Long-Distance Relationship Statistics

She had been talking to him for eleven months. He was an engineer on a contract in Dubai, he video-called twice a week for the first two months and then stopped because of the site network, and three separate flights home had been cancelled by his employer. When she finally reported it, the FTC logged one more entry in a category that took in $1.16 billion in the first nine months of 2025 alone. Here is the thing almost nobody says out loud about long-distance relationships: the distance is not the obstacle they survive despite — it is the thing holding them together, and that is exactly why a long-distance relationship is the one kind you cannot verify from the inside.

That sentence is the spine of this page, and the data supports it in an uncomfortable way. Peer-reviewed research finds long-distance couples are more stable than nearby couples while they are apart, and that they fall apart on contact. The mechanism responsible — idealisation, the gap between the partner you imagine and the partner who leaves dishes in the sink — is the same mechanism a romance scam is engineered to occupy. So this page does two jobs. It gives you the honest numbers, ranges and all. Then it gives you a checklist so you can judge your own situation instead of guessing.

How many people are actually in a long-distance relationship in 2026?

Nobody knows, and the widely repeated figure of "14 million Americans" is a single twenty-year-old estimate that has been copied forward without revision ever since. The most defensible recent anchor is not that number at all: it is the National Center for Family and Marriage Research finding that 12.5% of US newlyweds in 2023 were married and living apart, down slightly from 13.4% in 2018.

That single figure does more work than the headline everyone quotes, because it is recent, it is Census-derived, and it has a stated definition. Break it down by age and it gets more interesting still.

Group	Share married and living apart (2023)	Direction vs 2018
All newlyweds	12.5%	Down from 13.4%
Newlyweds aged 15–24	26.6%	Highest of any age band
Newlyweds aged 25–34	9.2%	Lowest of any age band
Newlyweds aged 65+	13.7%	Second peak in later life

Source: NCFMR Family Profile FP-25-27, based on American Community Survey data. Note the U-shape. Living apart is common at the very start of adult life and again after 65, and least common in the years when couples are building households and careers together.

Alongside that, the Institute for Family Studies reports roughly 3.5 million married Americans living apart from their spouse for reasons other than an impending divorce — a figure that has more than doubled since 1990, driven mostly by dual-career households that cannot find two jobs in one city. Add unmarried dating couples, deployed service members and students, and the true total is plainly in the millions. How many millions depends entirely on what you count.

Do long-distance relationships actually work?

Yes — the best evidence says they work better than nearby relationships right up until the moment the distance closes, at which point roughly 1 in 3 end within 3 months. This is the finding that reframes everything else on this page, and it comes from Stafford and Merolla (2007), published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

Their study found three things worth holding together:

• Long-distance dating relationships were more stable than geographically close ones for as long as the partners stayed apart.
• About one-third broke up within three months of becoming geographically close.
• Extreme idealisation during separation, and longer gaps between visits, predicted instability at reunion.

Roughly 1 in 3 long-distance couples break up within three months of finally living in the same place — the separation was holding the relationship together.

Compare that against the number every listicle leads with. The famous 58% success rate traces to a 2018 survey of 1,000 American adults, run by OnePoll and commissioned by a sex-toy company, as reported at the time. The same survey is the origin of the "132 miles" threshold — respondents were simply asked how far counts as long distance and the answers were averaged — and of the widely repeated claim that the four-month mark is when distance starts to bite. It is not fraudulent, but it is a marketing poll with a sample of 1,000 commissioned by KIIROO, and it is being cited on hundreds of pages as though it were longitudinal research.

Claim	Actual origin	Type of evidence	How much weight
14–15 million Americans in LDRs	Center for the Study of Long Distance Relationships, c.2005	Single practitioner estimate	Low — never revised
58% of LDRs succeed	OnePoll survey, 2018, n=1,000	Commissioned marketing poll	Low–moderate
"Long distance" begins at 132 miles	Same 2018 poll	Averaged self-report	Low
~1 in 3 split within 3 months of reunion	Stafford & Merolla, 2007	Peer-reviewed, longitudinal	High
12.5% of newlyweds living apart	NCFMR FP-25-27, ACS 2023 data	Federal survey microdata	High

If you take one methodological point from this page, take that table. The two strongest numbers in the whole topic are the two that almost no one quotes.

Why do so many long-distance couples break up right after closing the distance?

Because distance removes the daily evidence that would otherwise correct your picture of a person, and reunion delivers all of it at once — which is why about 1 in 3 couples separate within three months of closing the gap. Stafford and Merolla named the mechanism: idealisation. Apart, you assemble a partner out of their best hours — the calls they chose to make, the photos they chose to send, the version of themselves they had time to compose. Together, you get the unedited version, and the gap has to be absorbed in weeks.

This is the hinge of the page. Idealisation is not a character flaw. It is a structural consequence of low-bandwidth contact, and it happens to honest couples constantly. But it also describes, with almost no modification, the operating conditions a romance scam requires: sustained emotional intimacy, controlled information, and a permanently deferred meeting.

The practical difference between a real long-distance partner and a fabricated one is therefore not how they make you feel. Both produce the same feeling. The difference is whether their claims about the world hold up when you check them independently — which is what the checklist below is for.

How common are military long-distance relationships, and why are they impersonated so often?

The US active-duty force is about 1.3 million people supporting roughly 1.5 million immediate family members, and service members are among the most impersonated identities in romance fraud. Those population figures come from the Department of Defense Demographics Profile of the Military Community, and we quote them deliberately rounded: the profile's year-to-year category definitions shift enough that precise spouse and dependent counts are not safely comparable across editions.

What matters for this page is the structural fact underneath the count. A deployment or an unaccompanied posting produces a relationship conducted almost entirely through a screen, on the other party's schedule, with legitimate reasons for missed calls — which is the exact shape a fabricated relationship also takes.

The impersonation problem is separate and well documented. Scammers borrow uniformed identities because rank and service read as trustworthy, and because deployment supplies a ready-made, sympathetic explanation for never meeting, never video-calling, and needing money wired for "leave requests" or medical costs. The AARP analysis of FTC Consumer Sentinel data reports that the military community — active duty, National Guard, veterans and their families — filed 99,443 fraud reports in 2024, up 6%, with total losses of $584 million, up nearly 25% on 2023.

If someone you are talking to claims to be deployed, the cheapest verification you have is consistency across channels. Real service members have digital histories that predate you. A borrowed identity usually does not — which is what a username consistency check is designed to surface.

How many long-distance relationships cross a border?

Cross-border relationships are common enough that the US government issues tens of thousands of fiancé petitions a year — 56,382 I-129F approvals in 2024, a 12-year high. The Boundless K-1 fiancé visa report tracks the pipeline in detail.

Metric	Figure	Period
K-1 visas issued	19,825	FY2023 (down 7% vs FY2022)
I-129F fiancé petitions approved	56,382	2024 — a 12-year high
K-1 denial rate	27.8%	FY2023, down from a 37% peak in 2022
Median processing time	6.1 months	Early FY2025, down from 13.9 months in 2023
Share of all nonimmigrant visas	0.1%	2023

Source: Boundless analysis of State Department data

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Two honest caveats. First, published K-1 counts vary by whether you are reading visas issued at consulates or petitions approved by USCIS — those are different stages, and the gap between 19,825 and 56,382 is a pipeline artefact, not a contradiction. Second, a K-1 approval is meaningful evidence in its own right: the couple had to document a real relationship and, in almost every case, an in-person meeting within the previous two years. That is more verification than most domestic couples ever perform.

How much money is lost to romance scams in 2026?

US consumers reported $1.16 billion in romance-scam losses across just the first nine months of 2025 — about $2,950 every minute, around the clock. That comes from FTC Consumer Sentinel Network data through 30 September 2025, covering 55,604 reports — a 22% increase on the same period in 2024.

$1.16 billion in romance-scam losses in nine months of 2025 works out to roughly $4.25 million a day, or about $2,950 every minute.

Source: FBI IC3 Internet Crime Reports, 2024 and 2025 editions

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For scale, that $1.16 billion sits inside a much larger total: US consumers reported $12.5 billion lost to fraud of all kinds in 2024, up 25% on 2023.

The FBI's separate Internet Crime Complaint Center 2025 report tracks the same crime under "confidence/romance fraud" and tells a sharper version of the story.

Year	IC3 confidence/romance losses	Year-over-year change
2023	$652,544,805	—
2024	$672,009,052	+3.0%
2025	$929,287,469	+38.3%

IC3's 2025 report also recorded 1,008,597 total complaints — the first million-complaint year in its 25-year history — and $20.877 billion in total losses, up 26% on 2024. Romance and confidence fraud ranked fifth by loss, behind investment, business email compromise, tech support and personal data breach. Among complainants aged 60 and over, confidence and romance losses reached $584.0 million across 10,188 complaints, against $389.3 million across 7,626 complaints in 2024 — a 50% rise in losses on a 34% rise in complaints.

Where do long-distance romance scams actually begin?

Nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said it began on a social media platform — not on a dating app. The FTC's April 2026 data spotlight puts social media at the centre of the fraud economy generally: nearly 30% of people who reported losing money to any scam in 2025 said it started there, with reported losses of $2.1 billion — roughly eight times the 2020 figure, and more than any other contact method.

Source: FTC Data Spotlight, April 2026, note 1. Excludes reports with no contact method recorded

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Nearly 60% of 2025 romance-scam loss reports started on social media, against 28% of fraud loss reports overall — romance fraud is more concentrated there than any other scam type.

The behavioural sequence documented in the research literature is consistent: three to six months of grooming before any financial request, a deep emotional attachment established first, and a crisis introduced only once the relationship feels established. That timeline overlaps almost exactly with the point at which a genuine long-distance relationship is at its most idealised — around the four-to-eight-month mark. For the wider platform-by-platform picture, see our catfishing statistics and online dating statistics.

How can you tell a real long-distance relationship from one you cannot verify?

Not by how it feels — genuine and fabricated long-distance relationships produce identical emotions — so the only workable test is whether their claims survive independent checking, and these 6 checks are the ones that do the work. Here is the framework, ordered from cheapest to most involved. Work down it. If you clear all six, your situation looks like a normal long-distance relationship. If you stall on two or more, stop sending money and slow the relationship down until you have not.

#	Check	What passing looks like	What should concern you
1	Live video, unscheduled	They pick up, on camera, without prior notice	Camera never works; audio only; always a reason
2	Digital history predating you	Accounts, photos and friends going back years	Everything created within months of meeting you
3	Consistency across channels	Name, city, employer and photos match everywhere	Details shift; the same photos appear elsewhere under other names
4	Third-party corroboration	You have spoken to a friend, colleague or relative of theirs	Total social isolation; nobody else ever appears
5	A meeting that actually happens	A date, a booking, a plan that survives contact with a calendar	Repeated cancellations, each individually plausible
6	Money flows in one direction only	No money has moved, ever	Any request for cash, gift cards, crypto or "help with fees"

Two of those are worth expanding, because they are where the data concentrates.

Check 3 is the highest-yield one. A person maintaining a fabricated identity has to keep a story consistent across every channel they use, indefinitely, under emotional pressure. Almost nobody manages it. Cross-referencing a phone number, an email address or a username against the accounts attached to it is the fastest way to see whether a claimed identity has a real footprint — that is what our reverse phone consistency check and email consistency check are built to do, and you can start one from the checker on our homepage.

Check 6 is the bright line. There is no version of a healthy relationship, at any distance, that requires you to wire money to someone you have never met in person. The FTC's median romance-scam loss of $2,218 in Q3 2025 is not a fortune — it is a phone-sized amount that felt reasonable in the moment. The 9.4× mean-to-median gap tells you what happens to the people for whom the first payment was not the last one.

What this means if it is happening to you right now. The most common feeling reported by victims is not stupidity. It is loyalty — the sense that checking would betray someone who has done nothing wrong. Reframe it: verification is not an accusation, and an honest partner clears every item on that list without effort or offence. If asking to video-call causes a fight, the fight is the information. And if you have already sent money, report it to the FTC and to IC3 rather than absorbing it privately; the 2025 loss totals on this page exist only because people did.

Why do long-distance relationship statistics disagree so much?

Because there is no standard definition of "long distance" and no federal survey that measures it directly — so 4 specific problems explain nearly every discrepancy you will find, starting with the fact that the two most-quoted figures come from a practitioner estimate and a marketing poll rather than from research.

1. The definition problem. Researchers have used thresholds ranging from "cannot see each other as often as they want" to fixed mileage cutoffs, against the 132-mile figure the 2018 poll produced by simply asking respondents. Move the threshold and the population changes by millions. A couple 90 minutes apart is long-distance under one definition and not under another.

2. The inclusion problem. Does a deployed service member count? A student home for summers? A commuter-marriage spouse who is home every weekend? The Institute for Family Studies figure of roughly 3.5 million married Americans living apart deliberately excludes separations preceding divorce; the NCFMR 12.5% figure counts newlyweds in separate households regardless of reason. Neither is wrong. They measure different things, and neither is the "14 million."

3. The provenance problem. This is the big one. The 14–15 million figure comes from the Center for the Study of Long Distance Relationships and dates to roughly 2005. The 58% success rate and the 132-mile definition come from a single 2018 OnePoll survey of 1,000 adults commissioned by a consumer-products brand. Both are then cited as if they were census counts and clinical trials respectively. When you see them on a page with no link and no date, you are looking at a copy of a copy.

4. The reporting-base problem in the fraud numbers. The FTC and the FBI both publish romance-fraud losses and their figures differ substantially — $1.16 billion versus $929 million for overlapping 2025 periods. That is not a contradiction. They are different collection systems with different intake populations, different category definitions ("romance scams" versus "confidence/romance fraud"), and different reporting windows. Use them as two independent lower bounds on the same phenomenon, never as competing estimates of one true number. And remember that every fraud figure on this page is a reported figure. The FTC has repeatedly noted that most fraud is never reported at all, which means these are floors, not ceilings.

Our position, stated plainly: cite the NCFMR and Stafford & Merolla numbers, cite the FTC and IC3 series with their windows attached, and treat "14 million" and "58%" as folklore with a footnote. That is how this page has been built.

What should you take away from the data?

Long-distance relationships are not doomed, and the 12.5% of 2023 newlyweds living apart are not living on borrowed time. The strongest evidence available says the opposite — they hold together better than nearby relationships for as long as the partners stay apart. But that finding is a warning as much as a reassurance, because the reason for the stability is the absence of daily correction, and that is a property of the arrangement, not of the person you are with.

Which returns us to the spine. The same distance that makes a long-distance relationship durable is the distance that makes it unverifiable, and romance fraud is simply an industry built inside that gap: $1.16 billion in nine months, 55,604 reports, a 22% year-on-year rise, and losses growing 38% in 2025 after a flat 2024. Nearly 60% of those loss reports began not on dating apps, where people expect romance, but on social media, where they do not.

So the useful conclusion is not "be suspicious." It is narrower and easier to act on: emotional certainty and verified identity are two different things, and in a long-distance relationship you can have the first without the second for a very long time. Run the six checks. If they pass, invest in the relationship with a clear head — the research says your odds are good. If they do not, the cheapest moment to find out is always now.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of long-distance relationships work out?

The widely cited 58% figure comes from a 2018 OnePoll survey of 1,000 US adults commissioned by a consumer brand, not from academic research. The strongest peer-reviewed evidence, from Stafford and Merolla (2007), found long-distance dating relationships were more stable than geographically close ones while partners remained apart, but that roughly one-third broke up within three months of closing the distance.

How many people are in long-distance relationships in the US?

There is no direct federal count. The most defensible recent figure is that 12.5% of US newlyweds in 2023 were married and living apart, per the National Center for Family and Marriage Research using American Community Survey data. The Institute for Family Studies separately puts the figure at roughly 3.5 million married Americans living apart from a spouse for reasons other than divorce. The often-repeated "14 million" figure dates to roughly 2005 and has never been revised.

Why do long-distance couples break up after finally moving in together?

Research points to idealisation. During separation, partners build an image of each other from selective, low-bandwidth contact, and reunion delivers all the corrective information at once. Stafford and Merolla found that stronger idealisation and longer gaps between visits both predicted instability at reunion, with about one-third of couples separating within three months of becoming geographically close.

How much money is lost to romance scams each year?

US consumers reported $1.16 billion in romance-scam losses to the FTC in the first nine months of 2025 across 55,604 reports, a 22% rise on the same period in 2024. The FBI's IC3 recorded $929.3 million in confidence and romance fraud losses for full-year 2025, up 38.3% on 2024. The two agencies use different collection systems and category definitions, so both figures should be read as lower bounds.

Are dating apps or social media riskier for romance scams?

Social media, by a wide margin. Nearly 60% of people who reported a romance-scam loss in 2025 said it started on a social media platform, per the FTC. Social media accounts for about 28% of fraud loss reports overall, so romance fraud is more than twice as concentrated there as fraud in general. The FTC does not publish a matching dating-app share, so treat any precise app-versus-social ratio you see elsewhere with suspicion. Dating apps run identity and photo verification and users arrive expecting romantic approaches, while an unsolicited social media message carries no such warning.

Why do scammers pretend to be deployed military personnel?

Deployment supplies a ready-made explanation for everything a fabricated identity needs: no in-person meetings, poor video connections, restricted communication, and financial emergencies involving leave requests or medical costs. Uniformed identities also read as trustworthy. The military community filed 99,443 fraud reports with the FTC in 2024 totalling $584 million in losses, and veterans reported a median fraud loss of $700 against $497 across all FTC complaints, per AARP's analysis of Consumer Sentinel data.

How can I check whether my long-distance partner is who they say they are?

Work through six checks, cheapest first: an unscheduled live video call; a digital history that predates meeting you; consistent name, location and photos across every channel; corroboration from a third party who knows them; a planned meeting that actually happens; and no money moving in either direction. Failing one item can have an innocent explanation. Failing two or more is a reason to pause before sending anything.

Sources

• FTC Consumer Sentinel Network romance-scam data through 30 September 2025 — losses, report counts, median loss, year-on-year change.
• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report — confidence/romance fraud losses, complaint totals, older-adult figures.
• FBI IC3, 2024 Internet Crime Report — 2023 and 2024 confidence/romance loss baselines.
• FTC, "New FTC Data Show a Big Jump in Reported Losses to Fraud to $12.5 Billion in 2024".
• FTC Data Spotlight, April 2026 — losses to social media scams.
• Stafford, L. & Merolla, A. J. (2007), "Idealization, reunions, and stability in long-distance dating relationships," Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
• National Center for Family & Marriage Research, Family Profile FP-25-27: Married and Living Apart Together (ACS 2023 data).
• Institute for Family Studies, "Married, Alone: The Increase in Commuter Marriages".
• US Department of Defense, 2024 Demographics Profile of the Military Community (and the 2023 edition for comparison).
• AARP analysis of FTC military and veteran scam reporting, 2025.
• Boundless, K-1 Fiancé Visa Report — issuances, approvals, denial rates, processing times, origin countries.
• Pew Research Center, "Key findings about online dating in the U.S."
• StudyFinds coverage of the 2018 OnePoll long-distance relationship survey — origin of the 58% success rate and the 132-mile definition.