So you reach down and you get a sudden panic, it’s not there. Your phone’s not where you left it. Your heart races. Your brain goes into overdrive. Where is it? You’ve just experienced nomophobia, no mobile phobia, the fear of being without your phone.  

We’re living in an age where we feel our mobile phones are essential to life, we have a physical and emotional response to its absence. Our phones are our second brain, our source of laughter, our place of comfort and our sense of connection. But are our phones doing more harm than good? 

The word technoference is the disruption in interpersonal and social interactions caused by technology. When you’re busy staring your phone rather than staring into your partner eyes. There’s a word for it now. 

In relationships we talk about the concept of turning towards your partner instead of away or against, turning towards means to acknowledge your partners bids for connection, where bids for connection are attempts at interaction to feel a sense of relationship. Turning away means to ignore those bids whilst turning against means to dismiss. Turning towards our partners is related to satisfaction in our relationships, the more we turn towards our partners the more connected we feel. Instead of turning towards our partners, we’re turning towards our phones, and it’s damaging the connection in our relationships as we seem to have more of a connection with our phone than the person sitting next to us. 

People aren’t totally to blame. Technology has been designed to be more engaging than ever potentially creating a generation who are addicted to technology. We’re being programmed to turn towards our phones, rather than our partners, our phones are now an endless source of whatever human need we’re seeking in the moment. Rather than human interaction it’s our phones artificially meeting our needs. 

When someone is addicted, their brains get rewired to experience the addictive substance or behaviour as more rewarding than other things in life, the addiction meets short-term needs and doesn’t take into account long-term consequences. So, we resort to our phones because it feels more rewarding and it immediately meets our needs, our phone doesn’t need any convincing. But what we give up is a deeper more meaningful connection with our partner. 

That is how our phones are ruining our relationships. So rather than your phone turn to your partner instead, turn to your partner as your second brain, your source of laughter, your place of comfort and your sense of connection.