Occasion
Make a long distance relationship website
Long distance runs on things that can be opened alone. A page is one of them: it lives on their phone, it works at three in the morning in a different time zone, and it does not need you awake to be there. It is the closest thing to leaving something in their apartment.
The Flowers template is made for this. They open a hand-drawn bouquet and find your letter tucked inside. Further down are your photos as polaroids, the miles between your two cities worked out for you, a daisy with a reason on every petal, and the moon the night you met.
The miles, written out
Pick your city and theirs from the list, and the page works out the distance and shows it in miles. For a long distance couple that number is oddly romantic: it is the thing you are both fighting, written out as a sentence. It is also the one fact that makes the page unmistakably yours, because no other couple has that exact number. If one of you moves, change a city and the number changes with it, which is a small, good way to see the distance shrink.
The letter in the bouquet, for the days you cannot call
The bouquet opens on a small letter tucked among the stems. They tap it, and your words open out of it. This is the part to write for the bad days: the night after a canceled visit, the week you are both too busy, the Sunday evening. Say you know it is hard. Say one specific thing about the last time you were together. Say one thing you are looking forward to. Keep it to three short paragraphs, because it is read on a phone, often in bed, often tired. Write it for that version of them.
Photos of the good weeks
Up to six photos hang on the page as polaroids. With so few slots, pick the ones that prove the good weeks happened: the airport hug, the breakfast you made badly, the walk where you got lost. Long distance couples tend to have too many screenshots of each other and too few photos of the two of them together, so this is a good excuse to scroll back to the real ones.
The moon you both can see
Enter the night you met, or the first date, and the page draws the moon exactly as it looked that night. The moon phase is the same over both your cities, which is an unexpectedly good detail for two people in different countries. Pair it with the daisy, where they pull a petal off and read one reason per petal. Keep them short. Together these give them something to play with after the letter, rather than just something to read.
Time zones, the opened email, and the next visit
The link works at any hour in any time zone, so send it whenever you think of it. You get an email the moment it is opened, so you know when it landed even if you are asleep, and another when they write back from the reply box at the end. When a visit is booked, switch the page to The Ticket: a boarding pass with a little plane flying from your city to theirs and a countdown to landing. Your photos and words carry over.
Questions
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Start with Flowers
Starts as Flowers, filled in for you. Add your photos and words, preview it for free.
Start with this template