Jason Sprung, a 26-year-old comedian in Brooklyn, connected last year on the location-based dating app Tinder with a Tennessee woman who was visiting New York. The two didn’t get a chance to meet up while she was in town, but that didn’t deter them.

“We talked on the phone every day for almost a month and sent a lot of texts and photos and videos and sexts,” Mr. Sprung said. “We’d have phone sex. It felt close to a relationship without actually seeing the other person.”

The couple grew so intimate that the woman promised she would move to New York in six months. Mr. Sprung couldn’t wait that long. “So I broke up with someone I’d never even met before,” he said.

While his primary reasoning was logistical, he acknowledged that there may have been something else behind it. “You build up this rapport” over the phone and computer, he said, “and the expectations that we had of each other were very high. And I realized I’m not that great of a person. There’s no way I’m going to live up to that.”