Lovense Publishes the Distance Index 2026, a Startling Annual Report on Long-Distance Intimacy

5 Million+ Connections in a Single Year Reveal Some Surprising Facts About Couples Who Live Apart

SINGAPORE, Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Lovense today published the Lovense Distance Index 2026. Partners on the Lovense Remote app, the hub of the Lovense ecosystem, logged 5.036 million remote sessions between October 2025 and September 2026, averaging 20.4 minutes each. Added together, they come to roughly 196 years of connection, which is longer than the telephone has existed.

In 2013, Crystal Jiang and Jeffrey Hancock published a study in the Journal of Communication. The long-distance couples they surveyed felt more intimate than couples living close by. "The long-distance couples try harder than geographically close couples in communicating affection and intimacy," Jiang said. That study drew its conclusions from how couples felt. Now, with five million anonymized app records, the Distance Index goes further and looks at how technology lets partners experience physical intimacy across distance.

Key findings

Most long-distance couples choose to meet at 10 p.m. The day is over. The phone is on the pillow. Across the week, that is the hour they chose: activity peaked between 10 and 11 p.m. local time, by session end on the reporting side. "Before I fall asleep, it's always you I think of."

One connection a day is often not enough for couples apart. On 37.8% of the days a partner connected, they came back for a second session.

Connections peaked on Valentine's Day, yet the sessions were among the shortest?! Long-distance couples logged about 22,000 sessions on February 14, 49% more than on comparable weekdays. Then the surprise: the median session lasted only 6.6 minutes, below an ordinary day. But the next night, February 15, the median session stretched past 11.7 minutes! Valentine's Day, it seems, was only the foreplay. The day after was the main course.

In one country, couples apart find it hard to say goodnight once they start. Within a single country, couples in Japan stayed on longest. One session in ten ran past 62 minutes. As the report puts it, "some people, once they connect, can't bring themselves to say goodnight."

More than half of the busiest routes cross a border. Eleven of the top 20 routes link two countries. On the Australia–United States route alone, couples split between the two countries logged 11,800 sessions. At 10 p.m. in Sydney, it is not yet dawn in Los Angeles. The report asks how many "When are you coming home?" messages sit behind that one route.

Long-distance longing crosses time as well as distance

The report sets its total against a timeline that runs from the steam age in 1830 through the first phone call in 1876 to the internet in 1995. Over those years, people learned to send words and then voices across any distance.

But if they wanted to touch each other, couples apart were still out of reach.

Engineers in intimacy technology have worked on that problem since 1975, when the computing pioneer Ted Nelson coined the term "teledildonics." In 2015, the sex-tech developer Kyle Machulis described the process to VICE. "You have to turn on your computer, hook up the toy, hope the toy has drivers on there, hope the drivers will talk to the toy in the correct way…" Few couples would go through that on a weeknight.

Dan Liu, an engineer, founded Lovense in Singapore in 2010 to take those steps away, with long-distance couples in mind first. The company still works under the same three words: "Closing the Distance." Its first app-controlled toys went on sale in 2013. They were the first piece of what is now the Lovense ecosystem.

A session today needs two phones. When one partner taps the screen, the command crosses the internet to the other partner's phone and then reaches the toy over Bluetooth. Couples can do this during a video call in the same app. The person wearing the toy decides how long it runs and can stop it at any moment.

Couples can also sync the same devices to music, video, live streams, and games built with the company's Unity and Unreal plugins. Outside developers build their own apps on its public APIs. That is the Lovense ecosystem today, and every part of it runs on the same connection a couple uses at 10 p.m.

"When we started in 2010, long distance meant you could see and hear each other, and that was all," said Dan Liu, founder and CEO of Lovense. "This report shows what couples do once touch is possible. Twenty minutes before bed, often twice in a day, on an ordinary weeknight. Our job is to keep taking steps out of their way. And to make sure what happens between two people stays between them. Everything else in the Lovense ecosystem is built on that one connection."

A market with no official count

No government counts long-distance couples, so the report's five million sessions have no official total to sit beside. The United Nations counted 304 million international migrants in 2024, nearly twice the 1990 figure. In the United States, 12.5% of couples who married in 2023 were living apart from their spouse, according to researchers at Bowling Green State University.

Jobs, degrees and visas now put a border, or an ocean, between a great many partners. The couples in this report found a way across it in the Lovense ecosystem. Tonight, between 10 and 11, many of them will connect again.

Full report: https://lovense.com/distance-index

About the data

The Lovense Distance Index 2026 analyzes 5.036 million valid remote sessions on Lovense Remote from October 2025 to September 2026. Times use the local time of the session-end event on the reporting side. All data was aggregated and anonymized. The report does not identify individual users.

About Lovense

Lovense is a pioneering sex-tech company specializing in remotely controlled and interactive pleasure products, revolutionizing long-distance intimacy through cutting-edge technology. Since 2010, Lovense is dedicated to enhancing personal and shared experiences by leveraging cutting-edge tech to tackle the long-distance relationship challenge, offering unparalleled interactive intimacy experiences for couples worldwide. For more information, please visit www.lovense.com. 

SOURCE Lovense