Remote Control

Long-distance relationships and sex have a fundamental incompatibility that no amount of video calling has ever resolved. You can arrange to be naked at the same time on the same call, trade some bad dirty talk about what you’re doing with your hand while the other watches through a blurry rectangle on a laptop—and all of it adds up to something lonelier than just going to sleep. The gap it emphasizes is larger than the comfort it provides.

The We-Vibe 4+ is a vibrator with a companion app that lets one partner control it remotely. The mechanics are what they are: you give it to your girlfriend, she wears it, you open the app and decide—pulsing thrusts, sustained vibration, surprise patterns—from whatever city you’re currently stuck in. It’s not a substitute for being in the same room. Nobody is claiming otherwise. But it’s a different category of solution than video call dirty talk, which mostly makes you feel like you’re both performing for a camera you didn’t ask to have pointed at you.

What makes it interesting beyond the obvious is the control aspect specifically. You’re not just watching each other—you’re actually doing something to the other person, at a distance. The latency is real but the effect is real too. It turns what’s usually a disconnected, parallel activity into something with actual shared cause and effect. That’s not nothing.

Whether it’s enough to prevent someone from eventually choosing whoever is physically present over whoever is far away: unclear. Probably not. But it buys you a few good nights in the meantime, and sometimes a few good nights is the whole margin.