Chapter 6: Intimacy in Analog

It’s hard to believe we’ve only been living with “smart” phones with internet access since 2007. Prior to that, if couples wanted to ignore each other, they hid behind newspapers.

The old cliché of the man sitting at the dinner table with a newspaper up to his face has been replaced with the couple sitting in a restaurant scrolling their cell phones.

Same problem, same complaint, and same solution, ultimately.

If you’re using your phone to avoid human intimacy, connection and conversation, then it doesn’t matter what you’re hiding behind; you’re still hiding. Newspapers had a limited number of pages, with limited stories. At some point you were going to read the whole thing and eventually put it down. But phones connect us to a never-ending universe of information.

Phones have become our external brain. There’s no end to the thoughts, stories, information, and propaganda our external brain insists on sharing with us, whether we want to hear it in the moment, or not.

We’ve been well trained to answer the call of our pocket masters. Our brains are now wired to respond to notifications, dings, and bells and their attendant hits of dopamine or cortisol. For most of us, our phones are calling the shots.

A quick look down at our external brain, and there’s a whole world of messages and images that say, “Look at me! I’m far more interesting than the human sitting across from you!”

The couples I coach who are over sixty generally have a more utilitarian relationship with their phones. For them, it’s about actually having phone calls with human voices on the other end. But for the under sixties — especially those under forty — phone dependency is now on the list of common partner complaints. It’s called phubbing, and it’s a big problem in relationships.

A study published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture examined how smartphone use and smartphone dependency affect the health of relationships among college-aged adults. The study showed a significant correlation between higher levels of dependency on smartphones and higher levels of relationship uncertainty.

Think about this: the typical American checks their smartphone once every six-and-a-half minutes, or roughly one hundred and fifty times a day. How many of these phone checks pause an intimate conversation with a loved one or interrupt some other shared moment of human connection? The affected partner can become trained as well — trained to feel less important, unseen, or discounted by their partner’s phone habits. Studies have recently tied phone dependency to partner depression and relationship dissatisfaction.

“She never puts her phone down. Literally!” were the words of one of my clients. “Whenever we fight, he goes to his phone and doesn’t want to talk.”

When I suggest some new etiquette around phone use, it’s usually met with a stunned silence. Some couples will look at me like I’m suggesting something quite radical, even dangerous.

I think it’s a heroic demonstration of love, to say to your partner, “Let’s agree to leave our phones outside of the bedroom,” or “Let’s leave our phones in the car while we eat out,” or “Let’s avoid pulling our phones out if we’ve having a disagreement.”

You can even make this formal. Write agreements down and sign your names at the bottom. Get a witness to sign off on it! Do whatever it takes for you both to acknowledge that agreements have been made, and then see what happens. Get curious about what life is like when you take your power back from your phones!

What would it be like to remove your “alternate universe” from your together time with your partner and engage in full sentences that have awkward moments of silence, rambling unedited thoughts and even — God forbid — boredom. Who knows where it will lead?

It’s unfair to ask our partner to compete with the instant gratification of likes, alerts, calls to action, and feeds custom-designed to target our latest AI-monitored interests.

By removing our phones from our intimate life, we make the time and space to slow down and explore human connection that goes deeper than our usual day-to-day engagement with our partner. We have the dedicated, uninterrupted time to share ourselves, find out new things about our partner, and stay current with their thoughts, their vulnerability and their intimate confessions.

Every time my phone dings or buzzes with a notification I think about the scene from the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma in which three men are depicted as the controllers behind the phone, working day and night to find ways to draw my attention to my device: texts from friends, social media, Facebook Messenger, news alerts, traffic updates, voicemails, and vibrations

The Social Dilemma helped me recognize the nonstop war playing out between my phone and my increasingly weary and divided attention. Sometimes I feel like I’m losing the battle, but I’m also hopeful that as we contend with the ongoing invasion of technology into our lives, we will re-define our values and our boundaries.

I hear parents talk about creating restrictions on their kid’s phone time, taking their phones away at bedtime or limiting screen time, for example. So, let’s bring that same wisdom to protecting our intimate time with our partners.

Here are three simple steps to start taking your power back from your phone:

Acknowledge there’s a problem. Listen to your partner. If their experience of your phone use is causing them to feel unimportant it’s time to have an honest conversation about phone dependency and solutions.

Agree on priorities. We all have obligations, work commitments, and parental responsibilities, but you can still eliminate the distraction. Set your phone to only allow calls from these important contacts when on “do not disturb,” and then use it. The rest can wait.

Create phone-free periods. Agree on specific times when phones are put away in the other room, like while on intimacy dates, after a certain hour in the evenings, during long walks, and while spending time with the kids. For the ambitiously advanced radicals out there, try a techno cleanse for a weekend or a vacation. Give your brain a break from dopamine/cortisol concoctions that come with every notification. Step back into a relaxed world of analog intimacy, extended eye contact, empathetic listening, and conversations that are more than 280 characters.

I’m taking on a few new clients. If you’re interested in learning more about how relationship and intimacy coaching can improve/save your relationship, book a Discovery Call with me.

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