.
“We walk around with it. It’s in our pockets all the time. It’s next to us all the time. It then is either on the bed stand or on our beds even.”
Attention, she says, is the new fidelity.
“We’re not only comparing ourselves to other people. Now we’re comparing ourselves to an entire virtual frictionless world full of new bodies, novelty, endless algorithmic perfection that is so well crafted to hand deliver each of us exactly what we want at any given moment.”
This can cause feelings of isolation, she says.
“Why am I not adding up? Why am I not measuring up? My partner’s attention keeps going outside of our relationship.”
When we have the phone next to us all the time and it becomes a new companion, micro moments of connection and intimacy are eroded, Voce says.
“We miss the mundane moments where connection and intimacy are used to being built. So that could be on the car ride home. That could be right after dinner. That could be coming home from work. That could be before bed. That could be even cuddling, watching TV.”
Navigating this creeping intrusion can be fraught, she says.
“A couple of things can happen. One is we don’t bring it up. We ignore it, we sweep it under the rug.
“The other is we bring it up with blame and contempt and making our partner wrong and they don’t change anything because they get on the defensive.”
Instead, Voce says, look at layers beneath the phone use.
“Maybe it’s that you actually just miss your partner. Maybe you do feel lonely. Maybe you feel a little jealous of the phone.
“Maybe it feels like you want to be having this connected time after work, but your partner is on their phone the second they walk in. And so, you’re feeling rejected.”
None of these feelings are about the phone – the phone is the symptom, but not the underlying experience, she says.
“I’ll just use sex as an example. I might say, ‘hey honey, I actually have been feeling like I miss our sexual connection. So, I’m keeping it on me’.”
Approaching the situation this way avoids putting a partner on the defensive, she says.
“I’m saying, ‘hey honey, this is really hard for me to bring. I just want to let you know, I miss our sexual connection. I’m wondering if we can prioritise that?’
“’I’m wondering if we can actually make space for that. And if we can talk about how to do that’. So now the door is open.”
At the end of a day, people need time to decompress, and if time on the phone helps that, she suggests putting limits on scrolling time.
“What do you think about us taking 20 minutes after we both get done with work and we just do our own thing, we decompress however we want, 20 minutes, an hour, whatever.
“And then can we have time for just us? Can we make time for just us after that?”
Phones now occupy a space where TV or alcohol have lived previously as a numbing activity, she says.
“It’s not like we’ve never in the history of relationships numbed ourselves out and distracted. It’s just that now it lives right next to us. Now it’s this third arm that just does not leave our side.”
