I am king older than most posts i think. It was… different somehow. You would call and text, mostly call. I remember subscribing to one of the first ever mobile offers for “couples” where you had something like 1000 minutes of free calls and 100 free SMSs between only two specific phone numbers (of the same oprator, ofc), and that was amazing. Before that, it was expensive inter-city calls on landlines, because mobiles where too expensive.

I also remember writing letters, yes, paper letters, like twice a week. I have copied them all and kept also the replies, it will be fun times for the kids (… will they still be able to read handwrite?).

I took an awfull lot of trains in that year long… Luckly we where only like 2h by train away, but hey, we wanted it phisical you know, not just voice.

SMS where the big tihng. I remember wanting to replace my phone with one with a full qwerty keyboard… But ended up getting really good at T9 away those 160 characters. And be careful to fit or else! :)

Good times.

Anyway, forget about long distance relationships unless the “long distance” part is very clearly defined in time, no matter what technology is.

And no, it last less than 12 months. It was hard at 20 not to be phisically together for most of the week.

My gf was finishing a semester before she was to move out to California with me. I awoke to a butt-dial voicemail of her dry-humping a guy. She tried to say it wasn’t what it was. I transferred the audio to my computer and sent it to her (online, but in 2002, so I think it still applies to the question cause we didn’t have voip and such). She couldn’t defend it. I never spoke to her again.

I’m 40, and so I experienced the naughties 2000-2010 in dating life. Everyone was just getting cell phones when I was in high school. Cell phones ended the expensive long distance phone calls over land lines. Prior to that, writing culture was the primary form of communication. My parents sent each other letters in the mail. Life was much slower, but information was much harder to come by. Entertainment sucked and was just whatever was on cable TV. Music and movies were monopolies that were largely dictated by a few elites.

People were more social though. Everyone is getting their endorphins from idiot bricks like we are doing right now stranger. There is very little actual motivation to socialize and without the deficit building up for days or weeks to motivate socializing, humans are less likely to put out enough effort or value their opportunities. Now the problem is connecting with someone in the real world while disconnecting from the zombie feed in equal measures as individuals to focus on each other.

My mother is Asian and my father is British. My father had a pen pal that was a friend of my mother’s, and my mother also decided to write to him. I believe they wrote for about two years before deciding that if they want a relationship, they’ll have to get married. So my mother moved to Britain and they were married within the month.

Before the internet (and Facebook) became more accessible, my mother would write to her family often and occasionally call, which was expensive.

We’re now 57. At age 25 my SO went to work for MSF in a really remote place - like, no road through the jungle, small airfield served by derelict Russian aircraft, and in the middle of that nowhere, a huge refugee camp serving 2 warring nations.

It’s something she needed to do.

The pay was shit, but the local expenses where null, with food and accommodation being provided; her entire salary went into calling once a week for about 20 to 30 minutes (if the phone lines worked). She wrote also, same rhythm like once a week, but I would usually get them as a bunch of 3 or 4.

I couldn’t write. Dunno why retrospectively, I just couldn’t. Not getting the phone calls was nerve-wracking of course.

She was good at what she did, so in order to have her stay beyond the scope of her original mission they offered a Logistics position to me so I could join her. As it happens, in these conditions that position was untenable & she didn’t want us as a couple to establish ourselves in such a hellish place.

She came back changed of course. But mainly, when she did move across the earth again a few years later, we went together.

We talked with our voices on dumbphones, and it was awful.

Written letters and phonecalls on the weekend when the long distance rate was cheaper.

with some colored boxes :)

Well… in my experience it never went well. Every teenage couple where one or both went to Uni ended up breaking up before the year was out. SMS was relatively expensive in the 90’s/00’s, as was broadband - a lot of folk were on dial-up internet, which was also paid by the minute. So if money was a factor you’d go online, download your emails, disconnect, then draft all your replies, reconnect and send.

In fact, email was probably the preferred non-urgent medium between my peers until 2008 or so. SMS was more of a “hey, we’re headed to the bar now” kinda thing.

Letters were getting rarer and rarer - but one particular friend I exchanged actual postal letters a few times a year until 2012 or so.

As for family, my mum called me every week, and I never went more than 6 weeks between visits back home. Still don’t.

I was off at university, 2500 km away. We wrote letters and saw each other at Christmas and summers. It went on for two years, then I moved back. We’ve been married 45 years.

I was a volunteer teacher in Africa from 1988-91.

I would write letter from my village, and it would take one month to get to my family in Canada. They would write a response, and it would take one month to get back to my village. That was just the reality.

Now the village I lived in has a cell phone tower in the middle of it. I haven’t been back, but I am willing to bet that a lot has changed.

Calling cards. That’s how we did it. Cheap, international calls by pre-dialling another number first. Still cost a fortune.