We’ve all had the experience of scrolling mindlessly while our partner sits across from us, or feeling that pang of jealousy when their post gets more attention than our relationship seems to get. Social media has rewired how we connect, communicate, and even how we fight. The digital landscape that was supposed to bring us closer sometimes drives invisible wedges between us in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Here’s how your relationship might be suffering in the age of endless scrolling and digital performance.
1. It’s Not Just FOMO, It’s Relationship FOMO
That gnawing feeling when you see other couples posting picturesque vacation photos or milestone announcements isn’t just regular FOMO—it’s relationship FOMO, and it’s corrosive to genuine connection. You start questioning why your relationship doesn’t look like theirs, forgetting that you’re comparing your behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel. This constant benchmarking creates a perpetual sense of inadequacy that’s hard to shake.
The problem intensifies when these comparisons become topics of discussion or conflict between partners. What begins as innocent scrolling transforms into subtle jabs like “Why don’t we ever do anything like that?” or “Everyone else seems so much happier than us.” These digitally-fueled comparisons create expectations that are often manufactured, curated, and ultimately damaging to the authentic relationship you could be nurturing instead of photographing, filtering, and posting.
2. It’s Hard To Be Present When You’re Always Connected Elsewhere
The physical reality of being together while mentally miles away has become so common that we’ve normalized it completely. You might be sitting next to each other on the couch, but one of you is laughing at something completely separate from your shared experience, creating a subtle disconnect that builds over time. Research published in PLOS One found that simply having phones visible during conversations significantly reduces feelings of connectedness and empathy between people, even when they aren’t actively being used. That notification sound has effectively trained us to split our attention, even during our most intimate moments.
This divided attention doesn’t just diminish the quality of your time together—it fundamentally changes how you experience each other. Conversations become shallower, eye contact becomes rarer, and the small moments that build intimacy get missed entirely while you’re both half-present. When “just checking something quickly” becomes the soundtrack of your relationship, you’re gradually training each other to expect and accept less actual presence, less actual attention, and ultimately, less actual connection.
3. It’s Easy To Misinterpret Tone When Everything’s In Text
The absence of vocal inflection, facial expressions, and body language in digital communication creates a perfect breeding ground for misunderstandings that wouldn’t happen face-to-face. That message you read as passive-aggressive might have been sent with genuine care, but without contextual cues, we fill in the blanks with our worst assumptions. A study highlighted by Fast Company revealed that people accurately interpret the intended tone of a message only about 56% of the time, essentially making digital miscommunication more likely than not. These misreadings compound when emotions are already running high.
What begins as a minor misinterpretation can rapidly escalate into a full-blown conflict when both parties feel misunderstood and defensive. The time lag between messages creates space for anxiety to grow, assumptions to form, and emotions to intensify before the other person has a chance to clarify. By the time you actually talk in person, you’re both responding to a conversation that happened primarily in your own heads rather than between the two of you, making resolution much harder to achieve.
4. It’s Lonely When Someone’s Feed Becomes Their Priority
There’s a particular type of isolation that comes from watching someone you love be more engaged with their social feeds than with you. You notice how their face lights up at notifications but remains passive during your stories about your day. This digital prioritization, also referred to as “phubbing” by The New York Times, sends a clear message about what—and who—really matters.
The loneliness deepens when you realize you’re competing with an infinite scroll designed specifically to be more engaging than real life. Algorithms are engineered to trigger dopamine releases that real relationships, with their natural ebbs and flows, simply can’t match consistently. When your partner chooses the guaranteed hit of social validation over the more complex work of actual connection, it creates an emotional distance that feels impossible to cross—you’re literally losing them to a world designed to be more compelling than reality.
5. It’s Never Just About The Photo, It’s About What Gets Left Out
The carefully selected slice of reality that makes it to social media tells a story by omission that can be just as powerful as what’s included. That perfect anniversary post leaves out the fight you had on the way to dinner, the tensions about money, or the growing distance you both feel but haven’t addressed. Relationship therapist Dr. Esther Perel notes that this selective sharing creates “relationship performances” that not only mislead others but can actually gaslight couples about their own relationship reality. You begin to believe your own highlight reel instead of acknowledging the full picture.
This curated presentation becomes particularly problematic when it shifts from documentation to performance, when experiences are selected, shaped, or even manufactured specifically for their shareability rather than their meaning. Vacations become photo opportunities, conversations become potential quotes, and genuine moments get interrupted with “wait, let’s take a picture of this.” The pressure to maintain this performance eventually exhausts the authentic connection it was supposed to celebrate, leaving both partners unsure if they’re living their relationship or just performing it.
6. It’s Difficult To Separate Real Life From The Highlights
When your perception of reality becomes filtered through social media’s distortion field, your expectations of what everyday love should look like become impossibly high. Mundane Tuesdays feel inadequate compared to the endless stream of relationship “peak moments” flooding your feeds. Ordinary affection starts to feel less meaningful when it isn’t framed, filtered, and shared with a heartfelt caption. This cognitive dissonance between digital ideals and lived reality creates a persistent feeling that your relationship is somehow lacking, even when it’s perfectly healthy.
The highlight reel effect damages relationships most when it prevents you from appreciating what’s genuinely good but visually unremarkable. The partner who quietly makes your coffee exactly how you like it every morning won’t get the likes that a flashy public gesture will, but it’s these small consistent acts that actually sustain connection. When your brain becomes trained to notice only the Instagrammable moments, you literally become blind to the subtle forms of care that create lasting bonds but never make it to your feed.
7. It’s Exhausting To Maintain Two Identities
The gap between how your relationship appears online and how it feels behind closed doors creates a psychological tax that slowly depletes your emotional resources. You find yourself managing not just the relationship itself but also its public-facing avatar, which requires constant maintenance, updating, and performance evaluation. The pressure to align these identities—or to justify their differences—creates a background cognitive load that’s always running, always consuming energy that could be invested in the relationship itself.
This dual identity maintenance becomes particularly draining during relationship difficulties when the contrast between public perception and private reality grows sharper. Continuing to post happy couples content during periods of conflict or distance creates a dissociative effect where you begin to question which version is real. The effort required to manage this dissonance, to project happiness while processing pain, often becomes the final straw for relationships already under strain—it’s simply too exhausting to live two contradictory truths simultaneously.
8. It’s Complicated When Your Partner Has Thousands of “Friends”
The blurred boundaries between past romantic connections, work relationships, casual acquaintances, and close friends create an unprecedented relationship landscape with rules we’re all still figuring out. Your partner maintains digital connections with ex-partners, admirers, and people who know intimate details about their past in ways that would have been impossible before social media. These ambient connections exist in a gray area, not quite active relationships but never fully ended either, creating an ever-present background of potential complications.
These persistent connections introduce new relationship questions with no established answers: Is it controlling to feel uncomfortable about your partner regularly liking an ex’s photos? Is it reasonable to expect transparency about private messages with former flames? What constitutes digital fidelity when so many interactions happen invisibly? These questions have no universal solutions, forcing each couple to navigate territory without maps. The emotional labor of establishing these boundaries—often through painful trial and error—adds a complexity to modern relationships that previous generations never had to consider.
9. It’s Draining To Maintain The Perfect Relationship Status
The pressure to document relational happiness creates a strange new form of emotional work that falls disproportionately on one partner in most relationships. Someone becomes the unofficial relationship historian—capturing moments, crafting captions, selecting filters, responding to comments—essentially performing the digital existence of your partnership. This labor often goes unrecognized even as it shapes how both of you experience and remember your own history together through the lens of its documentation.
This performance becomes particularly exhausting because it never ends and is never complete—there’s always another anniversary, another vacation, another milestone that “should” be shared appropriately. The staging, photographing, editing, and captioning of relationship content becomes an additional relationship responsibility that someone must manage. When this labor becomes expected rather than appreciated, it creates resentment, not just about the work itself but about the commodification of what should be a genuine connection into content for others’ consumption.
10. It’s A Problem When Screen Time Trumps Face Time
The cumulative effect of prioritizing digital engagement over embodied presence fundamentally changes the neurological pathways that facilitate human connection. Your brain literally becomes less practiced at reading subtle facial cues, maintaining extended eye contact, or sitting comfortably in conversational silence—all crucial skills for deep intimacy. The habit of reaching for phones during any momentary discomfort or lull eliminates precisely the spaces where vulnerability and discovery typically emerge in relationships.
This digital default setting eventually creates couples who know more about each other’s online activities than their internal emotional landscapes. You notice when they haven’t posted all day, but miss the signs that they’re struggling with anxiety. You track their online activity timestamps but not their changing expression when certain topics arise. The displacement of attention toward screens and away from faces gradually erodes the observational intimacy that allows partners to truly know each other beyond what they explicitly share, leaving both people paradoxically more connected yet less truly seen.
