ABSTRACT Binary–binary interactions are important in a number of astrophysical contexts including dense stellar systems such as globular clusters. Although less frequent than binary–single encounters, binary–binary interactions lead to a much richer range of possibilities such as the formation of stable triple systems. Here, we focus on the regime of distant binary–binary encounters, i.e. two binaries approaching each other on an unbound orbit with a periapsis distance Q much larger than the internal binary separations. This ‘secular’ regime gives rise to changes in the orbital eccentricities and orientations, which we study using analytic considerations and numerical integrations. We show that ‘direct’ interactions between the three orbits only occur starting at a high expansion order of the Hamiltonian (hexadecupole order), and that the backreaction of the outer orbit on the inner two orbits at lower expansion orders is weak. Therefore, to good approximation, one can obtain the changes of each orbit by using previously known analytic results for binary–single interactions, and replacing the mass of the third body with the total mass of the companion binary. Nevertheless, we find some dependence of the ‘binarity’ of the companion binary, and derive explicit analytic expressions for the secular changes that are consistent with numerical integrations. In particular, the eccentricity and inclination changes of orbit 1 due to orbit 2 scale as ϵSA, 1(a2/Q)2[m3m4/(m3 + m4)2], where ϵSA, 1 is the approximate quadrupole-order change, and a2 and (m3, m4) are the companion binary orbital semimajor axis and component masses, respectively. Our results are implemented in several python scripts that are freely available.