A few weeks ago, my friend Isabel met her husband for a romantic lunch in a favourite London restaurant. They were there to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary and her husband, a publishing director, had even booked the afternoon off work so they could share the day together, just the two of them. Except it wasn’t just the two of them at all.
“As soon as I saw his iPhone on the table, I felt resentful,” she says. “He’s on Twitter, for work he says.” They’d barely got beyond their aperitif when a row started. “I refuse to have a three-way conversation. If you talk to me, I expect eye contact. Meanwhile, you are typing some meaningless observation into the ether.”
Isabel is increasingly resentful of her partner’s reliance on mobile technology, promising, as it does, a gateway to a new virtual world of communication, and socialising, music downloads, video clips, football scores, and the rest of the ephemera of the cyber dimension. We’ve long known about the compulsive allure of the “CrackBerry”, as well as its younger upstart the iPhone, but with the advent of Facebook, and particularly Twitter, a new level of distractedness is developing.
According to research carried out last year by Professor Nada Kakabadse at Northampton University, a growing number of people are becoming overdependent on their BlackBerries, mobile phones and other digital devices.
“From my research, you’d be surprised how many people had their BlackBerry next to their beds,” Kakabadse says. “They would pick up messages two or three times a night.” One in particular, she recalls, went so far as to hide her BlackBberry in a pot plant in the bathroom because her husband objected so strongly to her nocturnal fix. “It certainly created friction in some of the relationships of the people I spoke to. In some cases it led to divorce when one partner felt the other wasn’t paying enough attention to normal human interaction.”
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Relationship counsellors have also noticed this phenomenon. “I see more and more of it,” says Denise Knowles, a Relate therapist. “People feel they’re not being shown enough consideration, that they’re being excluded if their partner is spending a lot of time using phones for socialising, playing games or working. It’s the fact that these devices are so mobile that makes the problem more widespread.”
It is the ubiquity of these super-phones that make them so pernicious. D-Day for many people’s relationships came last summer when the iPhone relaunched, sleeker and faster than ever before. Subsequent jostling for market share between iPhone and BlackBerry also means that they are no longer the preserve of the business world. Katie, a full-time mother, 36, admits that her husband frequently growls at her to remove her BlackBerry from the bedroom. “He just can’t bear that blasted green blinking light flashing across the bedroom like a laser. I usually end up hiding it under a pillow,” she says.
Such technology, it seems, is designed to hook the user in, leaving a partner feeling even more irritated and excluded. I’m painfully aware of this as a BlackBerry user myself and, shamefully, have to admit to ignoring small children’s pleas and my husband’s protestations, to reflexively reach for the device whenever that green turns to red — meaning mail’s in.
“There is something quite compelling about contemporary gadgetry,” says Martin Lloyd-Elliot, a relationships psychologist. “These new designs seem to activate part of the brain that wants to be absolutely absorbed and, like computer games, they can create a strange altered state in the user, in which he or she is with you but not available to you.” Lloyd-Elliot’s patients frequently report a strange dislocated feeling when a partner is immersed in another virtual hemisphere.
“Sometimes it’s an almost tragic scene. The couple are on holiday with their children and dad’s eyes are are glued to a bit of electronic gadgetry. He’s present but he’s absent at the same time. The very technology that is meant to bring people together is increasingly separating us from those we need to attend to most.”
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Philip, 34, a software designer, used to be in thrall to his latest iPhone until he struck a compromise with his long-suffering girlfriend: “I’ve agreed that it’s fine to use at work but as soon as I’m in the home, putting the kids to bed and being with my family, I switch it off. At weekends, I’ve agreed reluctantly that I can ‘check in’ for an hour a day but not in the evenings or when we’re out. My partner was getting so annoyed, I knew I had to curb my habit. I still miss it, though.”
Ring-fencing, as Lloyd-Elliot refers to it — when a “gadgetolic” limits his or her usage to certain times and places in negotiation with his or her partner — is a method that he encourages with his patients.
However, the only way a new etiquette can really work is through increased self-awareness on the part of the user. For starters, users have to realise how their behaviour can affect others. As Lloyd-Elliot says: “There is something arrogant about the mindset that goes with this trend — the sense of always thinking that what you’ve got to say is so important it can’t wait. There’s also an absence of thoughtful empathy; how you are making those around you feel.”
Dr Emma Short, a senior lecturer in psychology, agrees. “It’s about being mindful about the choices you make. Whenever you take a call or reply to a message in front of someone, you are prioritising what is an absent presence.” In terms of your relationship and how your partner feels, she says, think about who you are promoting above whom when you hear that beep or see that flashing light.
Finally, don’t allow any mobile device beyond your bedroom door, and never in the marital bed. If in doubt, cast your mind back to last year, when Madonna confessed that she and Guy Ritchie “lie with our BlackBerrys under our pillows. It’s not unromantic. It’s practical.” Six months later they’d separated. Take heed — turn off that green flashing light now.