A healthy relationship starts with a phone-free conversation

A healthy relationship does not start in bed. It starts with something that sounds far from spectacular: the moment you put down your phone, look at the person beside you and genuinely ask how they are.

Not “Did you pay the bill?”, “What are we doing with the children tomorrow?” or “Did you buy detergent?”. Those conversations keep a household running. They do not necessarily keep the two of you alive as a couple.

Partners do not always drift apart because of one huge argument, an affair or a terrible secret. Sometimes it happens through a hundred small “laters”, through evenings when both of you stare at screens and days when you are a brilliant team for getting things done but less and less like lovers and partners.

When love turns into life with a flatmate

I often see couples who love and respect each other. The love has not disappeared. The time they used to give one another has.

The pace of life, work, children, bills, tiredness and everything we “have to” do take their toll. There is less conversation, more misunderstanding and resentment, and eventually both people end up scrolling on their phones. It is easier to watch other people’s lives than turn towards your own and ask: “Wait — where did we go?”

That is how a relationship starts to feel like life with a flatmate. You function. You make arrangements. Perhaps you rarely even argue. But warmth, touch and the sense of being the two of you again quietly go on holiday without announcing when they will return.

Then one partner wakes up and longs for love, warmth and feeling, while the other is still in hibernation.

That does not immediately mean it is over. It does mean it is time to stop living alongside one another and try to meet again.

Intimacy is more than “sex tonight”

When we say intimacy, many people immediately think of sex. Closeness is then discussed only when someone wants sex, when sex is missing or when someone has been rejected.

But intimacy is built long before the bedroom. In the way you look at one another. Touch. Talk. In shared silence that is neither punishment nor sulking, but the feeling that simply being together is good.

If you barely look at each other all day, spend the evening on separate screens and then expect desire to appear suddenly because it is ten o’clock and the bedroom door is closed, you may be asking a little too much magic from your relationship.

The body is not an app you open when you need it. Closeness is nourished throughout the day by small things that say: I see you, I hear you, I am still interested in you.

Ten minutes without a phone

I often suggest something very simple to my clients: ten minutes of phone-free conversation before bed.

Not two hours. Not a formal relationship meeting with an agenda. Not an analysis of everything that has gone wrong since the day you met up to last Tuesday.

Ten minutes.

You might ask: “What was good about today?” Or: “How did you feel?” You might say: “Do you know what I love most about you today?”

Then listen to the answer. Do not immediately fix it, offer a solution or explain why the other person should not have felt that way. Sometimes it is enough to hear “Today was difficult” and reply “I believe you.”

Not every conversation will be deep. Sometimes you will laugh at something silly. Sometimes you will sit in silence. Sometimes, after three minutes, you will realise you are so tired that you can barely keep your eyes open. That is life.

The point is not to repair your whole relationship in ten minutes. The point is that those ten minutes belong to you, not to work, children, chores or the people whose lives you watch on a screen.

Small topics open the door to big ones

Those brief late-night conversations create connection. When a bigger topic appears one day — sex, dissatisfaction, a desire for change, fear or something you have not dared to say for a long time — there is already an open path between you.

If you have spent months talking only about schedules and bills, the sentence “We need to talk about our sex life” can sound like a severe weather warning.

Do not wait until the relationship hits a wall before trying honesty for the first time. Begin with small truths.

“I miss you.”

“I would like us to have more time for ourselves.”

“Sometimes I feel we have become flatmates, and I do not want it to stay that way.”

These are not attacks. They are doors.

The phone is not the only culprit

A phone does not destroy a relationship by itself. Sometimes it is simply the easiest place to escape when we are tired, angry, disappointed or no longer know how to begin a conversation.

The answer is not to declare technology the enemy and introduce household screen police. It is to consciously choose a moment when the screen will not be more important than the person beside you.

Perhaps talking before bed will not suit you. Your ten minutes might happen over morning coffee, on a walk or in the car before you go into the house. The perfect format does not matter. What matters is having a moment when you are partners again, not merely people who share an address and a list of tasks.

In the end

A healthy relationship does not exist because a couple never has problems. It grows when two people keep returning to one another.

Sometimes love has not gone out. Its focus has simply moved to the stresses of everyday life, while everything tender has been left somewhere behind bills, children’s schedules and endless scrolling.

Put down the phone. Ask something that has nothing to do with chores. Listen to the answer.

Perhaps the person beside you only needs a little help waking from hibernation. Or perhaps you will realise that you have been asleep for a while too.

Related

• How to reconnect with your partner: seven unusual ideas for greater closeness
• Why doesn’t your partner initiate intimacy?

---

Some of Petra’s answers on which this article is based first appeared in an interview with She.hr on 29 October 2025.