Eighty-one undergraduates in the Netherlands (84 were recruited, with one member of each of three co-participating couples excluded to avoid double-counting) spent six consecutive evenings filling out a short survey about their day: how many minutes they’d spent face to face with their partner, how many on the phone, how many on video calls, and how many texting, followed by two ratings — how understood they felt by their partner that day, and how satisfied they were with the relationship.
The averages were lopsided from the start, and the researchers, Monique Pollmann, Tyler Norman, and Erin Crockett, were specifically testing whether the volume of texting could substitute for time spent together in a way earlier, less granular studies had suggested it might.
Participants logged about four and a half hours of face-to-face contact with their partner on a typical day, against eight minutes of phone calls, eight minutes of video calls, and just over an hour of texting. When the researchers ran the numbers, only one of those channels moved either outcome.
What actually predicted feeling understood
Time spent face to face was the one variable connected to both measures. On days when participants logged more in-person time with their partner than usual, they reported feeling more understood and more satisfied with the relationship — on days one standard deviation above the average for face-to-face contact, relationship satisfaction was 0.26 points higher on a 5-point scale, a real and specific shift tied to time in the same room. Phone calls and video calls, despite also carrying voice and in the case of video, faces, didn’t predict either outcome on their own once face-to-face time was accounted for.
What texting didn’t do
For relationship satisfaction, texting’s effect was flat. The researchers report that there was no main effect of texting on relationship satisfaction, and no interaction between texting and face-to-face time on satisfaction either — texting a lot on a low-face-to-face day didn’t move satisfaction any more than texting a little did on a high-face-to-face day. That result cut against the study’s own prediction going in; prior cross-sectional research had suggested texting could carry more weight than that, and this daily-tracking method found otherwise.
The one place texting did register
Understanding told a more layered story than satisfaction did. Texting showed no association with feeling understood on days when face-to-face contact was already high — once a couple had spent hours together in person, extra texting added nothing measurable. But on days when face-to-face contact was low, texting was positively associated with feeling understood, functioning as a partial stand-in for the in-person time that wasn’t happening. Understanding was still highest, across the board, on days with high face-to-face contact; texting only ever closed part of the gap left by its absence, never matched it.
Why phone calls worked and video calls didn’t
What’s notable here isn’t a null result for voice — it’s a split one. Phone calls, despite averaging just 8 minutes a day, significantly predicted both outcomes on their own, controlling for face-to-face time and texting: more phone contact was associated with feeling more understood and more satisfied with the relationship. Video calls were the one channel that came back null on both measures.
That lines up with a separate line of research on reconnecting with old friends by phone versus email, which found that hearing a voice, even without seeing a face, produced measurably more felt connection than exchanging text did — and the researchers behind that study found the same voice-based advantage held for strangers getting acquainted as well as for old friends reconnecting. Here, even a small daily dose of voice contact showed up as a real predictor, while texting’s much larger volume didn’t move satisfaction at all.
What this suggests about relationships built mostly in writing
Writing partnerships and long-distance collaborations run on almost the inverse ratio of what this sample logged: hours of Slack messages, comments, and shared docs against a handful of calls, if any. The study doesn’t speak directly to co-authors or critique partners, but the mechanism it isolates — that understanding tracks face-to-face time specifically, with texting only ever partially covering for its absence — is a caution against assuming a long, responsive DM thread with a writing partner is building the same mutual understanding that an actual call or meetup would. A collaborator who replies within minutes to every message may still be someone their co-author doesn’t understand especially well, if all of that responsiveness has happened entirely in text.
None of this argues for abandoning text messages, which still handled the logistics of coordinating a life together in this sample the same way they do in most relationships. It argues against treating the volume of messages as a proxy for the health of a relationship, or assuming that a long thread of texts throughout the day is doing the same relational work as being in the room.
The couples in this study who spent more time face to face felt more understood and more satisfied, on the same day, regardless of how many texts had gone back and forth — and the texts, however many there were, never showed up as the reason why.
