By Brooke Lea Foster, Oct. 28, 2016<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sherry Zheng was cleaning up from dinner, ready to toss out the remaining fried rice, when she grabbed her phone from the counter to text her husband, Chris. He was upstairs bathing their three children. \u201cShould I save you the leftovers?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her phone vibrated: \u201cSure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ms. Zheng, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mother in Oakton, Va., describes her marriage as happy, and she\u2019s thankful for those kinds of small conveniences that her smartphone affords her. But like most couples, there are also times, when her husband pecks away at a screen, that she wants to toss his device away with the table scraps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just the other day, Ms. Zheng was talking to her husband about their plans for the weekend, and when he didn\u2019t respond, she realized he was buried in his phone answering a work email. She tried again, and when he failed to even look up, she lost her temper \u2014 something she rarely does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCan\u2019t you just acknowledge me?\u201d she hollered. \u201cI\u2019m standing right here.\u201d Mr. Zheng promptly placed his phone on the table. (Since then, she has made her point a bit more clearly by texting him her questions, even if they\u2019re in the same room since she knows she\u2019ll get a response.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We live in a culture of dings, beeps, and buzzes, as most people manage everything from bank accounts to fantasy football teams on their smartphones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Spouses may pout if their partners don\u2019t \u201clike\u201d their every Facebook post, an expectation, for some, of marital boosting. Pull out your device to check the baseball scores while on a date with your wife, and you\u2019re bound to get an eye roll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Type an actress\u2019s name into IMDb while watching TV and suddenly you\u2019re on a 10-minute bender into the black hole of your screen, distracted by a text or game notification. \u201cAre you even watching?\u201d your husband snaps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Married or not, many of us sleep with our phones on our nightstands, pocket them as we go from room to room and think nothing of using them in the presence of our partners, whether they are talking or snuggling or reading beside us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Experts say that smartphone use is meddling in our marriages in ways that are sometimes benign but often frustrating, causing quarrels and forcing couples to address an even more important question: At what point are we choosing to spend more time with our smartphones than with our spouses?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many couples work hard to reduce their screen time while around their children; several couples interviewed said they have a policy of no phones at the dinner table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Elizabeth Sciupac, 31, a research associate at a think tank in Washington, said she realized one night that she and her husband, Ivan, 41, were at the same table but worlds apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019d been at work all day, and instead of talking to each other, we\u2019d be looking down at our screens,\u201d she said. \u201cWe were like: \u2018We can\u2019t keep doing this. We\u2019re not even having a conversation.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They\u2019ve tried to enforce the no-smartphone rule on dinner tables most of the time, but when their 2-year-old goes to sleep, they engage in a bit of a screentime free-for-all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe definitely have things that bug each other,\u201d Mr. Sciupac said. \u201cI can\u2019t stand when we\u2019re watching a TV show and she\u2019s on Candy Crush because she\u2019s not actually paying attention, but she insists she is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Sameer Sheth, 40, is a neurosurgeon who lives in Scarsdale, N.Y., with his wife, Sarita Sheth, 39, and their two children (who are in elementary school). He is inclined to catch up on work emails as soon as his family is busy with an activity; it\u2019s the nature of his job, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ms. Sheth, who admits that she is guilty of pulling out her phone during family dinners, said that the sight of her husband answering emails on a Saturday morning can make her hair stand up because it feels as if he\u2019s bowing out of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIsn\u2019t there something you could do around the house? Aren\u2019t there any light bulbs that need fixing?\u201d she\u2019ll say. When asked why it bothers her, she doesn\u2019t hesitate: \u201cBecause when he\u2019s home, it\u2019s our time. I want him to be here.\u201d And by that, she means mentally, not just physically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Marital therapists say the feeling of vying with a smartphone for your partner\u2019s attention isn\u2019t unique, especially because of just how often we\u2019re looking down, rather than up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt says to your partner, \u2018you’re less important than my phone,\u2019\u201d said Rhonda Milrad, a marriage counselor in Beverly Hills, Calif., and founder and chief relationship advisor at Relationup, an online, on-demand relationship advice app. Even mere seconds on a smartphone to check the weather or scan movie times can add up negatively in the eyes of a spouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While there isn\u2019t a clear correlation between screentime and marital dissatisfaction, a 2014 Pew Research report, \u201cCouples, the Internet and Social Media,\u201d polled 2,250 adults to gauge how relationships are weathering technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While 72 percent of adult internet users reported that the internet has had \u201cno real impact at all\u201d on their marriage, of those that did see an impact, 20 percent said it was mostly negative. A quarter of respondents said that partners were distracted by their cellphone when they were together. But therapists say it\u2019s not that smartphone use leads to divorce, just that it strains existing tensions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Steve\n Brody, a psychologist, said he often hears this refrain in his therapy \npractice in Cambria, Calif.: \u201cMy husband spends too much time on his \nphone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While men and women are equally tethered to their devices, it seems, anecdotally at least, as if women may be more sensitive to the rejection felt when a spouse looks at his phone than a husband is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWomen immediately think, \u2018He doesn\u2019t want to be with me,\u2019\u201d Dr. Brody said. \u201cIt gives them a sense of separateness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He chuckles at the thought that even he and his wife, Cathy Brody, who is also a marriage and family therapist, have struggled with each other\u2019s screen time. (For them, laptops are the issue; they don\u2019t get smartphone service at home in the mountains.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Dr. Brody likes to stay up reading the news and checking email, his wife thought it was crucial that they go to bed at the same time. \u201cIt was hard for me to give that up,\u201d he said, \u201cbut she\u2019s right: It\u2019s an important time to spend together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If couples don\u2019t actually speak to each other before bedtime, they\u2019re unlikely to crawl into bed anywhere close to being in the mood. Call it verbal foreplay, said Susan Heitler, a Denver clinical psychologist and relationship coach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For women, a great conversation with your partner is a turn-on, since it makes you feel emotionally close. But men are often turned on by visual signals. This can be a problem when both people are buried in a screen, she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe things that build intimacy are physical cues like eye-to-eye contact, laughing at each other, smiling,\u201d said Dr. Heitler, who also wrote \u201cPrescription Without Pills: For Relief From Depression, Anger, Anxiety and More\u201d; one chapter addresses technology addiction. \u201cWhen people come in and say they\u2019ve grown apart, this is one way it happens. They\u2019re tuned into their devices rather than each other.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Smartphones may be particularly disruptive if both partners are on their phones in bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Therapists say that when a marriage hits a rocky patch, they\u2019ve seen one or both partners hide behind their phones. Dr. Heitler said that one of her clients feared his wife was attracted to her flirtatious boss; rather than address it, he grew depressed and spent more and more time gaming on his smartphone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt distracted him, but it didn\u2019t fix the problem,\u201d she said. \u201cI worked with them on learning how to talk to each other again. I think that\u2019s getting lost in relationships today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And when Dr. Jamie Borin, a urologist in Manhattan, awakes from a good night\u2019s sleep and rolls over to chat with his wife, Dr. Stacy Loeb, also a urologist, she\u2019s often on her phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt helps me wake up,\u201d she said, noting she spends some of her free time on Twitter. When she begins texting her husband at the end of the day about dinner plans (\u201cFifteen texts may come through: What should we eat? Take in or eat out? What neighborhood?\u201d), he often just picks up the phone to call her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have the patience for that kind of back and forth,\u201d he said. They chalk it up to age differences: he is 45, she is 36.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Borin said, \u201cI\u2019d just rather talk.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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