Thinking of You

Carmen: If anyone ever hacks into my app, I’ll be embarrassed mostly about the time I tried to serenade Geneva to the tune of “Thinkin’ Bout You” without realizing that the pre-created “Thinking of You” cloud doesn’t say “Thinkin’ Bout You” at all.

In my defense, it was late, and I was in love.

Passcode

Hansen: I’ve decided this app would be perfectly for couples who want/need to be secretive about their relationships, like queer couples where one is closeted. You can set a passcode to the app so no one can get in there and see what you’re saying. It keeps the photos you take out of your photostream, which is a nice feature for, uh, some kinds of pictures you may or may not send.

Carmen: I used the passcode setting for a bit to experience “a private life” (what’s that like, BTW.) but my phone couldn’t deal with it so I turned it off. I hate nothing more than lagging, but I bet your phone never lags because you don’t know my life. If we had the kind of relationship where we exchanged really sexy images and not pictures of our dogs / the snacks we were eating, losing that feature would have been a huge drawback.

Knowing What’s Up With Your Partner 24/7

Kaitlyn: Couple incorporates a bunch of markers, subtle and not, to let you know what your partner is up to at most times. The understated among them are features like message read and “typing…” notifications, a status bar stating whether your partner has the app open, minimized, etc. and what device they’re using (mobile or web app), and even a spot listing the artist and song name if they’re listening to music. I discover a new feature like this every time we use the app, and they’re what really drive home the feeling of being together. They do something that is often hard to maintain in long-distance relationships: sharing what your partner is doing without them having to explicitly tell you themselves. And I appreciate that so much, because the worst part of being away from Camille is not being able to sit in the same room with her while we do our own thing, peeking up occasionally to smile at how pretty she is when she’s focusing or stressed and flips her hair every two seconds. If I can’t be in the room to hear her sing along to a song, it’s nice that I can at least know what she’s listening to.

Carmen: Geneva can see what song I’m listening to when I’m on my way to work and I could tell where she was on her cross-country journey to Winnipeg last week for the holidays. We know when the other is online (and the app is damn reliable at getting their online/offline status right, and even tells you when the app is minimized and when they’ve seen your messages), and we never f*ck up the time zones because the app tells you exactly what time and what location your boo is at, all day, erry day. It feels lame to say that the app has made it possible for Geneva to be a part of my every waking moment without actually being there, but it’s true.

Yvonne: Gloria comes home for the weekend (read as: one full day) every two weeks. So we use the calendar section to remind each other of her flight schedule.

Ali: Abby turned off the music feature because me knowing what she was listening to while she was on a train in Philly and I was in South Carolina totally creeped her out.

Sketch and Livesketch

Camille (Kaitlyn’s person!): There’s something childishly satisfying about the app’s drawing feature, which works like a compressed version of Microsoft Paint. Because I am five years old at heart, I can’t resist sending the occasional doodle to remind my girl I’m thinking about her (I don’t need no stinkin’ button to do it for me). Sure, I could tell her I love her for the forty-fifth time this morning, but it’s way cuter in bubbly green letters surrounded by hearts and rainbows. Until I have the money to send Kait flowers as penance every time I upset her, I’m gonna end up relying on cute finger-drawn pictures of our stick-figure selves holding hands in front of a giant double rainbow to say I’m sorry. Just you wait.

Hansen: We started drawing pictures for each other. At first they were silly, like pictures of what we could see, then we started just drawing stick figures reenacting our favorite sex positions, to be honest. We’re weirdos. Maddie’s studying for the GRE, so one night we just spent way too long drawing how to calculate the area of different triangles. So Couple made that fun for us.

Yvonne: Unlike normal texting or sending photos or videos, drawing is a really fun way to draw cute stuff for each other.

Our masterpieces.

The live drawing option is a great way to spend a few minutes with each other in the middle of the day. Or a great way to play tic-tac-toe, which is what me and Gloria like doing.

We drew these together.

Pictures, Audio and Video

Yvonne: Surprisingly, one of the best features of this app is the audio notes. The sound is really sharp that makes it sounds like your partner is right there next to you which is comforting, especially for our temporary long-distance relationship. Gloria likes to send me audio notes of her singing, speaking in British and Philly accents and to occasionally scold me.

And Gloria and I are pet parents so of course I have to send her photos and videos of our puppy.

Ali: When we first figured out we could send video in Couple, this is what happened:

Then I sent her a video of my Aunt’s new Siamese kitten.

And she responded with a picture of her mom’s dog.

Abby was better at sending me cute stuff. I want you guys to know that. If we aren’t adorable, it’s entirely my fault.

Lists

Carmen: We both got super heavy into the shared lists and calendar features available in the app. They’re a space for really important planning operations, y’know? Like your next big road trip. Or the names of your future puppies who are all named after boozes and liquor drinks. Or if you were a real person, groceries and to-do lists for your kids. But let’s get back to the puppies for a second.

Ali: I was totally into the list function right from the very beginning, but I run my whole life on lists, so that’s not surprising. Abby and I are planning to road trip next summer and we kept having ideas of places we wanted to visit and sticking them on the list. Then I started one for movies we want to movie night and made the mistake of listing one of Abby’s all-time favorite movies as “Gidget Does Something Or Other.”

A punitive alternate list correction was issued.

Verdict?

Carmen: The app worked smoothly for both of us: I’m on an iPhone 4 and she’s on whatever phone it is Google makes. The app gave us experiences we weren’t really able to have from Canada to America on the daily before: we thumbkissed, we drew a really terrible illustration of a dog chewing its foot together, we sent pictures and applied filters and nobody else had to see them in order for us to share them with each other, we laughed, we cried. So are the gays of our lives. Considering Couple.me is free and Geneva and I don’t get a lot of daily, private space to really interact, I’m super into the fact that it exists. The app feels like our own little world. I can open it and see her face whenever I want (her photo and my wallet photo of her makes TWO even); I can use it when I’m on the go or when I’m working and it’s just as fast, free, and easy as it was the other way around. When I’m using Couple.me, Geneva isn’t just one conversation I’m having: she’s the conversation I’m happening. For two people who mostly wish they were cuddling all of the time, that’s a nice change from hiding my chat windows at work and struggling to reply to important messages on the metro.

Couple.me is well-designed, fully functional, and pretty much flawless. And it’s customizable, so it will look just like your relationship every time you open it up. It’s kind of perfect, really. Just like the person you love.

Couple.me put my long-distance relationship into the 21st Century. And I’m really into it.

Kaitlyn: Thumbkiss is the kind of ridiculous icky thing that you don’t want to think about anybody else doing, but in the safe space of your relationship (which is of course adorable and perfect and immune from the pitfalls of disgusting sappiness of every other couple) it is maybe the cutest thing in the world. When I read Vanessa’s essay and spent thirty minutes crying uncontrollably, Camille playfully Thumbkissed me until I erupted in giggles. When I was drunk and wished I could kiss her for real, we Thumbkissed. When we were talking about how distance sucks and ran out of constructive things to say, we Thumbkissed. It’s silly and kind of pointless in a purely literal sense, but in the moment, sometimes the physical bump is better than any words you might come up with. That’s something Gchat and texting and even Skype can’t get at, and that’s why, to me, Couple is worth using.

I just need the world to know this happened.

Hansen: We started recording videos for each other, and taking silly pictures, and live sketching during our nightly Skype sessions. You might say we kind of got hooked on it? When I asked her about the app, she said, “It’s a little creepy but it’s also really addicting. To draw pictures with you and get naughty pictures of you. Yeah, I like that part.” The most irritating part of Couple for me is super pedantic, but I didn’t like that in the live sketch, my iPhone 5’s area was a lot bigger than her iPhone 4’s area, with no option to scroll down, so virtually 1/4 of the area was unusable. Stupid, I know, but annoying all the same. To be truthful, we still use regular texting out of the app more often because it’s more convenient. Couple is a little intense for a new couple, though. And I forget about it a lot, so when we’re together in person, I don’t think to take pictures of us together on it or anything. Some parts of it, I know we’ll never use: the location feature? That’s still just creepy to me. But it’s nice to open the “Moments” part of the app and see all of the pictures we’ve drawn together and pictures we’ve sent each other. It’s a cute little thing to add to our relationship, but I don’t see it being a central part of our relationship anytime soon.

Yvonne: The best thing about Couple is that everything is in one space. So instead of texting them, calling them, leaving nauseating Facebook wall posts, you can do all of that in this one portal. I mean, we still do all of the above anyways, but the Couple app definitely creates a special space for only the two of us that I can look back at when I especially miss my baby.

A snapshot of what our “moments” look like.

Overall, Couple.me allows us to effectively share the little moments in our mundane lives that make it a little easier to be so far away from each other. And of course, we always tell each other how much we miss the other person.

I think Couple.me is definitely worth downloading.

Ali: I thought we were gonna use it for one day, make fun of it together within the app itself and then it would disappear into oblivion.

One of many MANY screenshots of us making fun of this app.

But even though we were prepared to hate it, it’s really grown on us. It’s got a visually appealing, calming aesthetic (“I couldn’t see us fighting in here. We’d save that for iMessage”). We enjoy the stickers. It’s never not once crashed. Our critiques include the need for social media accounts to unlock the web beta (Abby doesn’t have a Twitter, so she’s stuck using the app only on her phone), the fact that you can’t use lists or calendars on the web beta (yet. Hopefully they’ll add that). Overall, though, this is a really solid app and is, in my opinion, only as co-dependent and terrifying as you make it.

Please let us know how you’re using this potentially disturbing but potentially amazing echo chamber of an app in the comments below!

This has been the fifty-ninth installment of  Queer Your Tech with Fun, Autostraddle’s nerdy tech column. Not everything we cover is queer per se, but we talk about customizing this awesome technology you’ve got. Having it our way, expressing our appy selves just like we do with our identities. Here we can talk about anything from app recommendations to choosing a wireless printer to web sites you have to favorite to any other fun shit we can do with technology.

Header by Rory Midhani

Feature image via Shutterstock.

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