Is your phone the third wheel in your relationship?

For a lot of couples, the bedroom used to be the one place where the outside world went away. Now it's often lit by the glow of a screen. Smartphones have slipped into the most private part of our lives, turning quiet moments into scroll time and intimacy into interruption. Relationship therapist Baya Voce argues that the phone has become an uninvited third presence in many partnerships. And it's not usually dramatic blowups that cause the damage in a relationship, it's the constant little withdrawals of attention from one more email, one more notification, one more Instagram check.Voce writes about this modern relationship shift in her essay for AfterBabel, Your Marriage Has a Third: What Phone-Based Adulthood Is Doing to Love and Sex.