--- title: How Your Smartphone is Ruining Your Relationship description: People who are more dependent on their smartphones are less certain about their relationships, according to new research. canonical: https://time.com/4311202/smartphone-relationship-cell-phone/ author: Mandy Oaklander article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-04-28T21:32:40.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-22T17:07:06.688Z article:section: Health og:title: How Your Smartphone is Ruining Your Relationship og:description: You're jealous of your partner's smartphone og:url: https://time.com/4311202/smartphone-relationship-cell-phone/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7ba4292bc6413d18/69877892524fc03156debc27/iphone-social-apps-whatsapp.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: TIME.com stock photos Social Apps iPhone og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Your Smartphone is Ruining Your Relationship twitter:description: You're jealous of your partner's smartphone twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7ba4292bc6413d18/69877892524fc03156debc27/iphone-social-apps-whatsapp.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How Your Smartphone is Ruining Your Relationship > Sponsored content. 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Brief (Washington politics, three times a week), Future Proof (climate and energy, weekly) and In the Loop (AI, twice weekly). All are free at time.com/newsletters and together reach more than 1.1 million engaged readers. #### Which TIME newsletter should I subscribe to? It depends on what you follow. For a daily briefing, The Brief. For health, Health Matters. For Washington politics, D.C. Brief. For AI and technology, In the Loop. For climate and energy as a business story, Future Proof. For culture recommendations, Worth Your Time. For how TIME's journalism gets made, Inside TIME. Readers can select any combination at time.com/newsletters. #### Are TIME's newsletters free? Yes. All seven TIME newsletters are free to join at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes TIME's newsletters? TIME journalists write them. Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement.  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Apr 28, 2016 9:32 PM UTC  Elizabeth Renstrom for TIME  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Apr 28, 2016 9:32 PM UTC Nothing kills romance faster than pulling out a smartphone, and now, research confirms it. Being attached to your phone seems to sabotage your attachment with your loved one. Plenty of research has been done on how cell phones affect relationships. Some suggests that they’re a positive influence—that being in easy, intimate touch with a partner through calling and texting makes people happier and more secure in their relationships. Other research reveals the dark side of cell phones. Real-life interactions are dulled when a person feels the urge to check their phone, and the distraction a phone affords one partner doesn’t make the other person feel good. But smartphones are far more invasive and demanding of our time, connecting us to the world in vastly more ways than the flip phones of yore. A team of researchers thought that smartphones might be making relationships worse, so they wrangled 170 college kids who were in committed relationships to see what role their phones were playing. In the [study](http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2016-19944-001/), published in the journal _Psychology of Popular Media Culture_, the college lovebirds were asked to report on their own smartphone use: how dependent they felt on their device, and how much it would bother them to go without it for a day. They then answered similar questions about their own partner’s smartphone dependency. It didn’t matter much how much a person used their device, but how much a person _needed_ their device did. People who were more dependent on their smartphones reported being less certain about their partnerships. People who felt that their partners were overly dependent on their devices said they were less satisfied in their relationship. In other words, people get jealous of their partner’s smartphone. “I’m more likely to think my relationship is doomed the more I believe my partner needs that thing,” explains Matthew Lapierre, assistant professor in the department of communication at the University of Arizona, who authored the study with his former undergraduate student Meleah Lewis. “It’s not use; it’s the psychological relationship to that device.” The researchers are now doing a followup experiment to try to understand the causal mechanisms behind their findings and to see whether or not smartphone dependency affects other areas of life, like academic performance, and whether factors like self-esteem predict a person’s smartphone obsession. “Smartphones are fundamentally different from previous technologies, so their effect is much more powerful,” Lapierre says. “I don’t want to say it’s uniformly negative, but it definitely hints in that direction.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4311202/smartphone-relationship-cell-phone/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4311202/smartphone-relationship-cell-phone/"},"headline":"How Your Smartphone is Ruining Your Relationship","datePublished":"2016-04-28T21:32:40.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-22T17:07:06.688Z","description":"You're jealous of your partner's smartphone","url":"https://time.com/4311202/smartphone-relationship-cell-phone/","keywords":["Sex/Relationships","Smartphones","relationships","Phone","Cheating","Phones","Relationship","cell phones","cell phone","smartphone"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7ba4292bc6413d18/69877892524fc03156debc27/iphone-social-apps-whatsapp.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Mandy Oaklander","jobTitle":"Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7ba4292bc6413d18/69877892524fc03156debc27/iphone-social-apps-whatsapp.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"TIME.com stock photos Social Apps iPhone","caption":"TIME.com stock photos Social Apps iPhone","creditText":"Elizabeth Renstrom for TIME","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/sexrelationships/","name":"Sex/Relationships"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4311202/smartphone-relationship-cell-phone/","name":"How Your Smartphone is Ruining Your Relationship"}}]}] ```