The 900-Kilometer Dinner Date

A candlelit dinner for one, cooked by him, in his own kitchen. Homemade pasta, a shirt with actual buttons, and his girlfriend 900 kilometers away holding the app.

My girlfriend and I have been long-distance for almost a year. I'm in Germany, she's studying in Portugal: 900 kilometers, one time zone, and a lot of video calls that end with "I miss you" and a bad night's sleep.

The idea was hers. For our monthly anniversary (yes, we still count those, don't judge), she said, "We're having a real dinner date. Same meal, same time, candles, everything. Dress up." What she didn't mention until two hours beforehand: "Oh, and put the Max 2 on. I have the app."

I cooked pasta, badly but with confidence. I set up my laptop at the table, lit a candle and put on a shirt with actual buttons. For a date in my own kitchen. She appeared on screen in a red dress, holding a glass of wine and smiling like she knew something I didn't. She did. She was holding her phone.

The first half was genuinely romantic. We ate "together," talked about our week and argued about whose pasta looked better (hers, obviously). Then, mid-sentence, while I was telling a story about my roommate, I felt it: a slow, deliberate pulse from across 900 kilometers. She kept eye contact and took a sip of wine like nothing had happened. I completely forgot how sentences worked.

It turned into a game. I had to keep a straight face and finish whatever I was saying, and every time I cracked, she won a point. I lost a lot of points. At one point my roommate came home early, walked into the kitchen to grab a beer and had a full two-minute conversation with me about his day. She, on mute, turned the intensity up to maximum out of pure evil. I have never nodded so politely in my life. When he finally left, I put my head on the table while she laughed so hard she nearly dropped her phone.

At the peak of the date, my Wi-Fi dropped. Just... gone. I sat there in a button-up shirt, alone with cold pasta and a candle, staring at a frozen frame of her mid-laugh. Two minutes of panic and one router restart later she was back, and the first thing she said was, "That was the funniest thing that has ever happened to us." She was right.

We stayed on the call for another two hours after that. No games, just talking: about visiting each other, about next summer. It sounds cheesy, but that stupid dinner was the closest I had felt to her in months. Distance stopped feeling like a wall for one evening. It felt like a game we were both winning.

My tips for anyone trying this: actually cook, because the effort makes it a date instead of just a call. Set the rules of the game beforehand, which makes the teasing ten times better. Lock your door. Seriously, lock your door. Test your Wi-Fi, and end the call slowly, because the talking-after part is where the intimacy actually lives.

We already have a rematch planned.