Research
What we actually know about long-distance relationships
Search for long-distance relationship statistics and the same handful of numbers turn up on dozens of sites, all citing each other. Here is where they actually come from, and what is genuinely known versus repeated.
The number everyone quotes
The 58 percent figure.
Most articles on long-distance relationships cite a success rate somewhere in the high fifties to low sixties percent, often stated as fact with no source attached. Traced back, the most commonly repeated version of this number originates from a single 2018 OnePoll survey of around 1,000 US adults, a consumer opinion poll, not a longitudinal academic study. It has been recycled across so many articles since that it now reads as settled research. It is not. It is one small survey, from one year, in one country.
A steadier figure
What is measured more consistently.
A separate, widely repeated figure attributed to the American Counseling Association puts the share of college students who report having been in a long-distance relationship at around three in four. This one is cited more consistently across sources, though like most statistics in this space it is difficult to trace back to a single, dated, publicly available primary study. Treat it as a commonly cited figure, not a verified one.
What is actually knowable
What this means practically.
Rather than invent better numbers, here is what does not need a survey to be true: distance changes how effort gets shown, not whether either of you has any. Making someone coffee is visible when you share a kitchen and invisible from four hundred miles away unless you say it out loud. A ritual that survives a missed day tends to last longer than one that punishes it. None of that needs a citation. It is just what building KTL, and living apart, has actually shown us.
Why we are telling you this
Instead of making up better numbers.
We could have written this page the way most competitors do: state the 58 percent figure as fact, add a stock photo, move on. We would rather you know exactly how thin that number actually is, the same way we would rather show you a quiet month on your Monthly Wrapped honestly than pad it.