‘Netflix and chill’, they said, and ‘text me when you get home’ but is that all we got today? Should a simple message replace quality time we should spend together or a good conversation with my partner?

Those are some of the questions Monica Umutoni, who is getting married in November, asks herself whenever she visits her fiancé.

Her fiancé, an IT expert, spends most of his time engrossed in technology and gadgets. They get very little time to talk to each other. Every time she visits, they will watch a movie, which means they won’t be talking much, and maybe it will get late and she has to go home.

When she gets home, all she gets is a WhatsApp message asking if she arrived home well, followed by ‘goodnight’ and that’s it. Sometimes he will switch to video games even when she is still around, or spend long hours on the phone talking to other people or texting.

"I am not sure that this is the kind of life I look forward to when we get married. I am hoping maybe he will change and make more time to talk and chat with me. Most times he claims it is work and I can’t argue with him,” says Umutoni.

When they had just met, he was a jovial and playful guy, who used to crack many jokes, cook food and even take walks in nature but all that started changing, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic when he started indulging himself more in gadgets.

A recent study done in the U.S revealed that greater use of the Internet and gadgets, particularly following the pandemic, is responsible for more lovers and family members communicating less physically, instead drowning themselves more in technology.

The study further showed that more people found themselves falling into depression and loneliness particularly due to overreliance on technology.

It warned that technology that crowds out our real-life interaction with others lowers our well-being and thus must be managed with great care or the quality of relationships will deteriorate and impact the social wellbeing of people.

The coronavirus pandemic led to a sudden mass shift to digital communication—away from face-to-face—affected overall social connectedness.

In one paper in the journal New Media & Society, researchers studied nearly 3,000 adults during the pandemic’s early months and found that email, social media, online gaming, and texting were inadequate substitutes for in-person interactions.

Boring relationships

The studies found that rather than bringing happiness, gadgets make relationships boring and eventually unsustainable, especially when one of the people gets extremely bored.

Voice and video calls were found to be somewhat better, even though later research also questioned the value of those technologies). Social connectedness is a key to happiness and when it is lowered, the worst could happen.

Apart from affecting lovers, 62 per cent of the children interviewed said that technology affects how they relate to their parents. While children were found to be addicted to gadgets, parents were found to be the most culprits in sacrificing social interaction over technology.

Researchers found that while the same technology can be used to enhance communication in a relationship, including conveying emotions very well, the same gadgets will take out happiness in a relationship if they replace real life interaction.

According to the findings, with low-dimensionality communications, people tend to hop from person to person and thus swap depth for breadth, which is why face-to-face conversations tend to be more expansive than those conducted over text.

Research has shown that deeper conversations bring more well-being than short communications. In the same study, teens who texted more often than their peers were found to have a tendency of experiencing more depression, more anxiety, more aggression, and poorer relationships with their fathers.

As texting and social media take over, researchers warn that abandoning the internet and eliminating virtual communications from your life in itself is not a solution, after all, these technologies have become part of our lives and what we do.

What is recommended?

Researchers say that one can learn to use technologies to complement, rather than substitute for, your relationships. Here are some ways to do so.

• Choosing interaction over screen time: If you have your lover or relative nearby, find the energy to avoid using technology and focus on face-to-face interaction. Face-to-face interaction has far more benefits than what you see on the screen.

• Turning your devices off while together is one of the radical ways but alternatively you can put them away and maybe impose some small penalties on breaking the gadget rules.

• Agree on terms; it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to stop texting or using technology, but you can turn to it less if you must. One of the terms you can agree on is to use the phone or computer only if it is work related and urgent. Work can be anything, but if you agree on the urgency, it will minimise the time you spend on gadgets while together.

• Interact with nature: Nature is one of the best ways to distract from technology. A walk in the forest, in the neighbourhood or down the river will make you forget about the gadgets. Pretend like you are in 1980 and switch off completely, you will be amazed by the quality time you will spend together.