When processes on two different machines communicate, they most often do so using the TCP protocol. While TCP is appropriate for a wide range of applications, it has short- comings in other application areas. One of these areas is fault tolerant distributed computing. For some of those applications, TCP does not address link failures adequately: TCP breaks the connection if connectivity is lost for some duration (typically minutes). This is sometimes undesirable. The paper proposes robust TCP connections, a solution to the problem of broken TCP connections. The paper presents a session layer protocol on top of TCP that ensures reconnection, and provides exactly-once delivery for all transmitted data. A prototype has been implemented as a Java library. The prototype has less than 10% overhead on TCP sockets with respect to the most important performance figures.