Abandoning my phone has killed my love life

Why I want to use my phone less and how it is affecting my love life

Like many,

I want to use my phone less. It’s stealing from me. I have been doing well abstaining but it has not come without downsides. Mainly I can’t keep a relationship.

First let me explain why I want to use it less.

I was completely addicted to my phone. I’d stick my nose up at people who watch TikTok, but I’d spend hours on YouTube. I was in a bad habit of wasting my evenings online and feeling depressed afterwards. It affected my sleep, my attention-span and my overall happiness. I felt like a loser. It had to change.

So, I turned off all notifications except for phone calls and texts. Because if I get a call or SMS, I know it’s family, business or a real friend who has my number. Then I started keeping my phone in a different room and only checking on it sparingly. I know what you might be thinking. What if you miss an important call/message? Well, I’ve a newsflash for you. Nothing is ever that important. You can just ring them back later.

I keep my phone in the other room because I feel like it still takes up mental space whenever I’m near it. Like an open mental tab. So, whenever I create distance from it, I feel like I’ve more bandwidth, which I desperately need. This could be psychosomatic, but I really believe it works.

Now finally, how is this affecting my love life?

I’d wager to guess that most communication that happens in my age group (Gen Z) is online. ChatGPT told me that

‘Estimates often indicate that around 65-75% of Gen Z's communication is online’

Take this with a pinch of salt because this is terrible research but anecdotally, I would say it’s close.

This is great sometimes. I can play PlayStation with my friends so I don’t get lonely. Fantastic!

But when my romantic relationships take place in the virtual world more often than the physical then I have a problem. Real world titties >> . Dating apps are painful, it’s like sales. You knock on a hundred doors to find one sucker. 95% of conversations die after the first few messages and if you don’t get the conversation off the phone and into the real world quickly, without seeming too eager, then the relationship is doomed to failure. It will die there on the phone.

Then when you do finally get a girl, a lot of them want you to snap them daily or to send messages throughout the day. This does not line up with me trying to stay off the internet. How much I like you shouldn’t be determined by how much I interact with you online. The constant connection is too much for me and I start to feel smothered. I start to get bored of the person and whenever we meet up there’s nothing new to talk about because we already discussed it through the worst form of communication possible… fucking texting.

It is easy to romanticise the past, but dating was so much better before phones. Well, it seemed better, I don’t know I was like 10. I just think it’s way more spontaneous and natural to meet a girl in real life where you’re not judged on your first six photos and a prompt.

In the past once you met a girl and began dating you didn’t know their every move and thought through snapchat. You had to ring their landline and hope they were there, or you left a message. Then you set up a date for the weekend. You weren’t mentally joined at the hip the second you start dating, there was space and mystery. You didn’t know everything about a person so fast. Love had room to grow and now there’s too much connection and love gets choked by the umbilical cord at birth.

I might become one of those pick-up weirdos who go up to girls in gyms but the odds of becoming a social pariah are too high. Maybe not the gym but a bookshop or something. Most girls would feel uncomfortable I think but I’ll never know if I don’t try. All my best relationships have happened when I met the girl in real life so I’m just going to put myself out there and hopefully not end up getting called a creep on TikTok.

I just want a girl who rings me when she wants to talk and we only text to make plans to spend time together. Is that too much to ask?