#sowhoknew: Has your smartphone ruined your sex life?
Spending more time with your Samsung than smooching? Getting less intimacy because you are fiddling with your iPhone? If so, then your smartphone is probably ruining your sex life.
According to the Daily Mail online, a new book entitled ‘Digital Inferno’ suggests that your relationship could be doomed if you don’t hang up your Huawei from time to time. The author is Paul Levy, a senior researcher at the University of Brighton who began studying the effects of our virtual lives on our physical relationships six years ago. He has since documented the lives of hundreds of couples whose relationships have been threatened or broken by their addiction to technology.
Levy cites the phenomenum of ‘wretched contentment’: spending evenings with loved ones whilst watching TV, yet constantly checking phones without talking. It can be pleasant, but it’s just not fulfilling.
Apparently the quality of our physical connections become diluted over time, we adjust, each time expecting less. Ultimately we forget what real romance is and fail to realise that sending digital kisses by social media can’t ever replace a real snog. How will you know when there is a problem? When you put an ‘x’ on an email to your partner more often than you actually kiss them…
A related study at the University of Missouri interviewed hundreds of Facebook users aged 18 to 82, which found that as their partners usage of the site increased so did their jealousy, often leading to cheating, break-ups and even divorce.
And a similar investigation at Oxford University of 24,000 married European couples found a direct, inverse link between use of social networking sites and marital satisfaction. It basically discovered that the more couples read about others’ (supposedly) exciting lives on social media, the more likely they were to view their own with disappointment and disdain. It detailed one couple whose partnership hit the rocks when they both started doing emails / social on their phones in bed rather than, err, doing each other! One woman was quoted as saying “My husband started working from the study next door instead. When he started texting me goodnight, instead of walking to the bedroom, I knew I was no longer a priority.”
So the next time you are wondering why your partner isn’t feeling the love then put down the LG and have some nookie instead of canoodling with your Nokia.
