Your Partner Can't Stop Looking At Their Phone
Their Tech Use Is Sabotaging Your Connection
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It's a tale as old as iPhones. You're sharing something with your partner. You look up, mid-sentence, but they're glancing down at their phone. You pause, waiting for their attention to return.
"I'm listening, just checking something really quick," they say.
But that's not how it feels to you. It doesn't feel like a quick check—it feels like a preoccupation that crowds out your relationship.
You try to ask "is this a good time?" before you start to talk. And they say "sure" in an offhand way. But the gravitational pull of their device inevitably wins.
There's a specific kind of modern world pain that comes when your partner is right there in the room with you, but their energy is quite literally in the cloud.
Today's Love Note is about this pain. We'll talk through:
- naming your partner's distraction (and its impact on you) in the moment,
- having the bigger conversation about the theme of their tech use,
- aligning with each other instead of against each other so you can get on the same page about tech use in your relationship,
- and situating your own technology habits in the equation.
Although this topic can certainly get philosophical (what is a phone? why are we all on them all the time? how is this impacting our brains and relationships?), we're going to keep it practical and focused on constructive dialogue you can have with your partner today.