Is Your Smartphone Ruining Your Relationships?

It's an uncomfortable reality we find ourselves in these days.

Smartphones are everywhere. Standing in line at the grocery store, waiting for an oil change, or sitting alone at the local café—we’re scrolling our phones to see what everyone else is doing with their time. It can be an addictive way to spend time, but is it getting in the way of more meaningful connections?

Before the rise of smartphones, our downtime was different. I remember riding a train from Toronto to Detroit as a single 20-year-old. I had a book to read but ended up in a conversation with an Indian musician instead. The conversation started because of my book and ended up covering everything from his beloved wife back in Delhi to Andrew Llyod Webber. 

Recently, that conversation has been coming back to my mind again and again. This past winter, after an overwhelming year of news and social media overload, I decided to reclaim those real conversations and ditch my smartphone. 

So, why get rid of a device that can connect me to millions of people in an instant?

What’s wrong with smartphones? 

Well, quite a few things actually. The more ubiquitous smartphones become in our lives, the more we can see their effects on how we relate to the world around us. It’s so easy to just open up the phone and check anything and everything. Whenever a thought or question pops into our heads, we pull out the phone and look it up, no matter when or where we are.

That habitual invasiveness is destroying relationships. According to researchers, consistent smartphone use is linked to conflict and uncertainty in romantic relationships. Essentially, your real-life date is getting jealous of your smartphone!

For singles, not only is pulling out a smartphone on a date a huge faux pas; but the chance of meeting someone while out alone is almost non-existent. It turns out books, notebooks, and sketchpads don’t deter casual conversation with strangers; but staring at a screen does. 

If you’re looking to meet new people, build relationships, and have meaningful conversations, the smartphone is often more of a complication than an asset. 

It's not all bad, though.

Reading all that might be disheartening. Smartphones are everywhere. You probably have one. Maybe you need it for work, or the loneliness of the past year’s lockdowns and isolation makes digital connections feel essential to you. Social media is sometimes the only way for truly lonely people to make connections in our increasingly isolated society.

There are also a host of apps on smartphones that can help you live healthier, more connected lives. CatholicMatch's app is a great example of that.

It’s all about balance. If you need a smartphone for work or other commitments, or if you’re not quite ready to leave your online life at home, there are still ways to keep your smartphone from intruding on a good relationship.

The art of creating balance.

Start by thinking about what you’d like in a relationship. Do you want a spouse who scrolls his phone while you’re talking about your day? A husband who breaks off a romantic evening to email his boss? A wife who spends hours telling her online friends about that time you tried to fix the car? 

If that’s not the future you dream of, then start creating a better one right now. Start building smartphone boundaries while you’re single. Boundaries like:

• Turing your phone off (or setting it to airplane mode if you use it as an alarm) at least 2 hours before bed. Obviously, if you’re ‘on-call’ for work, you may have to forgo this during your on-call evenings, but even then you can turn off your smartphone’s data and wifi connectivity. 

• Leave the phone off and out of sight on dates. Unless you’re getting someone’s number or using it to take a photo of you and your date, the phone should not make an appearance. 

• Avoid apps that unnecessarily digitize aspects of your life. As much as I loved my fasting app, it definitely fell into this category. If it can be tangible instead of digital, it should be. Your phone is already too enmeshed in your life. It doesn’t need to be your breviary, health coach, and library as well as your computer and telephone. The more you have on it, the more excuses you can make to check it constantly.

• Take tech-free days whenever possible. For some people, these may be once a week; while other people may not be able to tune out more than once a month. But disconnecting from the excessive updates of life in an information-saturated world is incredibly refreshing. 

Not everyone is ready to ditch the smartphone altogether.

But, if you start building healthy boundaries with your phone now, it will help make space in your life for casual conversations, opportunities to meet new people, and healthy tech boundaries within relationships. 

One of the most difficult aspects of ditching (or distancing) from your smartphone comes in swimming against the cultural tide. It can feel pretty isolating to choose the unconventional option. But doing so gives you the opportunity to start building an authentic, engaged, and intentional life now—so that you’ll be ready to share that life with someone else tomorrow!