another’s lives. I sometimes compare intimacy to a rope that holds two people together. The inner core of the rope is the sharing of emotions between one another. But around this core are thousands of tiny fibers made up of each seemingly mundane exchange or experience that occurs between a couple. While no one fiber is terribly important, as a whole they create the true strength of the bond. Couples in LDRs usually have a great inner core, but by itself it will not be strong enough to hold the couple together. They have to really work on adding the outer fibers by learning how to share in each others world even while they’re apart.
＿By Long Distance Relationship expert Dr. Guldner. 2018
Yes, some problems may be made worse by distance.
Because they cannot visually monitor their partner in the same way as a geographically close couple can, they sometimes create a fantasy world in which their partner is cheating. This fantasy often would be dispelled in a geographically close relationship as couples monitor one another unconsciously or consciously. In an LDR this monitoring is far more difficulty and these fantasies can get out of hand.
＿By Long Distance Relationship expert Dr. Guldner. 2018
The main purpose of this questionnaire is to understand the anxiety faced by long-distance couples and the methods of self-adjustment. So at the beginning, I hope that both parties can answer the questionnaire to find out whether the troubles of the couples overlap. I sent this questionnaire to the Facebook community of Taiwanese abroad and the designer community with the same user experience research background as me, hoping to increase the response rate of the questionnaire and the willingness to participate in the collaborative design workshop.(nearly 3,000 people)
Unfortunately, 13 people responded to this questionnaire, and most of them only one of the partners was willing to accept the answer. But the other person is happy, nearly 69.2% of the people are willing to accept more in-depth interviews.