How far does your love go?

Our survey results and more

On the 5th of March, we opened our survey up for respondents to tell us about their long distance relationships. In two minutes and eight questions, we wanted to know who they were, how they met their partners, how long they had been together, the distance between them, and the most difficult thing about being long distance.

Since then we have gathered 102 responses and today shut down the survey. We have also learnt a lot from the results which we are sharing today. In addition to that, we had more in depth interviews with 10 other couples, learning about what makes their relationship tick and how they have managed to stay in a relationship with their significant other.

Guide to interpreting the results

We opened the survey up to people who are or have been in a long distance relationship, if they did not explicitly state it in the survey, we have no way of telling if they are still together or have separated.

The distance between couples is based on three things:

If the couple told us the cities they live(d) in, the distance is the km distance between both cities, or if the couple did not tell us the cities they live(d) in and they live in different countries, the distance is the km distance between the largest airports (by volume) in both countries, or if the couple did not tell us the cities they live(d) in and they live in the same country, the distance is the km distance between the two largest airports (by volume, in different cities) in that country.

Using airports in lieu of distance help us account for how far a member of the couple would have to travel to visit the other member, and thus a good proxy. Resources like Prokerala and Air Miles Calculator gave us the distances.

Distribution

We put out the survey, first on Twitter and Instagram, but we initially got responses from people who were like us — of African origin, living abroad. So we knew we had to switch things up and decided to post the survey on Reddit.

On r/SampleSize, we heard of surveytandem.com where people can post descriptions to their survey and have other people fill it in exchange for points depending on how long the survey takes to complete. This worked really well to our advantage and we got some really diverse respondents from all the continents! In turn, some of these respondents elected to be part of our smaller focus group, more on that later.

Now, for the good stuff…

Where are the respondents from?

We had respondents who live (or lived) in 36 countries with at least one country from every continent, Europe had the most respondent countries with 17. These countries represent where the respondent currently lives or where they lived for a significant period of their long distance relationship.