When Carmen emailed us about Couple.me, I confess I’d heard about it before but dismissed it immediately as co-dependent and terrifying. I mean, just look at their product video.

But many, many of our staff members had strong positive feelings about the app. Which led me to think two things:

a) perhaps I am dead wrong about this app
b) this would be a great time to merge an app review with how adorable everyone is with their perfect humans because everyone who works here is a total critter.

We tried to get a bunch of different kinds of relationships, from the super new to the super long term to the super close and the super far away. Those humans are:

Carmen and Geneva
Carmen’s in DC and Geneva lives in the Great White North. Both of these cool cats work for Autostraddle.com and they met at A-Camp.

Carmen: I think I speak for both Geneva and myself when I say that Couple.me has provided us with a fun space to chat and interact with each other, and that we will definitely continue to use it. To be honest, I still can’t get over the whole “me and my girlfriend have a relationship so special we use an app” thing.

Kaitlyn and Camille
Kaitlyn is one of our newer contributing editors, based in Chicago, and her girlfriend lives in New York City. They’ve been together 7 months.

Kaitlyn: Camille and I have a pretty app-oriented relationship. Before we were dating, we may or may not have created a four-person GroupMe chat so we could hit on each other in a less intimidating space than, you know, real life, and GroupMe was our main mode of conversation in the months before she got an iPhone to replace her old, text message-hating phone.

Hansen and Maddie
Hansen is our DIY/Food editor and she met Maddie at this past A-Camp. Hansen lives in Colorado, Maddie’s all the way in Nevada.

Hansen: My girlfriend and I started using Couple first out of curiosity. We’re currently long-distance, with her in Vegas and me in Colorado, so in the weeks between our visits, we thought it’d be nice to have a different way to connect. We weren’t even officially in a relationship at the time, so we thought we could be the “control” pair, as in “Can new couples who aren’t super duper in love use this app without feeling creeped out?” And let me tell you, we were totally creeped out at first.

Yvonne and Gloria
Yvonne is our Associate Editor. She and Gloria have been together since college. They live together in Texas, but Gloria’s job recently took her to Philadelphia. Indefinitely.

Yvonne: We honestly were friends for that first year and nothing happened between us. She was the first person I came out to in college and I had no idea she was queer despite us going to gay clubs and watching “Loving Annabelle” and “Imagine Me and You” in her dorm and not thinking it was weird. It turns out she was queer too but she didn’t tell me that until the next fall semester. Well anyways, we realized we really liked, liked each other that turned into love and the rest is history. We’ve been together for more than 3 years.

Yvonne + Gloria

Ali and Abby
Hi! That’s me and my girlfriend! And right now we’re semi-nomadic in that we have our home base in NJ (mostly together) but we travel a ton because neither one of us can say no to opportunities/fun stuff. But we do that mostly together. Abby was next to me while I wrote my portion of this review.

Ali: For me ‘n Abby, this whole experience started with me texting her the Couple.me link and stating “we have to review this travesty of an app.” In short, we were prepared to hate it. And for a little while, we definitely did.

So without further ado, I give you the giant review of Couple.me, organized by app feature.

Chatting

Carmen: We moved a lot of our chatting over to Couple for a few reasons:

+ Because Google Hangouts fails to work on my phone every. damn. day. and makes me want to bang my head into the metrobus window when I’m on the go,

+ Because the beta web version of the app is amazing and lets your “wallet photo” (I know, right) be an omnipresent part of your online experience,

Stickers

Carmen: Geneva gave me the gift of Beaver Stickers That I Strongly Identify With and it was legitimately the most amazing act of love I’ve ever experienced. It’s really revolutionary.

Although I identify most with the heart-wielding Beavers, Geneva insists the Flirty Drunk Beaver speaks to my person. Considering how we met, this concerns me, but not enough to stop sending it to her every morning.

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.

Thumbkiss

Kaitlyn: You guys, we need to talk about Thumbkiss. This feature takes you out of the conversation screen to a blank white one, where you press your thumb to show your partner a fingerprint icon that they can then touch with their own thumb. If you hold your thumbs together for a few seconds, the screen turns red and the phone vibrates. You have just Thumbkissed. Like with actual kissing, it is awkward to initiate your first Thumbkiss, and if you go for it and your partner does not reciprocate, you will feel the same urge to run away, fake your death, change your name and start a new life on another continent, preferably with a tropical climate. Also like kissing, you get better at it the more you do it. Soon enough you’ll figure out what you like, who should lead, who prefers little pecks to long smooches, which one of you has better aim and how the whole thing gets old after 25 seconds or so. Wait, that last one only applies to Thumbkissing.

Steamy

Carmen:

Hansen: I thumbkissed her, and she said, “That’s weird.” Then, I don’t know what changed, but I found myself thumbkissing her under the table during class and grinning to myself.

Ali: The first time we thumbkissed, Abby sent back the message “ew, this is weird, I don’t like it.” But she also wants you to know that she’s a luddite who doesn’t like change and it takes her a while to warm up to new things. I’m not like that, though, and I still hated it. Because it felt co-dependent in a way we really aren’t.

And then I went to South Carolina for a week. To dog-sit my parents’ Greyhounds. And I was on that farm for a week. By myself.

All of a sudden the thumbkiss feature that we found so creepy was a cute way to know we were doing the same thing at the same time. Of course we could have both stared at the moon and realize we were staring at the same moon like Fievel, but this was definitely a more 21st century way to do that.

Yvonne: Me and Gloria practically thumbmakeout all the time.

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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