Study finds regular 'phubbing' could be damaging marriages | Hacker News Reader

Study finds regular 'phubbing' could be damaging marriages

phys.org

28 pointsel_duderino64 comments

Yet more ammunition for my upcoming "phone divorce". I've had my eyes on a few different "dumb phones", and I plan to eliminate my smartphone entirely. I shit you not, it was easier to quit smoking than it has been to try to quit my phone.

It's just... a waste. The thing is a waste. It's a waste of time and focus that I could be spending on my relationships, on my hobbies, etc., instead.

So. I've penned up the "divorce papers" for my phone and I, to be signed next month. This article will be an exhibit before the judge.

Now to get a little pocket change together so I can switch carriers...

If there are any models you have in mind, please do share!

My real wife demands I have a GPS, so it's kind of limited me on what phone I can choose -- I need something dumb enough to be less of a distraction, but smart enough that I won't get lost in the wilderness.

For that reason, I'm really eyeing the Nokia 6300 4G. I'm in America and it's supported by lots of ( cheap! ) carriers. It has google maps and a couple of other applications built in, but it's otherwise a terrible phone all around, which makes me believe I won't be able to stand using it for long, so I'm excited to try it out. Or rather, buy it, and not try it out very much.

If you are looking for a smarter dumb phone, you might like the Sonim XP3800. I chose it because I was looking for a dumber phone that supported Signal and although the Punkt phone was sleek the experience was suboptimal.

Perhaps she could accept an apple smart tag or a very small gps device?

"Jiobit Gen 2" came up in a google search, no idea if it's any good.

"Perhaps she could accept an apple smart tag"

Yea, lets not normalize woman putting an Apple Airtag on their husbands...

My wife and I have 100% considered Airtagging each other.

Every time we're out somewhere one of us absentmindedly wanders off with a kid or two, leaving the other wondering "where did they go?"

It can be seen as distrust "like where are they",

Or trust "I know they'll only use this when its actually required"

Lots of ways to frame things, given my relationship history the more verifiable information I have the safer I feel. I will need a partner that strikes a healthy balance between asserting her own right to freedoms and empathy to the realities of my emotional state and past and how she can choose a minor sacrifice on her behalf for a major win for her partner. Afterall, isn't that what we all do in relationships?

If she's not cool with it, then cool, she's probably just not my person :) ..

Ah -- I guess I should've been a bit more specific -- by GPS I just meant "some app that can do directions when we're in a weird place", not really tracking, necessarily.

I uh.

Don't really leave the house. So, not much to track :D

Check out the Unihertz Jelly 2.

idk these days seems like a lot of couples have "share location" turned on 24/7. Don't really know how healthy that is. Really good in a emergency though...

We have it on all the time, but for us it's because we moved out to BFE and don't know our way around very well. It's very possible for us to be lost and damned.

Healthy is as healthy does. Our relationship kicks ass, so "location on" isn't a trust issue to us, it's an "oh dear, hopefully my loved one wasn't kidnapped" issue.

Healthy depends very much on the relationship, as a sibling post pointed out. I'm not a fan of the "if you have nothing to hide" argument in the general case, but in this case of my wife we have nothing private between us. In fact, its the things we share that make up the bulk of what I consider private from others. I figure that if Google, my cell provider, the government, and who knows how many other corporate entities have ready access to my location data, why not her? In practice she has more interesting and useful things to do with her time than watch me all day.

I have done pretty well with a combo of Nokia dumbphone for calls and texts, and a separate smartphone with no SIM as needed. I leave my smartphone at work or in the car when I want a break.

Only downside really is no WhatsApp but you can get a KaiOS phone that supports WhatsApp if it's essential.

Honestly the urge to constantly pull it out just passes after a couple of days. The boredom is intense but pretty soon you won't miss it and will enjoy other activities.

I also had good results with a very very cheap Android phone running Android Go. It was so slow that I just didn't want to use it for browsing. Downside is as a Dad I want to have a good camera within reach for special moments.

> I have done pretty well with a combo of Nokia dumbphone for calls and texts, and a separate smartphone with no SIM as needed. I leave my smartphone at work or in the car when I want a break.

This is my route, too. I use a Sonim XP3 for my day-to-day communications: calling and text. I have an old Xperia flashed with SailfishOS when I want a pocket computer for calendaring (I use the calendar to record memories of my kids), light web browsing, and the occasional note.

You can always just use an iPhone and turn on screen time, with tons of restrictions. You can "remove" the browser, adding apps, of course any app you want (including core ones like messaging), and keep a few useful ones like Google Maps, etc. Then have your wife or someone else set the passcode on it and bam, you have a "dumb" smart phone. If you ever need full functionality for something like a trip abroad, etc., you can have them unlock it. I do this with my wife sometimes because I don't like all the distractions, or even the distraction of resisting the urge to be distracted. Works great.

Yes! I can. But I'd rather have a phone that's dogshit from the start if I'm honest.

Plus the Nokia is like $70, haha.

I've bought several of these phones. My texting habits are relatively minimal, but I'm apparently pretty hard on T9-capable keyboards.

I bought a Sonim XP3 recently that is chunky, terrible for web browsing, and ideal for texting. One of its predecessors was featured on "Will it Blend?"[1] and only mostly blended (try that with an iPhone).

I've not destroyed anything on this phone, whereas the keyboards on my two Nokias died in less than a month.

[1]: https://piped.mha.fi/watch?v=Wt1fNKhQdKk

I like the idea of a dogshit phone, but I'd be really unhappy to lose having a good camera.

Can't you just buy a standalone GPS receiver?

I said "GPS", but I really meant "Google Maps or Waze or something" because holy hell my sense of direction is from toiletsburgh

The GPS I have in my car has similar functionality including traffic alerts that it gets over radio, but it's a bit large to be carrying around. No idea if any of the handheld ones have the same capabilities.

This sounds perfect for you:

https://sunbeamwireless.com/product/sunbeam-f1-orchid/

I have no affiliation with the company, just a satisfied customer.

http://bjornwestergard.com/notes/sunbeam-f1-daisy.gmi

I tried this with a unihertz jelly 2e. it's full android but ultra small. it didn't help it just made it frustrating, so after a month or so I went back to my old phone.

I also don't recommend the jelly 2e in particular because for some reason the only usb-c cable that's charges it effectively is the one it comes with, I couldn't find a single other cable that would charge it quickly, only trickle charge essentially...

Why not get a GPS device?

Bizarrely I didn't... even consider the possibility of that, haha.

I'd even gone as far as considering getting a decent digital camera, considering that my current camera is my phone.

The cat s22 isn't exactly a dumb phone but it is a flip with a numpad and a very small touch screen which makes it much less addictive. You can still hotspot with it and have access to apps when needed. I love mine so far

How long does the battery on something like that last?

I'm thinking of something like that and an iPad mini to tether when I need to actually use a screen, the mini would be too big to just keep in my pocket and pull out so I'll only use it for banking, maps, etc.

i dont use it much and get 2-2.5 days.

I have kept my smartphone and use that for maps (as gps still works) and music (predownloaded) in the car and occasionally around the house, but treat it more like my laptop now.

I'm a fan of the Unihertz Jelly 2. It's great for 'detoxing' from smartphone usage because it is still able to provide useful everyday functions like Google Maps, but is so small that it's infuriating to use for mindless scrolling/entertainment purposes.

How it the battery life in real world use?

It looks like the Palm PVG100 which had a bad battery life but it could be helpful to place calls when travelling

In my experience - it can provide a 'full day' of usage, possibly more if used minimally. Given that my use case is a conscious effort to minimize screen time, I haven't ever found myself worried about battery life.

Divorcing a smartphone in this day and age is counterproductive, given all kinds of useful applications they run, like photo/video cloud backup, banking, home alarm/cameras, solar panel status, and a long etc.

I think it would be more productive to find out your time waster apps, and divorce specifically those. Social media, messaging, games, and news are the usual time devourers, they know hot to push our buttons.

Behind me, satan! :)

I tried going back to a dumb-phone some years back. But that didn't quite work out, either.

One policy I had for a while was to remove apps that (a) I didn't want to use, or (b) I would never use and that didn't want cluttering up the phone's screen.

I have since moved on to my current system: I don't bother removing apps, I just move them to other screen-pages that I don't look at. Consequently I have a 'first-screen' that has only about half-a-dozen apps showing. *

If I can be bothered and have some time to kill, I might actually remove some apps from the phone, but generally I can't be bothered.

* It's not a huge list.

On the bottom row: phone, texts, camera

On the main screen: Settings, clock (alarms,reminders), browser, photos, calendar, notes.

IMO Surveys are the lowest form of science.

Another way to title it "More evidence that neuroticism leads to marital dissatisfaction and dissolution"

Think about the process:

1. You decide/agree to fill out a survey (this is a form of selection bias already)

2. The survey asks you *to recall* experiences (this is both a form of bias of memory and neuroticism which causes you to ruminate on events in the past or what they might mean)

3. Then we make association (often interpreted as causal outside of the actual papers) that the examined behavior is the reason for the outcomes we've cherry picked.

Perhaps people on the brink of divorce phub more?

Perhaps the people are just neurotic about their partner's behavior? (notice, ruminate on, and ascribe negative meaning to their partner being on a phone)

Perhaps phubbing is just a coping mechanism for *the real cause of damage* in the marriage?

Besides which, according to the CDC, the divorce rate in the United States has been declining since the release of the iPhone. But that doesn't fit the narrative that smartphones are destroying all of society, does it?

I would argue that metric is simply because less people are getting married now in the first place.

You're not wrong, but just to clarify, the divorce rate is decreasing, not just the number of divorces.

I've seen presumptions that is because marriage has been declining. People who were marginally less into marriage for whatever reason seem to be forgoing the "I guess we need to get married ... <1 to 7 yrs, maybe kids> ... I never was into this, why did we get married? Lets divorce" pattern.

isnt this why we all collectively shit on psychology? also the replication crisis.

Ok, the term phub is not a shortened form of a well known adult website.

  phub | fəb |
  verb (phubs, phubbing, phubbed) [with object] informal
  ignore (one's companion or companions) in order to pay attention to one's phone or other mobile device: I'm not a huge phone fan so you won't catch me phubbing anyone | more than 46 percent of survey respondents said they had been phubbed by their partner.
  DERIVATIVES
  phubber noun
  ORIGIN
  early 21st century: from phubbing.

> early 21st century: from phubbing

Love how this origin date would equally apply to "I just made it this morning".

Study aside, do we really need a new word for this? It seems we have plenty of existing, commonly used words for this behavior. It distracted me from the main content of the article.

I don’t think phubbing is a new word?

The word "phubbing" sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me

That aside, married people who spend time on their phone instead of with loved ones, it would make sense they would be more susceptible to damaging their marriage because of the lost high-quality time

Is the dissatisfaction caused by the phone use or the phone use by an existing dissatisfaction?

Or are both caused by another cause?

iirc we know that social media use leads to dissatisfaction due to seeing everyone's "perfect" lives. Perhaps these married people are observing "perfect" marriages and taking a negative perspective on their own?

Perhaps so, but why were they looking in the first place?

I agree to a point, but the way we talk about this seems very conservative. If someone develops a negative perspective towards their current situation, is that a bad thing?

My interpretation is that social media use leads to ambition and raises people's standards. Seeing other people doing better makes people think about how they can improve their own lives, which leads to less complacency and drives them towards positive change.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that most relationships are crappy. If the average person was to see what a good relationship looks like, they would leave or try to change their current one, which is a good thing. Same applies for careers.

I went into this article thinking phubbing was something much different.

A reminder that these kinds of "studies" are more like market analysis and understanding "the lay of the land" to help figure out things that might need to be studied rather than a powerful conclusion in itself.

> ... they [the researchers] created surveys to associate closeness in a marriage with phone use. They sent out hundreds of them ...

> The researchers found a pattern—couples who reported more phubbing in their home also reported less satisfaction in their marriage. They note that their findings make sense logically. People tend not to respond well when ignored. They did not discuss the possibility that less-satisfied partners might be more inclined to phub their spouse. [emphasis mine]

So the research is blind to cause ==> effect, and amounts to "people unhappy with their marriage generally treat their spouse less well".

And you read your Emily Dickinson,
And I my Robert Frost,
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we've lost.
Like a poem poorly written
We are verses out of rhythm,
Couplets out of rhyme,
In syncopated time
And the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,

Are the borders of our lives.

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/simongarfunkel/thedanglingco...

Study finds cave painting could be damaging prehistoric marriages (fancy.edu)

professor thog find when cave partner do cave art instead of loving partner that partner more often run off to other tribe

is your prehistoric mate cavernsnubbing you??? be big scared

I don't think a smartphone has anything to do with their results.

Ignoring your spouse tends to lead to dissatisfaction. Doesn't matter if you do it with a phone or a newspaper or a book

"Phubbing" isn't the cause, it's a symptom. If you don't want to spend time with your partner, you're going to use your phone as an avoidance mechanism instead.

I don't think this is true. I've noticed myself phubbing in front of my friends and partner sometimes and it feels more like a compulsion. If I resist or put my phone somewhere else the compulsion passes and I enjoy the time without using it.

Sure, if you have self control. I've definitely met people who are addicted to their phones and don't mean to intentionally disrespect company by being on them, but definitely do anyway.

For those like me, who don't know what 'phubbing' is, from the article -

> A pair of psychologists at Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University, has found evidence showing that married couples who regularly engage in phone snubbing (phubbing) have lower marriage satisfaction than couples who do not.

> And now it seems that a new behavior has been identified—"phubbing," or "phone snubbing"—in which people cut off conversations with others in their vicinity as they talk or text on their phone. If two people are doing it to each other, it is double-phubbing.

I guess if people are having to cut off conversations with their partners, they already have problems in their relationship. Blaming a phone for it is just lame!

This just in: Treating each other with contempt will damage your relationship.

This is dumb. Are people 'phubbing' and damaging the marriage or is a damaged marriage more apt to have 'phubbing'? No evidence either way. Much stupid.

Wet streets cause rain.

> And now it seems that a new behavior has been identified—"phubbing," or "phone snubbing"—in which people cut off conversations with others in their vicinity as they talk or text on their phone.

I don't think we needed an article or a study for this - seems obvious to me lol if you prioritize communicating with your phone over the person next to you IRL that person won't like you as much. Or do people not realize this?

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