You, Me, and the Smartphone Between Us
What Our Screens are Doing to Intimacy (Vol. 6; Issue 33)
Our smartphone addiction isn't only changing how we spend our time. It's changing how we relate to one another. Who among us hasn’t felt hurt when a friend or family member looks at their phone while we’re talking with them? We’ve all felt annoyed when our partner scrolls on their phone while we’re watching our favorite show. These everyday distractions can leave us feeling ignored, rejected, or strangely alone in the presence of someone we love.
Imagine a typical couple, anywhere in the developed world, at day’s end. They have brushed their teeth, turned off the lights, and climbed into bed. Perhaps they lie only six inches apart. One reaches for their phone. The other does the same. Time passes. They are more physically intimate than they’ve been all day, but psychologically, they’re miles apart.
What began as a couple has now morphed into a love triangle or, more accurately, a love quadrangle1. Four entities lie in the bed: two humans and two machines. These alleged “lovers” might be reading the news, looking at Instagram feeds, watching a video, or texting. By any measure, they are:
Detached, isolated, separate.
These devices offer us an extraordinarily easy escape from one of intimacy's central tensions, well-captured by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s phrase:
It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.2
Part of us wants the safety of remaining hidden. But another part longs to be seen and understood. These machines allow us to be “close” to another, kind of. There’s the physicality of lying close, maybe even touching. But, again, mentally we can essentially vanish into other worlds. Researchers Roberts and David3 call this snubbing of your partner “phubbing.”
Couples therapist Pauline Boss4 calls what most couples do in bed these days ambiguous loss, that experience of someone being physically present but psychologically absent. We all know of the typical internal psychological defense mechanisms—denial, projection, repression, rationalization, intellectualization. Technology functions as an externalized defense mechanism.
Feeling anxious?
Scroll.
Feeling lonely?
Scroll.
Feeling sexually rejected?
Scroll.
Feeling angry with your spouse?
Scroll.
Feeling bored with yourself?
Definitely scroll.
The phone asks virtually nothing of us psychologically while offering almost unlimited stimulation. A human being is much more demanding.
Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg5 describes how couples develop private jokes, rituals, memories, sexual signals, and irritations. They know how to hurt one another; they know how to comfort one another. They develop a language that belongs partly to neither person individually and partly to both of them together. Couples form their own social units while simultaneously existing within a larger social group.
Successful couples develop, among other things, a kind of shared ideal, a sense of what we are together. Smartphones punch holes in that boundary between the couple and the group—in the bedroom, the dining room, and the broader social world. The group enters whenever it wishes.
Even before smartphones, couples needed to create sanctuaries from the group: dinner together, a walk together, a date night without the kids, seeing a film in a theater. (Remember those dates?) Attention is finite. Love requires attention and a special kind of separation from the society around them.
Before smartphones, entering the intimate space of a couple required considerable effort. Someone had to knock on the door or telephone the house. Now the entire world sits on the nightstand. And it is extraordinarily seductive.
Consider the competition:
Your partner may want to tell you about something that happened during the day. But the phone can offer you breaking news, pornography, an angry political argument, a beautiful house in Tuscany, your high school girlfriend’s profile pic, a hilarious dog video, a war, or an investment opportunity.
Your partner hardly stands a chance.
Returning to the universal vulnerability involved in intimacy, suppose your partner says:
You seem distant tonight.
You might say:
You’re right. I’m angry with you.
Or:
I’ve been feeling lonely lately.
Or:
I’m worried you’re losing interest in me.
Or even:
I don’t know what’s wrong. I just feel strange tonight.
Each of those responses carries psychological risk. You’re exposing your heart, and you’re never sure what your partner will say in response.
You might be rejected. Misunderstood. Criticized. You might start an argument. You might discover something about your relationship (or yourself) that you would rather not know.
The same problem extends into erotic life. Erotic life requires something that our culture increasingly seems determined to eliminate. Empty space. Desire needs anticipation. Fantasy. Curiosity. Frustration. Waiting.
Technologies remove ambiguity and inconvenience from life. They create expectations of frictionless satisfaction that actual human beings cannot possibly meet.
Your phone is designed to respond immediately.
Your lover is not.
Your phone doesn’t say:
Not tonight.
Your phone doesn’t misunderstand you.
It doesn’t have a headache. It doesn’t suddenly bring up something you said to its mother three weeks ago. We humans are gloriously inconvenient. And that inconvenience is part of intimacy.
Relationships are built less through dramatic events than through thousands of tiny encounters.
A glance.
A touch.
A joke.
A sigh.
Someone saying:
Listen to what happened today.
And the other person actually listens to you.
These moments communicate something fundamental:
You care for me; and I care for you.
Smartphones invite the accumulation of the opposite message. You begin telling a story. Your partner looks down. You see the glow of the screen. And somewhere, perhaps barely consciously, you register:
Something else is more interesting than I am.
Once means nothing.
Five hundred times means something.
We might think of these as micro-abandonments. No one leaves the house. No one files for divorce. No one even necessarily becomes angry. But some tiny strand of connection is broken. Then another. And, then another. The little glowing screen awakens an old and familiar anxiety:
The person I need is here, but somehow no longer available to me.
Seen this way, our phones don’t simply distract us from one another. They stir up some of our earliest fears about losing the attention, and ultimately the love, of someone upon whom we depend.
We cannot store relationships in the cloud. They are built moment by moment through the remarkably simple experience of one human being giving another their undivided attention.
The obvious solution is remarkably unsophisticated:
Put the damn phone down.
Tonight, notice what happens when you climb into bed. Another world will be waiting on your phone. It will still be there tomorrow.
Turn toward the person beside you instead.
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And check out my book, Lover, Exorcist, Critic: Understanding Depth Psychotherapy, available on Amazon.
References
Karbelnig, A.M. (2017). The geometry of intimacy: love triangles and couples therapy. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 35(1):70 – 82.
Winnicott, D. W. (1963). Communicating and not communicating leading to a study of certain opposites. In The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development (pp. 179–192). New York: International Universities Press.
Roberts, J. A., & David, M. E. (2024). Partner phubbing and relationship satisfaction among high and low reward romantic partners: An expectancy violations theory perspective. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 40(18): 5493–5502. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2023.2238341
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
Kernberg, O. F. (1980). Love, the couple, and the group: A psychoanalytic frame. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 49(1):78–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/21674086.1980.11926907
Kernberg, O. F. (1995). Love relations: Normality and pathology. Yale University Press.