Together

Couples and phones: what the surveys actually found

Phones come up in almost every conversation about modern relationships, usually with a strong opinion attached. The survey record is quieter than the opinions. Here is what it says, with each figure's year and its limits, because a number from 2019 about Americans who answered a questionnaire is exactly that, and no more.

The phone on the table

The most-quoted figures come from a Pew Research Center survey of 4,860 U.S. adults, run in October 2019 and published in May 2020. Among people who were married, living with a partner or in a committed relationship, 51% said their partner is at least sometimes distracted by their cellphone when they are trying to have a conversation, and 16% said it happens often.1

Age made a difference. 62% of partnered 30- to 49-year-olds said so, against 52% of 18- to 29-year-olds and 41% of those 50 and older.1 Subgroup figures like these carry a larger margin of error than the overall result (about ±2.1 points), so the gaps between age groups are less exact than the headline.

Distraction and being bothered by it are not the same thing. Four-in-ten partnered adults said they are often or sometimes bothered by the amount of time their partner spends on their phone; 18% of those aged 18 to 49 said often, compared with 6% of those 50 and older.1

Two caveats travel with every number here. They are self-reports about a partner's behaviour, so they measure how it feels from one side, not how often it happens. And the survey ran in 2019, before the pandemic changed how much time many couples spent at home together; Pew has not repeated these questions since, so there is no newer figure to quote.

Looking through a partner's phone

The same survey asked a harder question. Roughly one-third of partnered adults, 34%, said they had looked through their significant other's phone without that person's knowledge.1

This is a self-report of something people may not like admitting, so the true share could be higher. It is also a single yes-or-no answer: it doesn't say whether it happened once years ago or last week, or what the person was looking for. What the figure does establish is that the behaviour is common enough to be ordinary, not rare.

How many couples met online

A separate strand of research looks at how couples meet rather than how they live with their phones. The best-known study, published in PNAS in 2019 by Michael Rosenfeld and colleagues, used a nationally representative survey of 2,997 heterosexual couples in the United States. Among heterosexual couples who met in 2017, about 39% had met online, up from 2% in 1995, which made online the single most common way those couples met. Meeting through friends had fallen to 20%.2 Among same-sex couples who met in 2017, about 65% met online.2

Three things to hold onto. The 39% is for heterosexual couples only, and for couples who met in that one year, not all couples.2 The data is now nine years old. And it comes from people describing, after the fact, how they met.

It helps to set that beside a different measure. Pew's July 2022 survey of 6,034 U.S. adults found that one-in-ten partnered adults had met their current partner through a dating site or app, and about one-in-five partnered adults under 30 had.3 That figure is much lower because it counts every current partnership, including marriages that began long before apps existed. The two numbers don't contradict each other; they answer different questions.

What this does and doesn't tell us

Surveys like these describe. They don't explain. A partner reaching for their phone during a conversation can be a habit, a work demand, a way of avoiding a subject, or simply the phone being where the news is. The question doesn't ask, and the answer can't say.

The one study in this set that measured phone use rather than asking about it makes the point. In 2025, researchers tracked 247 U.S. adults with phone-monitoring apps and eight days of time diaries. People used their smartphone during 27% of their time around their partner, and 86% used it at least some every day in their partner's company. More phone use around the partner went along with lower relationship satisfaction, though the link was significant only for the women in the sample.4 The sample was parents of infants, three-quarters of them women, and the design was correlational: it can't say whether phones lower satisfaction, whether unhappier people reach for their phones, or whether something else drives both.

So nothing here shows that phones damage relationships, and nothing shows they don't. No survey in this set tested whether any app, habit or rule changes how a couple feels about each other, and we're not going to claim one does.

What BrainMatch won't show a partner

One-third of partnered people looking through a partner's phone is a fact about how much curiosity there is between two people who share a life. BrainMatch is built so that curiosity has nowhere to go but the other person. There is no feature that lets a partner see the other's journal, answers, or when they last opened the app. A partner sees only what the writer chose to share, one answer at a time, and there is no activity log a partner can read. What you write in it is yours, and how that's kept is set out on the privacy and data use page.

This article is general information, not relationship or mental-health advice. The figures are about Americans who answered surveys in the years given, not about BrainMatch's users, and BrainMatch isn't built on or validated by these studies. We share what's known, including how much isn't.

Sources

  1. Vogels, E. A., & Anderson, M. (2020, May 8). Dating and Relationships in the Digital Age. Pew Research Center. Survey of 4,860 U.S. adults, October 16–28, 2019 (American Trends Panel). https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/05/08/dating-and-relationships-in-the-digital-age/
  2. Rosenfeld, M. J., Thomas, R. J., & Hausen, S. (2019). Disintermediating your friends: How online dating in the United States displaces other ways of meeting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(36), 17753–17758. How Couples Meet and Stay Together 2017, 2,997 heterosexual couples. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6731751/ (DOI 10.1073/pnas.1908630116)
  3. Pew Research Center (2023, February 2). Key findings about online dating in the U.S. Survey of 6,034 U.S. adults, July 5–17, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/02/02/key-findings-about-online-dating-in-the-u-s/
  4. McDaniel, B. T., Uva, A., Cornet, V., & Drouin, M. (2025). Smartphone use around one's partner, relationship satisfaction and coparenting: A study using phone-monitoring apps and time diaries. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies. 247 U.S. adults in relationships who were parents of infants. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12674674/ (DOI 10.1155/hbe2/3547526)