The news in brief
A study in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, published online on 14 November 2025, looks at young adults who have been in a long-distance relationship for at least six months. Behaviours that maintain the relationship, especially openness and a positive attitude, are linked to greater mutual trust, itself linked to better relationship quality. These are statistical links, not proof of an effect.
What the study says
Ali Berke Körün and Seydi Ahmet Satıcı, counselling psychology researchers at Yıldız Technical University in Istanbul, published an article online on 14 November 2025 in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology (Körün and Satıcı, 2025). Their starting point: long-distance relationships are increasingly common, especially among those psychologists call emerging adults, young people who are no longer teenagers without being quite settled. How do these relationships last, and what makes them more satisfying?
Let us be clear about what we were able to read: not the full text, but the published abstract and a few elements of method visible on the publisher's page. According to these, the final sample is made up of 348 university students in Turkey, aged 17 to 26, all in a long-distance relationship for at least six months (Körün and Satıcı, 2025).
Three elements are studied: relationship maintenance behaviours, the ordinary gestures by which we take care of the bond; dyadic trust, the trust placed in one particular partner; and the quality of the relationship as each participant perceives it (Körün and Satıcı, 2025).
The authors use a serial mediation model, which tests whether a link passes through intermediate steps. According to the abstract, maintenance behaviours are linked to relationship quality in two ways: directly, and indirectly, by way of trust. Among these behaviours, openness and a positive attitude stand out as the most important for trust, which is itself linked to better relationship quality (Körün and Satıcı, 2025).
The key points
First point: trust acts as a bridge. Maintenance gestures are not only associated with a relationship judged to be better, they are so partly because they go hand in hand with more trust in the partner (Körün and Satıcı, 2025). The direct link remains: trust does not explain everything.
Second point: not all gestures weigh the same. Openness, that is, confiding and saying what you feel, and positivity, that is, a kind and encouraging tone, are the ones the abstract highlights for trust (Körün and Satıcı, 2025). The abstract gives neither the other behaviours measured nor the strength of the links.
Third point: the authors read their results in light of family systems theory. The couple is seen there as a system under stress, here the difficulties of distance, and relationship maintenance as what helps it keep its balance. From this they draw ideas for couples counselling (Körün and Satıcı, 2025).
How to read these results
The key word is “linked”. The abstract speaks of “predicting” or “increasing”, but it describes associations between answers to questionnaires. A mediation model organises the data; it does not prove that the gestures produce trust, or that trust improves the relationship. The opposite direction is just as plausible: when you trust the other person, you open up more easily.
The population is specific: 348 students in Turkey, aged 17 to 26 (Körün and Satıcı, 2025). This is a student group, in a precise cultural context. The results say nothing for certain about older couples, married couples, couples with children, or couples separated by a border and residence procedures. Nothing in what we read indicates that both partners of the same couple answered: we would then have the view of only one person.
Finally, the abstract mentions no follow-up over time. We therefore do not know whether those who are doing well today will still be doing well in a year, and a relationship judged to be of good quality does not guarantee that it will last.
What this changes for the reader
Other studies point the same way. In an online survey of 647 young adults, 36.5% of whom were in a long-distance relationship, frequent written messages and attentive replies went hand in hand with greater satisfaction among long-distance couples, whereas the use of video calls was not linked to it (Holtzman et al., 2021). Another study, in which couples rated their exchanges in a diary, found that long-distance partners confided more, and that this openness was associated with a stronger feeling of intimacy (Jiang and Hancock, 2013).
What we can take from it without exaggerating is that, at a distance, trust does not fall from the sky. It seems to be sustained by very simple gestures: saying what you are going through, welcoming kindly what the other says, keeping a warm tone even when the day has been long. These gestures guarantee nothing, but they are within everyone's reach.
This does not replace the underlying question: knowing where the relationship is going and for how long. And if mistrust, jealousy or silence settle in for good, a talk with a psychologist or a couples counsellor can help to see more clearly.
What our main page adds
Our main page first recalls that distance is more common than people think and that the couples concerned are no less satisfied than others. In France, 4% of adults in a couple did not share their partner's home at the start of 2011, more than half of them being under 30 (Insee, 2013). It lists what makes a couple last: a goal or an end date, a rhythm of contact that suits both, shared everyday life rather than conversations that take stock, alternating who travels, and a social life that is kept up. It describes the pitfalls: idealising the other, wanting a perfect reunion, letting jealousy take hold. It concludes that a long-distance couple lasts above all because both know where they are going. See the page on long-distance relationships.
Going further
This news item is part of a broader topic, which our page Long-distance relationships covers in detail.