This isn't a personality quiz. There's no points total at the end. It's a list of the questions that — in our experience and in the research — tend to separate long-distance relationships that work from ones that quietly come apart.
Read through with your partner if you can. If not, with yourself. The answers aren't always pretty; that's the point.
Communication
- Do you both want roughly the same amount of contact per day? If not, has the more-contact partner felt heard about that, or are they suppressing it?
- When you have less contact than usual for a few days, is your default assumption "they're busy" or "something is wrong"? What does the answer tell you?
- Can you remember the last time you had a conversation that wasn't logistics, reassurance, or recap of your day?
- When you have a fight over text, do you typically switch to a call to resolve it, or do you let it fester and then act normal the next day?
- Are there things you've stopped bringing up because you don't want to argue from a distance?
Trust
- If your partner went out tonight and didn't text for four hours, would your reaction be calm acceptance, mild curiosity, or escalating anxiety?
- Have you ever checked their location, social media, or messages without their knowledge? How recently?
- Are there topics related to their life (friends, coworkers, exes) that consistently make you anxious — even when nothing specific has happened?
- If you found out tomorrow they had been mostly honest but had downplayed one specific friendship, would the rest of your trust in them survive?
- Do they extend the same default trust to you that you extend to them? Asymmetric trust is a quiet predictor of long-term trouble.
Investment
- In the last month, who initiated more of the calls? Who planned more of the visits? Who sent more "thinking of you" messages? If one person is doing 70%+ of the work, has that been the pattern for the whole relationship?
- Do both of you talk about the future in concrete terms (jobs, cities, dates), or does one of you keep things abstract?
- Has either of you turned down opportunities (a job, a trip, a friendship) for the relationship in a way the other doesn't know about? Resentment grows from invisible sacrifices.
- When you imagine your life five years from now, is your partner in it as a clear character, or as a question mark?
- Have you ever caught yourself fantasizing about being single or in a different relationship for reasons beyond ordinary curiosity? How often?
Independence
- Outside the time you spend with your partner, do you have a full life — friends you see regularly, work that engages you, hobbies that aren't "scrolling on my phone while waiting for them to be free"?
- When was the last time you went out with friends and didn't check your phone every twenty minutes for messages from them?
- If the relationship ended tomorrow, would your daily routine be largely the same, or would there be a gaping hole where the relationship was?
- Do you feel guilty when you have a great day on your own?
- Does your partner have their own life that you don't need to be the center of, or do you sense that you are the center of theirs in a way that worries you?
The future
- Do you have a rough date or range of dates by which the distance ends? Not "someday" — a quarter, a year.
- Have you and your partner discussed who is moving where, and is that decision made with both of you genuinely on board, or is one of you accommodating?
- Have you visited each other's actual cities — not just hotels or romantic weekend spots — enough to know what daily life there would feel like for the partner who moves?
- If a visa, job, or family obligation pushed your CTD date out by 18 more months, would the relationship survive that? Honestly?
- If you imagine yourself five years after closing the distance — past the moving-in honeymoon — do you actually want the life you'd have together? Including the small ordinary parts?
What to do with this
If most of these questions feel easy and clear, your relationship is probably in pretty good shape. Pay attention to the ones that didn't.
If a handful felt uncomfortable, that's normal — most LDR couples have at least 3-5 weak spots. They're things to work on, not signs to leave.
If most of these questions made you flinch, the relationship is probably under more strain than you've been admitting. That doesn't mean it's over. It does mean the next conversation with your partner is probably an important one — and that a few sessions with a therapist who works with LDR couples might do more than another year of figuring it out yourselves.
If you went through these and quietly knew it was over — that part of you has already left — read our guide on when to break up in an LDR.
Want to talk through specific patterns? The LDR Timeline covers what most couples are dealing with at each phase, and Questions to Ask Before You Move is the harder version of this checklist for couples thinking about closing the distance.