Does Distance Make You Like Someone More? What the Evidence Says

The question is really two questions, and they have different answers

Ask whether distance makes you like someone more and you get proverbs. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Out of sight, out of mind. Both are in circulation, both get quoted with total confidence, and they say opposite things, which is usually a sign that the question underneath has not been split properly.

There are two questions inside it, and the research answers them differently.

The first is about people you have not met. Does physical distance change who you end up liking? Here distance is a filter on the pool: it decides who you run into, how often and for how long. This is the question the classic proximity studies answer, and their answer is not ambiguous.

The second is about somebody you already know. Does time apart raise or lower how you feel about them? Here distance is a gap inside an existing relationship, and what it changes is the flow of information between two people who already have one. This is the question the long-distance literature answers, and its answer is stranger.

Most writing on this topic quotes the findings from one at the other. Mere exposure, a laboratory effect about repeatedly viewing a stimulus, gets used to explain why a partner should travel more. Idealisation data from separated couples gets used to argue for being less available on a second date. Neither transfer is licensed by the studies that produced them.

So this article takes them in order. What proximity does when you are choosing. What exposure and information do while two people get acquainted. What separation does to a relationship that already exists, and what happens when the separation ends. Then the direct answer to the question in the title, and a famous version of the folklore that has been tested and did not survive.

One thing it will not do is supply a method for making somebody want you by withdrawing. That question has its own evidence and its own page, and the short version is in the 72-hour rule. The rest of this section is under Dating.

Proximity is one of the sturdiest findings in the field, and it points the other way

Start with the result that has been replicating for seventy years.

In 1950 Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter and Kurt Back published a study of friendship inside a housing complex built for married MIT students. The point of the setting was that apartments had been assigned essentially at random, so who lived near whom was nobody's choice. Residents named 41% of the people assigned to live next door to them as a close companion, and 10% of the people assigned four doors down the same hallway. Four doors is a walk of a few seconds.

They also separated physical distance from what they called functional distance. Stairwells and mailboxes made some apartments far more likely to generate chance encounters than the floor plan alone suggested, and friendship followed the encounters rather than the metres.

Then it kept replicating in places nobody chose. Mary Segal studied 44 trainees at a state police academy where both dormitory rooms and classroom seats were assigned alphabetically by surname. Asked to name their closest friends in the academy, trainees named the people whose surnames sat next to theirs in the alphabet far above chance: an arbitrary letter predicting friendship because it predicted who sat where. Students assigned to the same row of a lecture hall report stronger friendships a year later than students in different rows.

Two honest qualifications. Proximity is not a machine that manufactures affection. In one study, residential proximity predicted the intensity of enmity as well as the intensity of friendship: what proximity reliably produces is contact, and contact amplifies whatever the contact contains. And the internet was supposed to have dissolved all of this. It has not. When Diana Mok, Barry Wellman and Juan Carrasco compared the same Toronto population in the 1970s and again in the 2000s, the sensitivity of personal relationships to distance had barely changed, despite email and cheap telephony arriving in between.

For the first version of the question, then, the answer is flatly no. Distance does not make you like someone more. It mostly makes you never meet them.

Mere exposure: why familiarity usually raises liking, and where it stops

The mechanism underneath proximity has its own literature, and that is where this gets interesting.

Robert Zajonc's 1968 monograph proposed that repeated exposure to something, on its own and with nothing else attached, improves your attitude towards it. In one of his studies undergraduates were told they were in a visual memory experiment and passively viewed photographs of students from another university. Each face appeared 0, 1, 2, 5, 10 or 25 times. Liking tracked frequency in a dose-response pattern: the more often a face had been shown, the better it was rated afterwards.

The effect leaves the laboratory. Richard Moreland and Scott Beach sent four women into a large lecture course. One attended no sessions; the others attended 5, 10 and 15. They arrived early, sat where they could be seen, took notes and interacted with nobody. At the end of the term, students who had never exchanged a word with any of them rated the ones who had attended more often as more attractive and as more similar to themselves. Nothing had happened except being in the same room.

Robert Bornstein pooled the literature in 1989 across 208 experimental contrasts and put the average effect at around r = .26. That is a real effect and a moderate one.

Now the part that matters here. The relationship is not a straight line. When Matthew Montoya and colleagues re-examined the same literature in 2017 with a much larger model, what fit was a curve: liking rises with exposure, reaches a peak, and then declines. They found that inverted U across essentially all visual stimuli. More is better, until it is not.

Two limits worth stating out loud. Most of this work uses non-social stimuli, such as nonsense words, ideographs and abstract shapes, and photographs are a minority of it. And a face viewed 25 times in a laboratory is not a person you have spent 25 evenings with. What mere exposure describes is the stage before anything has happened between two people, which is precisely where the opposite finding lives.

The other camp: more information, less liking

In 2007 Michael Norton, Jeana Frost and Dan Ariely published the study that gives the folklore its best empirical support, and the title says it: less is more.

The paradigm is simple. Participants read a list of traits describing an unknown person and rate how much they like them. The list is 4, 6, 8 or 10 traits long, drawn at random from the same pool. On the near-consensus view, more information should mean more liking. It did not. Across their studies, more traits meant lower liking.

Two things make this more than a curiosity. First, they asked people what they expected, and people expected the opposite: participants confidently predicted that knowing more would make them like someone more. Second, they proposed a mechanism, which they called the dissimilarity cascade. The first piece of evidence that this person is not like you changes how you read the next piece, which is then more likely to be interpreted as further evidence of difference, and so on down the list. Ambiguity is a space you fill in optimistically. Information closes it.

They did not stop at the laboratory. The same negative relationship between knowledge and liking appeared in data collected from online daters before and after they actually met.

This is the strongest version of the claim that distance makes you like someone more, and it is worth stating precisely, because it is narrower than it looks. It does not say that absence deepens a bond. It says that when you barely know somebody, a good part of the person you are rating is your own construction, and constructions score well. The same gap between what you have observed and what you have supplied runs through reading a friend, where people project their own feelings onto the other person.

Then the finding ran into trouble from two directions at once.

Two labs argued about this in public, then wrote a paper together

What happened after 2007 is one of the better episodes in this literature, and more useful than either of the original findings.

Harry Reis, Michael Maniaci, Peter Caprariello, Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel argued that a list of traits is not what social interaction is, and tested familiarity with live people instead. In one study, pairs of strangers talked through a series of topics for 90 seconds each and were randomly assigned to cover either 2 or 6 of them. In another, pairs had unstructured instant-message conversations of 10 to 15 minutes and were assigned 1, 2, 4, 6 or 8 of them. More interaction produced more attraction: the eight-conversation pairs liked each other most and the one-conversation pairs least. Three things mediated the effect, and they are worth naming: perceived responsiveness, comfort during the interaction, and the sense of knowing the other person.

The Norton group published a commentary. The Reis group published a reply. The disagreement ended in a public debate at a conference.

Then they wrote a paper together. In 2015 all eight authors published an adversarial collaboration that abandoned the question of whether familiarity helps or hurts, calling it oversimplified and distracting. What they proposed instead is a model with three stages: awareness, where you know of somebody but have never interacted; surface contact, where you have interacted but almost nothing depends on it; and mutuality, where two lives are genuinely entangled. Familiarity does different things at each stage, and most of the fighting came from comparing paradigms that were not measuring the same situation.

Their moderators are the practical residue. Familiarity turns negative faster when the other person has unappealing rather than appealing qualities, and when the context is competitive rather than cooperative. Beyond that, coherence of information matters most at the awareness stage, saturation at surface contact, and structural interdependence at mutuality, which is a careful way of saying that the more of your life somebody can disrupt, the more opportunities familiarity has to cost you something.

There is a postscript. In 2025 a registered report led by Zoe Horsham ran a large preregistered replication of the original Norton studies with 801 participants. The belief replicated cleanly: people still predicted that knowing more would make them like someone more. The behaviour did not. Number of traits and liking came out essentially uncorrelated, r between minus .05 and .06. Part of the evidence for the lure of ambiguity has now come back empty, which is worth knowing before quoting it.

The honest shape is an arc

Buried in that 2015 collaboration is the sentence that answers this question better than any single study in it.

Reviewing what happens once two people are actually interdependent, the authors report a set of findings that popular writing tends to skip. Undergraduates randomly assigned to live with a stranger like that person less at the end of the year than at the beginning, and the decline was as strong or stronger when the roommate was of a different race. Marital satisfaction declines on average over time, which is one of the most robust effects in the marriage literature. Passionate love declines, which everybody expects. Companionate love, the settled warm kind that was supposed to compensate, declines too.

And yet people choose each other in the first place, and were more in love on the day they married than they were after the first date. So the authors describe the normative course as an arc: liking rises after an initial encounter, peaks somewhere between minutes and years, and on average ultimately declines.

They are careful about that word, and so is worth being. Normative means on average. Some marriages do not decline. Some people keep liking each other more the longer they date. The point is not that the arc is destiny. It is that the arc is the default shape, and whether familiarity is currently helping or hurting depends entirely on where on it you are.

That reframes the title question. Distance does not move you along the arc; it holds you where you are. Early, before the peak, in a phase where more contact would still be adding, a gap costs you. Later, past it, a gap gives back some of what proximity has been quietly spending. That is not something you can determine about your own relationship from the outside, and anybody offering the version where it is has stopped reporting the research.

Long-distance relationships: the case where absence really does add

Now the second question. Two people already have a relationship and are separated. What happens?

The intuition is that they suffer, and the data disagree more than most people expect.

Laura Stafford and Andy Merolla compared long-distance dating relationships against geographically close ones and found the long-distance partners scoring higher on a cluster they grouped under idealisation: idealistic distortion, romantic love, relational reminiscence, and the belief that the two of them agreed about things. Satisfaction with their communication was higher too. And the idealisation tracked scarcity: it was strongest where face-to-face contact was least frequent.

Crystal Jiang and Jeffrey Hancock ran a diary study on 63 dating couples, 30 of them long-distance and separated for an average of 17 months, at distances ranging from 37 to nearly 4,000 miles. Their long-distance couples disclosed more, formed more idealised perceptions of the relationship, and reported more intimacy in their interactions. That first part is not a quirk of distance: how people actually open up to each other follows a shape that separation happens to accelerate. The paper is called Absence Makes the Communication Grow Fonder, and the emphasis on the middle word is the finding: what changes is not mystical, it is what two people do with the channels they have left. How much a channel distorts what you meant is the subject of what texting habits actually transmit.

So on this question the answer to the title is yes, with a specific mechanism. Separation raises how positively you rate somebody. It does that partly by reducing the supply of information that might contradict the rating, and partly by changing what the two of you do with limited contact, which really does improve rather than merely feeling like it has.

Stafford and Merolla also found something that looks like it settles the argument in favour of distance. Long-distance relationships were more stable than geographically close ones. More of them survived.

That finding has a condition attached, and the condition is the rest of the sentence.

What happens when the distance ends

The condition is that they were more stable for exactly as long as they stayed apart.

Stafford, Merolla and Castle surveyed 335 undergraduates about long-distance dating relationships that had become geographically close. Of the 180 who reported making that transition, at least 36.6% ended the relationship afterwards. Two-thirds of those endings came within the first three months of the reunion, and in the group analysed in detail the relationships ended an average of 1.25 months after moving to the same place. What recovery from one of those endings actually looks like, as against the folk timelines, is in the signs you have moved on and the signs you have not.

The people involved did not see it coming. On a seven-point scale, participants scored 6.15 on wanting to be in the same location and 5.78 on expecting the relationship to improve because of it, both far above the midpoint. What they reported actually experiencing was significantly less positive than what they had expected. And the two groups, those who stayed together and those who did not, had been indistinguishable beforehand on how long they had dated, how long they had been apart, their age, how much they had looked forward to the reunion, and how much they expected it to improve things.

What separated them was what arrived with proximity. Among those whose relationships ended, 61.1% reported the realisation of negative characteristics in their partner, against 25.0% of those who stayed together. The group that broke up was also more likely to report missing things the distance had been supplying: autonomy, 55.6% against 33.3%, and anticipation and novelty, 36.1% against 13.9%. Novelty going missing is not a footnote: it is one of the better-evidenced mechanisms in this literature, and the self-expansion research on attraction over time goes through the work it comes from.

In the companion study, extreme idealisation during the separation and longer gaps between visits both predicted instability at reunion. The idealisation was not a harmless side effect. It was a debt.

The limits matter here and they are real. These are American undergraduates, most of them separated for university reasons, reporting retrospectively on their own relationships, and a survey of people remembering what happened is not a controlled test of why it happened. What the data support is a pattern rather than a mechanism: the same separation that raises the rating also postpones the information that would have adjusted it, and then the adjustment arrives all at once. For couples who were never separated, the same adjustment happens on a slower schedule, and what is actually known about its size and timing is in why the honeymoon phase ends.

So: does distance make you like someone more?

Three answers, because the question honestly has three.

Before you know somebody, yes, but weakly, and the evidence has been shaken. Fewer facts produced higher ratings in the original trait studies, and a large preregistered replication in 2025 found essentially nothing. What survives that exchange is not the effect so much as the expectation gap: people are consistently confident that more information will make them like someone more, and that confidence does not track what happens either way.

Inside a relationship conducted at a distance, yes, and this is the sturdiest version. Separated couples idealise more, communicate more deliberately, and report more intimacy per interaction. The effect is real and measured, and it is partly made of the absence of contradicting information.

As a strategy, no, and it is worth being blunt about this part. Nothing in this literature shows that manufacturing distance from somebody increases how much they like you. The proximity findings run the other way. The live-interaction findings run the other way. The long-distance findings describe couples separated by universities and jobs rather than by design, and their advantage disappears the moment the separation ends. The nearest thing to a test of engineered unavailability is the work on playing hard to get and on delayed replies, covered in the 72-hour rule, and that does not support the practice either.

The useful reframe is that distance is not an ingredient you add. It is a condition that changes what information is available, and idealisation is what fills the space the information used to occupy. If you like a version of somebody that distance built, the thing that has increased is not the relationship. Some of the same machinery shows up in why smart people keep dating the wrong people, and the limits of what can be known about anybody in advance are the subject of the questions that reveal compatibility.

The folklore version has been tested, and it failed

There is a second-hand version of this belief that deserves its own section, because it gets quoted constantly and it did not hold up.

In 1972 Richard Driscoll, Keith Davis and Milton Lipetz reported that couples who experienced an increase in parental interference over six months also reported an increase in love over the same period. They called it the Romeo and Juliet effect, and it became the standard citation for the idea that obstacles intensify romantic feeling, that being kept apart makes two people want each other more.

Replications have been elusive ever since. When Colleen Sinclair, Kristina Hood and Brittany Wright revisited it, following 396 participants over three to four months and measuring love, commitment, trust and criticism alongside perceived interference from friends and family, they found the opposite. Participants reporting more interference, or less approval, reported poorer relationship quality on the outcomes measured. That result is what the field calls the social network effect: disapproval from the people around a couple predicts decline, not intensification.

So the most cited empirical support for obstacles fuelling attraction now points the other way. Being kept apart by circumstance is not the same thing as being kept apart by people who disapprove of you, and the second one is associated with things getting worse rather than better.

This is a good place to say something about the standard of evidence in this genre. A single striking result from the early 1970s that has not replicated is still circulating in relationship articles fifty years later, because the replication is boring and the original has a Shakespeare reference in the title. That is the normal failure mode here. It is why every empirical claim on this page carries a linked source, which is the promise in our editorial policy.

When distance is not distance

One line has to be drawn before the practical part, because this topic sits next to a set of behaviours that are not about distance at all.

Distance used as a sanction is not the same thing as distance. Withdrawing contact to punish somebody, going silent so they will chase, letting a gap stretch so the other person stays off balance: those are moves in an argument, not circumstances. They work, in the narrow sense that they produce a reaction. What they teach the other person is that your presence is conditional on their compliance.

There is a version specific to this topic, and it shows up most often in relationships conducted across distance, where checking is easy to justify. Location sharing that is required rather than mutual and freely chosen. Being made to account for your time. Having to prove where you were. Video calls demanded on the spot as verification. Phone or message access expected on request. Contact with friends narrowed a little at a time because it is harder to explain from far away.

Monitoring, restricting contact and demanding constant availability are recognised markers of coercive control. The reason to name them here rather than in a footnote is that the distance supplies a ready excuse for every one of them. There is a research literature on electronic surveillance between partners and it is worth knowing that it exists, but the practical point does not depend on it: none of the above is a communication problem, and no arrangement of check-in schedules fixes it.

If any of that is recognisable, the useful next step is a person rather than an article. Find A Helpline, in the sources below, lists free and confidential services by country. In the United States the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788, 24 hours a day.

Where the feeling underneath is jealousy rather than control, the difference between the two is worked through in the psychology of jealousy, and the phone-specific version of the same line is in what phone behaviour on dates actually shows.

What this changes in practice

Four things, none of them dramatic.

If you are choosing, treat proximity as a constraint rather than a preference. The proximity findings do not say that nearby people are better; they say that contact is the raw material and distance is what rations it. Nobody in that MIT housing complex decided to prefer their neighbours. Knowing that your pool is shaped by a floor plan and a commute is more useful than any conclusion about who belongs in it.

If you are apart from somebody, ask what you actually know as distinct from what you have filled in. This is the only practical move the idealisation research supports, and it is a question rather than a technique. What have you seen this person do when something went wrong? What does an ordinary Tuesday look like for them? What has a previous partner asked them to change, and what did they do about it? Those are checkable, and they are exactly the categories a separation postpones. The longer version is in the questions that reveal compatibility.

None of that has a dose attached, incidentally. The numbered rules that prescribe a visit every so many weeks are advice with no measurement behind it, and a quota one partner enforces on the other is a different thing again.

If a separation is about to end, treat the reunion as its own event rather than as the reward. It is the point where most of the endings in the Stafford data actually happened, expectations going in were reliably higher than what arrived, and the specific losses people named were autonomy and novelty, both of which can be deliberately kept rather than surrendered by default. Conflict after a reunion is not evidence that the relationship was a mistake. How it gets repaired is the part that carries information, which is the subject of how to reconnect after a fight.

And if gaps are unbearable rather than merely unpleasant, that is worth looking at separately. The size of the reaction to distance is one of the places attachment patterns show up most clearly, and it is closer to a fact about you than a fact about the relationship. Our attachment style test takes about two minutes and says plainly what it cannot tell you, and the difference between love and anxious attachment covers where those two come apart. There is more on this under Mindset. Where the ambiguity is structural rather than geographic, the relevant piece is the signs of a situationship.

What none of this can tell you

The limits go at the end rather than in a footnote.

The samples are narrow. The long-distance research here is overwhelmingly American undergraduates separated for university reasons, reporting on their own relationships after the fact. The mere exposure meta-analyses are dominated by non-social stimuli, and generalising from an ideograph to a person is a step rather than a given. The proximity classics are mid-century housing complexes, a police academy and a lecture hall, and the finding has held up remarkably well, but the world they measured had no video calls in it.

The disagreement is not settled. Two research groups spent years arguing about whether familiarity helps or hurts, concluded that the question as posed was the wrong one, and proposed a stage model they were explicit about not having tested. Their own word for it is speculative. A large replication in 2025 of the best-known finding on the other side came back close to zero. This is a live area, not a solved one.

And none of it is about you specifically. The arc, rising and peaking and declining, is a normative average, and averages contain the relationships that improved for thirty years. Whether distance is currently helping or costing you depends on where you are on that curve, and no study can locate you on it. What the evidence can do is say what distance is made of: less information, more room for construction, and a bill that comes due when the information finally arrives. What you do with that is not something a literature gets to decide.

Every empirical claim on this page carries a linked source below. The rest of this section is under Dating.