15 Things to Do With Your Long-Distance Boyfriend That Are Not "Watch a Movie Together"
Real long-distance life is mostly Tuesdays: async, unglamorous, quiet. Fifteen small things built for that — including raising a shared pixel pet that grows as your relationship does.
Every list of things to do with your long-distance boyfriend starts the same way: watch a movie together, play an online game, have a video-call dinner. Those are fine. They are also the things every couple already tried in month one, and they all share a flaw — they require both of you to be free at the same time, performing "quality time" while one of you is secretly tired. Real long-distance life is mostly Tuesdays: asynchronous, unglamorous, quiet. So here is a different list. Fifteen small things, most of them doable across time zones without scheduling anything, built for the part of the relationship that actually needs feeding. Including one unusual one — raising a small pixel pet together that grows as your relationship does — that has quietly become the favorite ritual of more couples than we expected.
1. Send the boring photo, not the good one
Not the sunset. The desk. The half-eaten lunch. The weird dog on your street. The curated photos say "look at my life"; the boring ones say "be in my life." Long-distance relationships run on the second kind. One unremarkable photo a day, no caption required, does more than a weekly photo dump ever will.
2. Write the wishlist you'd be embarrassed to say out loud
Open a shared note and each add five things you want to do together someday — small and big, silly and serious. A specific ramen shop. A lazy Sunday with no plans. Where you'd live if money didn't matter. It costs ten minutes, works fully asynchronously, and gives you a shared future to point at when the present feels long.
3. Raise a pixel pet together
This is the one that surprises people. Instead of another app to schedule calls in, you adopt a small shared creature that lives inside your relationship. In Togthr, the two of you raise a little round-headed robot — Togthr Bot, a pastel purple-and-pink pixel character with an 8-frame sprite animation — by writing small honest sentences about your days. It doesn't die if you forget a weekend. It grows: through 5 growth stages, from baby to legend, only as long as both of you keep showing up. Over time it unlocks 6 hidden career skins (programmer, doctor, astronaut, chef, police, firefighter), and there's a 1-in-72 hidden golden edition. A year in, you haven't just chatted — you've raised something together, and it remembers the boring Tuesdays too.
4. Leave voice notes instead of essays
Typing "how was your day" produces "fine lol." A thirty-second voice note produces the actual day — the sigh, the laugh, the part where they trail off. Voice carries what text edits out. One rule makes it work: no response deadline. A voice note is a gift, not a task.
5. Watch the same show — one episode behind each other
The trick isn't syncing playback; it's the one-episode gap. One of you stays an episode ahead and gets to watch the other catch up, react, and guess wrong. It turns a solo activity into a slow two-person conversation that stretches across a whole week.
6. Send a song with one sentence about why
Not a playlist — those die after week two. One song, one sentence: "this played in the store and I thought of you." Music plus context is a postcard. Build the shared playlist out of those postcards, slowly, and it becomes an archive of specific days.
7. Play the question game badly
Take turns asking one question a day, and ban the good questions. No "what's your love language." Ask the dumb ones: "what's the worst sandwich you ever ate," "what would your autobiography's worst chapter title be." The dumb questions get the real answers, because nobody performs for them.
8. Cook the same meal, separately, and rate each other
Pick a recipe neither of you has made. Cook it on the same weekend, in your own kitchens, and send photos of the result — including the failures. Judging each other's burnt rice is oddly intimate. It is a shared memory of a meal you technically never ate together, which is exactly the kind of memory long-distance couples are made of.
9. Read each other's day in one sentence
Every night, one sentence about your day, sent to the same place — a shared journal, or to a shared pet like Togthr Bot who holds it until the morning. The sentence is not for starting a conversation. It's for keeping the record. Months later, scrolling back through two people's one-sentence days is strangely moving. That record is what a shared life looks like from a distance.
10. Mail something stupid
Physical objects hit different when everything else is pixels. A postcard. A snack from your city that doesn't exist in theirs. A terrible souvenir. It costs a few dollars and lands like an event. Do it rarely enough that it stays an event.
11. Have a standing date that survives bad weeks
Pick one small recurring thing — Sunday coffee call, Friday voice note, a shared check-in with your pet before bed — and agree it happens even when the week was terrible. Especially then. The point of a ritual is that you don't renegotiate it when you're tired. Tired is when it matters.
12. Learn each other's tiny vocabularies
Every person has private words — the name they call their tired mood, the phrase from their hometown. Ask for them. Use them back. There is no faster way to make "goodnight" feel like it came from inside the relationship instead of from a script.
13. Plan the next visit before this one ends
The cruelest part of a visit is the airport. The antidote is leaving with the next date already on the calendar — or at least the month. The distance is much easier to carry when it has an end date, even a soft one.
14. Do nothing together on purpose
Call, and then don't entertain each other. One of you folds laundry, the other scrolls recipes, the call just stays open. It mimics the thing couples in the same city take for granted: existing near each other without performing. It feels weird for five minutes and then like the most natural thing in the world.
15. Let the pet be the excuse on days you have nothing to say
Some days there is no news. On those days, don't force a conversation — go feed the shared robot. Type one flat sentence: "long day, nothing happened." That's enough. Togthr Bot doesn't need you to be interesting. It just holds the day, and tomorrow your person reads it with their coffee and knows the shape of your Tuesday. Staying gently in touch on the empty days is the whole game. Everything else on this list is a bonus.
Start with #3 tonight: adopt your shared Togthr Bot together, write your first sentence each, and watch it take its first baby steps. Free to start — monthly is $5.49, yearly $37.99 when you're ready. Try Togthr free →
FAQ
What do you do with a long-distance boyfriend when you've run out of things to talk about?
Stop trying to generate conversation and switch to co-existing rituals. Shared objects — a show you're both watching, a shared journal, a pet you're raising together — create topics naturally because you're both living inside the same small thing. The empty days are exactly when a low-pressure ritual like feeding a shared pet matters most: one flat sentence is enough, and it keeps the thread unbroken.
Are virtual pet apps actually good for long-distance couples?
The shared ones are, yes — because they give the relationship a third small presence that accumulates history. In Togthr, the bot grows through 5 stages (baby to legend) only while both of you keep checking in, so it becomes a living record of the relationship's consistency. It's not a replacement for calls or visits; it's the Tuesday-sized thing that fills the gaps between them.
How often should long-distance couples talk?
There's no correct frequency — there's only a correct texture. Daily tiny touches (a photo, a sentence, a song) plus a few longer calls per week works better for most couples than one huge scheduled call, because it matches how closeness actually works in person: lots of small contact, occasional deep dives. Whatever rhythm you pick, protect one standing ritual that survives bad weeks.
What are good apps for long-distance couples in 2026?
Look for three things: async-first design (works across time zones without scheduling), a shared persistent space (not just a chat log), and low daily effort. Togthr covers all three — it's a shared pixel pet plus journal that works across 8 languages, free to start, $5.49/month or $37.99/year in USD regions with local pricing in 13 countries. Pair it with whatever calling app you already use and you're set.