Excessive screen time can lead to emotional detachment in relationships. Photo / 123rf
As our relationship with tech becomes more engrossing, digital addiction is being increasingly cited in marital breakdowns
The final straw for Laura came during what should have been a romantic mini-break to Paris with her husband. The couple had arranged for the grandparents to babysit their children and headed off on the Eurostar for their first trip a deux in almost a decade. By the end of the first day, however, Laura knew she couldn’t take any more.
“At home, we’d had months of me trying to get him to stop endlessly scrolling on his phone,” she says. “I’d hoped that going away, just the two of us, would get him to put it down for a while, at least. But it was clamped in his hand the entire time, while he effectively ignored me. I spent the weekend seething, and I knew our marriage was over.”
The couple, in their late 40s, split up shortly afterwards. Ending a marriage over a cellphone may sound melodramatic, but they’re not alone: “digital detachment”, described as constant phone use and a lack of meaningful, in-person communication, is an issue couples are increasingly citing during marital breakdowns, according to specialists Divorce-Online.
Online infidelity is a major factor. Another is excessive social media use, which was mentioned in 30% of the divorces the company handled between January and August. But Facebook and Instagram are far from the only attention-diverting culprits, as Laura discovered.
“John’s phone addiction started during the pandemic, when he was working from home and the lines between work time and family time seemed to blur,” she says. “From then on, he seemed to be permanently glued to his phone, whether we were sitting in front of the TV, out with friends or even lying in bed together.”
Naturally, she wondered if he was having an affair. “I looked through his phone early one morning when he was asleep, but I couldn’t find anything incriminating,” she says.
Instead, she believes he was addicted to checking a variety of apps: “His emails, WhatsApp messages, news websites, Wikipedia. He’d go into a sort of trance. I could never get his full attention and it made me feel like I wasn’t important. I also hated that he did it in front of the kids, so it felt as though they weren’t a priority either.”
The issue is something psychotherapist and relationship coach Susie Masterson sees often in her practice. “It comes up a lot, and it’s not restricted to one gender or a particular age bracket, although it might take different forms for different groups,” she says. “It’s a stereotype, but I’ve observed that where women might use their phones more to communicate with others, men gain a sense of power from gathering knowledge.”
Whatever the focus of the addiction, it’s fuelled by the same thing: repeated hits of dopamine, the “feelgood hormone” that motivates us to do things we think will bring pleasure – checking our social media notifications for likes, for example, or finding an instant answer to a question about a film or football player. Over time, we associate our phones with self-soothing, and start to reach for them when we’re bored, or in a tricky social situation.
Dr Anna Lembke, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine in the United States and author of bestseller Dopamine Nation, describes the smartphone as a “modern-day hypodermic needle” offering constant stimulation and instant gratification.
For some, it’s their personal relationships that bear the brunt. “When we’re on our phones, even if we’re interacting with people by leaving messages or commenting on their social media posts, it asks nothing of us,” says Masterson. “When you’re face-to-face with someone without that prop, it’s much harder, and some people can retreat into the undemanding option. The problem with ‘phubbing’ [snubbing someone to engage with your phone] is it’s a constant diversion of our attention elsewhere, and it says to the other person that they don’t matter. It can have a pernicious impact on intimacy.”
It drove Joe, 32, to leave his girlfriend of two years when, despite his repeated pleas, she was unwilling or unable to dial down her social media use. “She hardly ever posted on Instagram herself, but she was obsessed with scrolling through her feed,” he says. “It got to the point where most of her conversations were about things influencers were doing – their new breast implants or free holidays.
“It was like she’d forgotten what her own personality was – she just wanted to live in their world, even though she was fully aware most of it was fake. She found it comforting, I think, like a constant soap opera, but I found it mindless and depressing.”
Anna, 61, was also pushed to the brink of divorcing her husband, who “couldn’t go for more than a couple of minutes without picking up his phone”, she says. “If someone mentioned, say, the 1966 World Cup, he’d immediately start ‘researching’, looking up players and scores mid-conversation. He’d fall down an internet rabbit hole and that would be it for the entire evening.”
He was even preoccupied with his phone during an expensive dinner in an upmarket restaurant for her birthday. “We’ve been together a long time, so I don’t expect him to hold my hand and gaze into my eyes, but I looked around at other couples chatting to one another and felt hurt and angry that he couldn’t make the effort to do the same,” she says.
“It drove me absolutely mad. If I saw him put the phone on the table during a meal, even facedown, I’d feel my blood pressure rising. When he brought it out in front of guests, I found it mortifying. I just wanted to feel connected to him, and it reached a point where I wondered if we’d ever get that back.”
As Masterson points out, the ubiquity of smartphones obscures the fact their use can be damaging. “If everyone’s on them all the time, it’s difficult to even realise there could be a problem,” she says. “We wouldn’t go for dinner with a partner and get a book out to read in front of them, so we should see phones as similarly intrusive, but somehow as a society, we don’t.”
For those who feel their partner’s phone use is out of control, she recommends trying to broach the subject gently. “Be curious and say, ‘I’ve noticed this lately’ rather than accusing them, because it’s possible they’re struggling in some way,” she says. “That’s a much better starting point for trying to empathise with one another and collaborate on putting boundaries in place.”
Anna and her husband did manage to cut down on his usage, after they had couples’ counselling and she explained how it was making her feel. “It’s still not perfect, but it’s much better than it was,” she says. “If we’re watching a film or eating in a restaurant, we put our phones away and I remind him he can do his research later.”
For Laura, walking away from her marriage felt like the right choice, even though the financial and emotional cost to all four family members has been profound. “I think John’s phone addiction was a symptom, really, of the distance between us which had been growing for a long time,” she says. “It’s easy for me to put 100% of the blame on his behaviour, but maybe we just lost sight of one another along the way – and the phone was his way of coping.”
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