A young man and woman sit side by side in the front seat of a car for an Instagram video that runs about a minute and a half, and a line of white text sits at the top of the frame the entire time: “5 Red Flags In Long Distance Relationships.” The post is from @_iluvwillll, and its caption is short: “Don’t ignore the signs,” with a tag for a second account and the hashtag #reels.
He has dark curly hair, a goatee and a gray blue button shirt. She has long straight black hair, a light green top and a butterfly pendant, and she sits close enough that both fit in the frame, with the pale ceiling and sun visor of the car above them. They take turns talking to the camera. Each flag appears as its own line of text near the middle of the frame, one at a time, replacing the one before it, while the title stays up top. The first flag is on screen by about the seventh second, the second by about the twentieth, the third by about the thirty eighth, the fourth by about the fifty first and the fifth by about one minute nine, so each heading gets somewhere between 13 and 18 seconds of explanation.
The five flags, as they appear on screen, run in this order. Number one is “Texting and calling is ‘too much.'” Number two is “Not sharing location.” Number three is “They’re keeping you a secret.” Number four is “You barely know who you’re talking too,” spelled that way in the video. Number five is “They only care about looks.” The man’s hand sweeps into the foreground while the first, second and fourth flags are up, pointing and counting things off. The video does not caption the spoken explanation behind each heading, so the headings are the only wording this article can quote.
Research on long distance couples bears on how much weight contact carries. A 2018 study in Interpersona, an international journal on personal relationships, by Adam Hampton, Jessica Rawlings, Stanislav Treger and Susan Sprecher surveyed a diverse online sample of people in long distance romantic relationships. The authors report that greater frequency of using various communication channels was associated with both relationship satisfaction and communication satisfaction. Text messaging was the most frequently used channel, and Skype use was the strongest predictor of both relationship satisfaction and communication satisfaction. They also found that communication satisfaction mediated the link between Skype use and relationship satisfaction, meaning video calls seemed to help in part through how satisfied partners felt with their communication.
That finding fits the first flag. In the study, partners who used the channels more often reported being happier with the relationship and with how they communicated, which means a partner who pushes back on texting and calling is limiting the very channels the study links to satisfaction. It does not prove that every partner who finds contact heavy is a poor match. The study measured satisfaction, not breakups, and it looked at people in long distance relationships rather than predicting which ones last.
For a reader planning a trip to see a long distance partner, a proposal or a visit, the five headings turn into five things to check before a ticket gets booked. Ask for a video call, since that is the channel the research found most tied to satisfaction. Find out whether the person has told friends and family about you, which speaks to flag three. Learn something about their daily life that a photo could not tell you, which speaks to flag four. Notice whether the conversation ever goes past appearance, which speaks to flag five. Location sharing is a choice for the couple, and a partner who declines is not automatically hiding something.
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