Lakshmi Rengarajan has spent fifteen years studying how relationships form on screens — first through the evolution of dating culture from 2010 through the rise of dating apps, and now by bringing those lessons into workplaces. Her Running Remote 2026 session was unlike anything else at the conference: no frameworks, no slide decks full of data, no operational guidance. Just a close look at how human connection actually forms, and what remote teams can learn from the people who have figured out how to build it across distance.
The research foundation
Rengarajan’s mentor was Dr. Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist and former chief science officer at Match.com, who studied romantic love through MRI brain imaging and spent her career arguing that love is essential to human experience. Fisher met the love of her life at 71, married at 75, and died about eighteen months before the conference. That arc — open to connection throughout a lifetime, through grief, through complexity — was the emotional context for what followed.
Rengarajan’s own work began with a language observation. When she listened to people who had met in context — at work, through shared activity — they used what she calls ‘realization language’: something shifted in me, I started to notice her differently. When she listened to people who had met online, the language shifted toward consumerism: didn’t feel a spark, didn’t look like their photos.
This distinction matters for remote work. The language of consumerism — evaluation, transaction, optimization — is exactly the language organisations use about their employees. And it is exactly the language that makes genuine connection impossible.
Martin and Scarlet
The story Rengarajan told at the centre of the session was not a team case study. It was a love story.
In June 2020, Jane — married to Martin for over fifty years — was in hospice. She spent her final weeks urging Martin to reconnect with Scarlet, their former neighbour from 35 years earlier. After Jane died, Martin received an email from Scarlet. He did not act on it. Later, he received a handwritten letter. He recognised Scarlet’s handwriting from school board meetings decades ago, where she had been the note-taker. Seeing that handwriting — seeing her actual humanity on paper in a way the email could not convey — he called her. Their conversations grew from twenty minutes to hours. In 2021, after getting vaccinated, Martin drove to Florida to see her for the first time in forty years. They have been together since.
The insight that Rengarajan drew from this story: what opened Martin’s heart was not information, not transparency, not communication. It was intimacy — a small, specific signal of her actual humanity. The email acknowledged a loss and closed. The handwriting revealed a person.
Six principles from long-distance relationships
Successful long-distance relationships have been studied extensively, and Rengarajan drew six principles with direct application to distributed teams.
Willingness is not the same as preparedness. Having Zoom and Slack does not mean knowing how to translate your personality across those platforms. Remote-first organisations that assume tools create connection are confusing infrastructure with skill.
Avoid checkbox care. Scheduled check-ins that become obligations — recurring one-on-ones that both parties endure — create disconnection rather than preventing it. Care has to be genuine or it becomes a signal of its absence.
Do not over-rely on in-person time. Long-distance couples who let the relationship erode between visits, banking everything on the next gathering, tend to struggle. Offsites cannot fix empty connections that have been deteriorating for months. The relationship has to be maintained between the moments, not resurrected at them.
Feel for the other’s format. Strong long-distance partners notice where the other person expresses themselves best — text, voice message, video, written reflection — and amplify that channel rather than forcing everything through a single medium. The equivalent for teams: not everyone communicates best in Slack. Not everyone opens up in video calls. Leaders who notice and adapt do better than those who require everyone to meet them where they are.
The struggle is the story. Long-distance couples who view misunderstandings and crossed wires as evidence of incompatibility struggle. Those who view them as opportunities to understand each other better than they could in easier circumstances tend to build more durable connection. The same principle applies to distributed teams navigating the inevitable friction of async work.
Maintain a sense of wonderment. Successful long-distance relationships often involve genuine appreciation for the improbability of the connection — that these two people, across this distance, found each other. Rengarajan translated this into a question for teams: when did you last think about how remarkable it is that this specific group of people is working on this specific problem together?
Intimacy over trust
The closing argument Rengarajan made was the one most worth sitting with. Most organisations, when they talk about what is missing in distributed work, use the word trust. They build trust frameworks, trust initiatives, trust scores.
What is actually missing, she argued, is intimacy. Trust is often about compliance — did they do what they said they would do? Intimacy is about being seen — knowing small, specific things about someone that reveal who they actually are. The email about Jane’s death was trustworthy communication. The handwriting was intimate. Only one of them changed anything.
