Your Presence Matters More Than Their Ding
A phone buzz doesn’t seem like much. But in close relationships, even small interruptions can leave a mark.
We’ve all been there. You’re having a conversation with your spouse about the family schedule for the upcoming week when he gets a notification on his phone. He glances down, and that’s enough to pull his focus from the conversation.
You say to him, “Honey, what do you think about that?”
And he stares back at you, bewildered, “Huh?”
“The school bake sale,” you say again, slightly annoyed, “did you want to bake the cookies we made last year?”
“Oh, uhm, yeah,” he tries, as he struggles to piece together the conversation you were having just five seconds ago, “Yes, the oatmeal raisin cookies,” he finally manages to say.
Or, you’re enjoying a long-delayed date night with your wife when her watch dings. It’s Stella, texting your wife about the ladies’ game night. Your wife glances at her wrist, thinking you don’t notice, but of course you do. You’re thrilled that your wife has a fantastic group of girlfriends, but when Stella texts, her message immediately becomes a third wheel on your date night.
These notifications carry a subtle but significant cost, one that shows up in our closest relationships. They pull you away from being present with the people who matter most in your life.
A recent study from Dr. Brandon T. McDaniel at Penn State found that “phone use around [a] partner (not total daily phone use) predicted lower relationship satisfaction and coparenting quality.”
And in another study, McDaniel specifically cited the interruptions, the mere act of receiving a phone notification, as the cause of tension in a romantic relationship:
The current abundance of technology in daily life creates opportunities for interruptions in couple interactions, termed technoference or phubbing. We found that on days when participants rated more technoference than usual, they felt worse about their relationship, perceived more conflict over technology use, rated their face-to-face interactions as less positive, and experienced more negative mood.
I can attest to this personally. I can be in the middle of a conversation with my spouse, and if she receives a notification, she is very likely to glance at her phone—or even just her Apple Watch, to read it.
In that brief moment, she leaves our conversation, and I can tell it takes her brain another few moments to re-orient herself back to our conversation, probably because she’s now not only thinking about our conversation, but the conversation that’s happening on her phone or her watch.
I hadn’t heard of the term “phubbing” until I read McDaniel’s study, but it’s an excellent term for how I feel. I feel slighted by her phone. I feel phubbed.
Again, it’s great that her friends want to connect with her about a girls’ night or a book club, but the mere act of the notification gets in the way of the relationship I’m trying to maintain with her.
In my first essay on No New New, I discussed how work emails can sabotage our days, making it harder to deliver the work we had previously promised to colleagues and clients.
But newness, in the form of texts from friends, or maybe even social media notifications, can pull us away from the connections that we’re trying to maintain away from work. These notifications, while they may seem harmless, can harm those relationships in ways that aren’t always obvious.
As I continue this series of essays, I will argue that we need dedicated time away from notifications, and newness in all of its forms. And, in doing so, we can improve not only our work outputs, but also our personal relationships.
You’ll also notice that I haven’t argued for time away from our phones or our devices. As I’ll explore in this series, it’s not the devices themselves that disrupt our days or our relationships, but the newness they introduce, often at the expense of our presence and our intentions.
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In the next essay, I’ll unpack what I mean by “newness,” and how it shows up in our lives in two distinct ways.