P-phubbing Could Ruin Your Relationship and Make You Depressed

Study suggests that snubbing your partner by checking your phone during a date might ruin your relationship.

P-phubbing could be ruining your relationship (Photo: Twitter/@londonnewsnow)

P-phubbing - snubbing your partner by checking your phone during a date or while having a conversation - could be ruining relationships and making people depressed, a new study suggests.

In the term p-phubbing, ‘p’ stands for partner while phubbing is a portmanteau of ‘phoning’ and ‘snubbing’. In a new study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, Baylor University business professors James Roberts and Meredith David did a series of surveys to determine whether p-phubbing (partner phubbing) was a thing, and if so, whether it was causing problems.

Roberts and David polled over 150 men and women on Mechanical Turk who were in relationships, asking them various questions about their phubbing experiences. The subjects answered other tests to measure their relationship styles and general happiness levels.

Researchers found that people who fear being ignored or abandoned react more strongly when their partner uses a mobile device, ‘Gizmodo’ reported. They also found that there’s a strong correlation between phubbing and conflicts over mobile devices.

People who experience the most phubbing in their relationships also tend to have more conflict, and this leads to general unhappiness in their lives. Researchers admitted that it is possible that people who are already unhappy in their relationships are doing more p-phubbing.

However, they assert that “the institution of marriage (and romantic relationships in general) is under attack” from p-phubbing.