A scene everyone knows
Evening, on the couch. One of you is watching a show, the other is scrolling through videos. At a restaurant, a notification, and the conversation stops dead. In bed, two faces lit up in blue, each in their own world. And that moment when you're telling them something important and they say "oh really?" while typing a message.
It's almost never meant unkindly. You check a train time, fire off a quick reply to a coworker, look "just for a second." But for the person who was talking, it stings a little: "What I'm saying matters less to them than their phone."
In 2016, two American researchers, James Roberts and Meredith David, put the question to more than 450 adults. Nearly half said their partner did this to them. Nearly a quarter said it had already led to arguments. And the more people felt pushed aside for a screen, the less satisfied they were with their relationship.
What the studies show, and what they don't
Many more studies have been done since. In 2025, a team of researchers (Ni and colleagues) pulled together around fifty of them, covering nearly 20,000 people. Their conclusion: feeling pushed aside for a phone goes along with a less satisfied relationship, less intimacy, feeling less listened to, and more arguments.
Two important caveats. First, the effect is real but modest: the phone is only a small part of what makes a relationship go well or badly. Second, most of these studies show a link, not a cause. Someone who's bored in their relationship may also retreat into their screen. Sometimes the phone is the symptom, not the illness.
Dutch researchers Camiel Beukeboom and Monique Pollmann tried to understand why it hurts. It's mostly not jealousy ("who are they texting?"). It comes down to three simpler things: you feel left out, you feel less listened to, and you feel less close.
Should phones be banned from the table?
You may have read that a phone sitting on the table, even unused, makes conversations less warm. That idea comes from a 2013 study that was widely shared. But when other researchers repeated the experiment the same way, in 2021, they didn't find the effect. The mere presence of a phone doesn't seem to be enough to spoil a conversation.
What matters is using it. An experiment in a restaurant, by Ryan Dwyer, Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn, showed this well. Around 300 people had dinner with friends or family. Some were randomly asked to keep their phones on the table, others to put them away. With phones within reach, diners felt more distracted and enjoyed the meal a little less.
The lesson is reassuring: you don't need to live without your phone. You just need to not use it while your partner is talking to you. And the easiest way to manage that is to put it a little further away.
It's how your partner feels that counts
A 2023 study led by Katherine Carnelley and her colleagues, with couples who rated their day every evening, adds a valuable nuance. On days when someone felt pushed aside for a screen, they rated their relationship as worse. But how much time their partner said they'd spent on their phone made no difference.
In other words, it's not the stopwatch that counts, it's the feeling. The person checking their phone for thirty seconds to look up a time doesn't feel absent. The person who was talking at that moment feels like they've disappeared.
So there's no point arguing about who is "really" on their phone more. It's better to ask your partner how it feels for them, and believe them. And if you're the one feeling ignored, say it simply: "When you look at your phone while I'm talking, it feels like you're not interested." That works far better than "You're always on your phone."
Duoly, the couples appThe evening date that puts the conversation back at the center.At night, in bed
The bedroom has become one of the phone's favorite places. You go to bed together, but each of you scrolls through your own feed. Then the light goes off without you really having talked.
Yet those few minutes before sleep are often the only time in the day when it's just the two of you, quiet, no kids, no work. That's when the little things get said: a worry, a joke, "I missed you today." Researchers Brandon McDaniel and Sarah Coyne gave this a name: "technoference," meaning screens that interrupt conversations, meals and time together. In their study, it went along with more tension in the relationship.
The problem isn't the screen itself. A show watched together, curled up under the covers, can be a genuinely shared moment. It's the solitary screen, the one that replaces the last conversation of the day, that takes something away from the relationship.
What if you're the one who can't put it down?
Let's be honest: most of us are on both sides. We grumble when our partner is on their screen, then grab our own the second there's a lull in the conversation. That isn't a lack of love. Phones are designed to grab our attention, and they're very good at it, especially when we're tired, stressed, or need to decompress after a long day.
Ask yourself, without judging, when you reach for it most. When you get home from work, to unwind? As soon as a conversation gets a bit difficult? When you're bored together? The answer often tells you something important.
If it's to unwind, you can say so: "I need ten minutes to myself, then I'm all yours." Your partner will take that much better than a silent absence. If it's to dodge a tense conversation, the phone isn't the real issue, and that's worth talking about. And if it's boredom, it may be a sign your evenings need a bit of novelty. That's not a disaster: it's actually pretty easy to change.
Rules to try tonight
- Pick two phone-free moments. For example, dinner and the first ten minutes after you get home. Two rules you actually keep beat ten you forget.
- Out of reach and on silent. A phone you have to go get from the hallway interrupts far less than one buzzing next to your plate.
- If you need to look, say so, and show them. "Just checking the train time, two seconds" doesn't break the conversation. An absorbed silence does.
- A small bedtime ritual. Phones charge away from the bed, or at least out of reach, and the last five minutes are for the two of you.
- Make the rules together, on a good day. A rule imposed in the middle of a complaint becomes one more thing to fight about. A rule you chose together can be brought up with a smile, without it sounding like an accusation.
- Long distance? Do the opposite. When you live apart, the phone is what connects you. A video call where you really look at each other beats an evening side by side with each of you somewhere else.
None of these rules asks you to give up your phone. They just ask you to give your partner, at a few chosen moments, the attention we hand over so easily to a screen. Try it for a week: many couples are surprised by how much they had missed those small moments.
