The Inanimate Object That Destroys The Most Relationships
Your phone might be disconnecting you from your love.
Anna Shvets, Saracin, Fratila Codrut's Images | Canva Are you more intimate with your phone than your partner? Think about it, which one do you touch and pay more attention to, your phone or your partner? When your phone is in your hands, your attention is not on your partner or relationship. We might act like we heard what they said, but we might not process the information or remember it. This creates a ripe environment for conflict and resentment to settle into your relationship.
Our phones do a great job of connecting us to the world, but at the same time, they’re also pretty darn distracting and often keep us disconnected from the relationships we value most. The devices and the applications they run are designed to grab and hold our attention. This can leave little room for focusing on your partner and relationship. Emails from the office. Facebook updates from “friends.” Texts from your BFF. Candy Crush. Our phone knows how to get (and keep) our attention, and our partners and children suffer as a result.
Senior VP of YourTango Melanie Gorman took this all-too-common problem to our panel of experts: psychotherapist and loving relationship expert Tamara J. Green; therapist and hypnotherapist Leslie Rouder; life coach Lora Lucinda Andersen; and renowned relationship expert and author John Gray, PhD.
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They all said the same thing — technology is a handy tool, but should never replace in-person connections.
Even the greatest multitasker can't maintain an effective focus on listening and communicating with another human while actively engaged with a phone or other mobile device. Factoring in how most human communication is non-verbal, your focus on the phone leaves little room to read your partner's body language or other discrete forms of communication.
“You miss all of the subtleties of communication,” says Leslie Rouder. “Eye-to-eye contact and being able to see someone’s body expression … over 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal, we’re not being in close contact with each other [when on our phones] in a way that’s most beneficial in terms of really good communication.”
In addition to just distracting us from our loved ones (we’re looking at you person playing on your phone while out to dinner with your spouse!), John Gray, Ph.D. says overstimulation from our phones is changing our brains. “When our brain is overstimulated, it adapts," says Gray. "It suddenly depends upon over-stimulation and it can’t relax. We have to train our brain to come back to a more centered, relaxed place and this is very challenging.”
So how do you do it? How do you keep your phone addiction from ruining your relationships?
Check out the video above to hear the spot-on, super-smart advice our experts share for making your phone work FOR your relationships instead of against them.
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