Making love possible: cell phones and intimate relationships

Abstract

The cell phone plays a significant role in the constitution and maintenance of intimate relationships. It enables individual women and men to conceive and end relationships over great distances. It allows them to break the ice on initiation of relationships, whilst it also ‘softens’ their sense of appropriate gender roles, language and posture customary to face to face interactions. Recent research indicates that as much as cell phones influence intimate relations they are also equally shaped by social relations. This article illustrates how the cell phone challenges traditional notions of intimate relationships. It demonstrates how cell phones aid the commencement of relationships without the fear of rejection. Moreover, cell phones make breaking-up inconsequential since it can be done over long distances without the responsibility of having to deal with the hurt and frustration of the other. Because the cell phone is also seen as a ‘representative of the self’ it leads to sensitivities around privacy, thus leading to new kinds of conflicts in relationships. Cell phones, the article concludes, are implicated in already existing relationship challenges.

Keywords:

• intimacy
• romantic relations
• cell phones