Sex advice with Suzi Godson: Husband’s use of smartphone during sex is unreasonable

Q: My husband is obsessed with his mobile phone and has it in his hand almost every waking moment. Recently things have become even worse and he picks it up as soon as we have finished having sex. He has even reached out to check it a few times during the act. I’m furious. How can I make him see that his behaviour is unreasonable?”

A: If a man can’t get through sex without checking his phone, there is obviously something wrong. But what? The most obvious paranoia is infidelity, but people who are being unfaithful guard their mobile phone with their lives, and even the dopiest cheater would be smart enough to avoid looking at a notification that came in while he was having sex with his wife.

While one can never completely rule it out, it is much more likely that your husband’s routine “habit checking” has got so out of hand that he feels rising panic if he can’t look at his phone. That might sound far-fetched, but research by Nancy A Cheever, a professor of communication at California State University, confirms that heavy users of smartphones experience separation anxiety, marked by physiological increases in heart rate and blood pressure, if they are unexpectedly parted from their phones.