SINGAPORE – Intimacy technologies and adult pleasure products brand Lovense has released a new report, “Distance Index 2026,” which the company describes as “the world’s first white paper on remote intimacy.”
According to the release announcement, the report “covers 5.036 million anonymized sessions that couples ran on the Lovense Remote app between October 2025 and September 2026.” Lovense reports that the average remote date “ran 20.4 minutes, and together they add up to more than 100 million minutes of play.”
“Long-distance intimacy has rarely been studied at this scale,” Lovense noted, adding that the Distance Index “shows the hours couples choose and the borders they cross.”
Some of the report’s key findings include:
- Couples went on about 22,000 remote dates on February 14, 49% more than on comparable weekdays. But the median date that night lasted 6.6 minutes, shorter than on an ordinary day. On February 15 it rose to 11.7 minutes, 77.6% longer than on Valentine’s Day itself. So, couples kept the holiday going for a second night.
- Couples connected most between 10 and 11 p.m. local time. On 37.8% of the days a partner connected, they came back for a second round. Those numbers describe a nightly habit. Couples have built it into the end of an ordinary day. Remote play is a weeknight habit
- Eleven of the 20 busiest routes in the report link two countries. Couples split between Canada and the US had about 26,000 remote dates. UK–US couples had about 22,500, and Australia–US couples about 11,800. The report also details Nigeria–US and Netherlands–US routes. Inside the United States, couples met up about 199,000 times.
- On every cross-border route, one partner lives outside the US. Those couples need no extra hardware to cross the distance. When one partner taps the screen in the app, the command travels over the internet to the other partner’s phone. That phone passes it to the toy over Bluetooth.
- Among routes inside a single country, couples in Japan stayed connected longest, and one rendezvous in ten there ran past 62 minutes.
Lovense noted that “no government counts long-distance couples, so the size of this market has gone largely unmeasured.”
“The United Nations counted 304 million international migrants in 2024, nearly twice the 1990 figure,” Lovense added. “In the US, 12.5% of couples who married in 2023 were living apart from their spouse, according to researchers at Bowling Green State University. The Distance Index shows how big that demand already is. It counts more than 5 million connections in a single year, on a single app.”
Dan Liu, founder and CEO of Lovense, said the company “found a lot of interesting details in this report.”
“We also saw how many couples really do use our products to stay close,” Liu added. “That makes our work mean more to us. We believe this report shows only part of the demand for long-distance intimacy. Technology can give love a touch that reaches across mountains and oceans.”
The full report is now available to read, free of charge, at lovense.com/distance-index.
