NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T olstoy famously began Anna Karenina with, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But that’s not Greg Schutte’s experience. Schutte has been a professional counselor for nearly three decades in Dayton, Ohio, and has served hundreds of clients from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Today, nearly all the married couples he works with are suffering from the same problem: addiction to electronics.
In a recent interview with the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), Schutte “low-balled” the numbers for us. Of his clients, he estimated that, “75 to 80 percent have something like a tech or social-media addiction.”
The compulsive use of electronics introduces a variety of marital troubles. Some couples, Schutte says, struggle with a porn addiction, despite severe spousal disapproval. Some, using directing messaging, have gone from surreptitious contact into extramarital affairs. Many of his clients suffer from suspicion (“who are you talking to?”), feeling ignored by a spouse unable to look away from the screen, or from lack of conversation, the engine on which relationships run.
According to Schutte, the overarching problem is that, through these devices, spouses create “other lives” that they pop in and out of, where one’s significant other is unwelcome. This breeds suspicion and absenteeism in marriage. “It’s so destructive to build these secret lives on our phones,” Schutte says. “People are finding more ways to do this with more phones and accounts, and it becomes impossible to help [these couples] rebuild trust.”
Over the last several years, strong evidence has emerged that, among American young adults, addiction to social media and smartphones is a major health problem. In May, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory warning that social media drives anxiety, depression, emergency-room visits, and suicide ideation, calling its effect on adolescents, particularly girls, an “urgent public health issue.”
But the negative effects of electronics are not limited to children and teens. Though the phone addiction of adults has not been analyzed as widely as the problems it causes the youth, counselors such as Schutte see the problem. In an earlier study of 145 adults, James Roberts and Meredith David found that “phubbing” (prioritizing one’s phone over people in one’s presence) leads to greater relationship dissatisfaction among romantic partners.
A new survey of 2,000 married Americans ages 18 to 55 — by YouGov on behalf of IFS and the Wheatley Institute — confirms that a large portion of couples are struggling with smartphone addiction, and that their marriages suffer as a result. This new survey finds also a new “digital divide” in marriages, with low-income couples being most vulnerable to overusing screens.
More than a third of American spouses (37 percent) say that their husband or wife is too often on a screen when they would prefer talking or doing something together. Not surprisingly, this problem is concentrated among the young, with 44 percent of individuals ages 18 to 34 saying that this is an issue in their marriage. More mature couples (ages 35 to 55) are by no means exempt, however, with 34 percent lodging the same complaint.
Our work found important income disparities, with the problem being more severe among low-income couples. Of American marriages making less than $50,000 per year in total income, 44 percent struggle with smartphone addiction. That is 13 percentage points higher than marriages with an income of $100,000 or more, of whom 31 percent report dealing with such problems.
But that by no means renders it a non-issue for those with higher income. Peter McFadden, a marriage counselor in New York City with predominantly high-income clients, says that smartphones are a “growing, addictive, and potent threat to marriage,” even among these couples. For McFadden, the lifestyle of the affluent — where you have to be constantly checking in to work, chatting with clients, or using apps to communicate with your child’s school, etc. — enables smartphone addiction, and eventually, the marriage suffers. “Phone use,” says McFadden, “can definitely limit connection [with your spouse], and when that happens, the door opens to all kinds of negative thinking.”
Phone addiction in marriage has significant repercussions. Happy marriages are fueled by communication between spouses, time spent together alone, and moments of physical intimacy when the children (God willing) are asleep for the night. These ongoing works of love deepen the union between spouses, strengthening them to face difficulty and preserve their marriage until the very end. Unfortunately, with American adults, according to one study, checking their smartphones an average of 344 times per day, these seemingly small but ultimately significant acts can decline.
Indeed, our research finds that phone addiction within marriage is linked to fewer date nights, less sex, and — unsurprisingly — less marital happiness. Couples who experience phone distractions are about 70 percent less likely than other couples to be very happy with their marriage. Phenomena like these, in turn, tend to be intertwined with a greater chance of divorce. That bears out in our findings, as well. The odds of a spouse saying he or she anticipates divorce in the future is four times greater when the marriage is troubled by technological addiction.
Given that divorce rates are already significantly higher among low-income Americans, this is a cause for alarm; it is precisely these marriages that have the most to gain from the freedom to be attentive. Many troubled marriages are potentially happy ones. Tech addiction is bad on its own — but by crowding out time for the things that make marriage work, it may also sap spouses of the energy to revitalize their relationship. Tech, for many marriages, could be the difference between success and failure.
Social media is engineered for addiction. While recognizing that adolescents are especially susceptible, it would be naïve to think that adults are not. The survival of many marriages in this country may depend on us being honest about that in public. Schutte urges his counselees to see that their responsibility goes beyond limiting what their kids see and do online, and he emphasizes that it’s their own habits that matter most. To resist the temptation to seek community on the phone, instead of with one’s spouse, husbands and wives should practice “doing things for each other, connecting every day, parking the phone.” Schutte adds, “Phones need to stop being a way of life.”
The Institute for Family Studies further recommends measures for addressing the problem, including urging social-media companies to proactively redesign their platforms to root out their most addictive features, such as infinite scroll. We call for a broad-based effort, through public-service announcements and other means, at educating Americans about the potential risks of unmitigated attachment to these devices. Community and national leaders must establish social norms around smartphones — e.g., at school, in church, throughout the media, and elsewhere — that frequent use of a smartphone in the company of others is simply unhealthy. American couples, of high and low income, deserve to know about the danger of smartphone addiction to their relationships.
McFadden told IFS a story about a couple with children whom he recently counseled. One night a week, he advised them, have dinner with the kids and go technology-free. “They thought their kids would complain,” McFadden told us. But, “They were surprised that the kids were more enthusiastic about that technology-free night than they were.” He summarized: “They wanted that family connection.”