Messages are where the story of a long-distance relationship is written.
The day-to-day bantering, profound observations, and heartfelt reminders that you’re thinking about each other might seem insignificant to someone else.
But not to you. Each thoughtful message is a reminder that your relationship is a gift to be cherished. When you start to doubt or miss each other, you can reread your messages and remember why you keep going.
The challenge and the solution
The trouble is that messaging apps don’t make finding meaningful messages easy. You’re stuck scrolling through your conversation history or sifting through a mess of identical screenshots. Plus, all of that requires you to know what you’re looking for.
This struggle inspired one man in a long-distance relationship to create an app called TextVibes (that’s him and his now wife in the photo at the top). With TextVibes, you can save, organize and rediscover your favorite messages.
Below, I’ll dive into the details of the app’s best features for long-distance couples. In full disclosure, I partnered with TextVibes to write this sponsored blog post. I only recommend products I trust and believe can be useful for you in your long-distance relationship.
Save and organize your favorite messages
Ever tried to find a specific message, only to get frustrated and give up?
TextVibes makes it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for.
You start by importing your chat history with a specific person. Then, you choose a day on the calendar and view messages from that day.
After you select the messages you want to save, you can assign that conversation a label. The labels allow you to automatically add messages to collections organized by emotions — such as joyful, romantic and funny — or categories — such as life events, travel and animals.
Over time, this allows you to build collections of your favorite messages around different topics.
Whenever you want to reread a specific type of message, you can open that collection and bring back a flood of memories.
Rediscover hidden gems
The best part of TextVibes is that you can discover messages you forgot about.
Over the course of your relationship, you’ll send each other thousands of messages. TextVibes’ founder and his wife exchanged about 300,000 messages in the three years they dated long-distance.
You’d never be able to sort through all those messages on your own. That’s why TextVibes uses artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend messages for you to save.
The app analyzes your writing style, emojis and keywords to identify potentially meaningful messages. Once it brings a conversation to your attention, you can decide whether you want to add it to your collections.
If you like surprises, this feature is like getting a treasure chest of hidden gems delivered to your doorstep every day.
Back up chats in TextVibes
Before you can begin finding memories, you need to backup your messages.
Currently, you can import messages to TextVibes from WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. To backup a chat, follow the video tutorial or step-by-step instructions.
All the data you import is protected with encryption. TextVibes explains, “Nobody can access or read your messages. We don’t make any money from selling any personal information and we’ll never do it.”
How to make the most of TextVibes
When you open the app after backing up a chat, you’ll see two options: Daily Surprise! and Pick A Day.
Daily Surprise! uses AI to identify meaningful messages. Pick A Day allows you to view messages from a specific date on the calendar.
If you use the free version of TextVibes, you get three Daily Surprises, one Pick A Day and one chat backup per day. You can unlock more daily memories by inviting friends or switching to the premium version of the app, which is only $12 per year.
The premium version gives you access to unlimited daily memories, chat backups and days in the calendar. For what it gives you, $1 per month seems pretty reasonable.
When you save a conversation, you can also choose to share it externally in the Community tab of the app. One thing to note is that other people’s messages are not filtered for language. If this bothers you, you can easily avoid using the Community section of the app.
Where to download
Ready to start discovering the hidden memories in your messages?
TextVibes is available to download for free on iOS and Android.
