The smartphone and your relationship.
The U.S. divorce rate hovers at 40 percent , but that's not the whole story. Many intact relationships are on life support. According to a survey by the National Opinion Research Center, 60 percent of people in a relationship say they're not very satisfied. There are some familiar culprits: money problems , bad sex and having kids . But there's a new relationship buster: the smartphone. My colleague Meredith David and I recently conducted a study that explored just how detrimental smartphones can be to relationships. We zeroed in on measuring something we've dubbed "phubbing" (a fusion of "phone" and "snubbing"). It's how often your romantic partner is distracted by his or her smartphone in your presence. With more and more people using the attention-siphoning devices – the typical American checks his or her smartphone once every six-and-a-half minutes , or roughly 150 times each day – phubbing has emerged as a re