My boyfriend stole my most precious phone time

When couples move in together, they have to make digital adjustments

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Whether you’re quietly disassociating or staving off a panic attack, I cannot recommend “Best of the Bloopers | The Office U.S.” highly enough. —Kate

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Photo by SHVETS production.

Moving in with a partner is perhaps the largest lifestyle adjustment there is, just behind losing a limb but right after getting bangs. While living with roommates comes with its own frustrations, the perceived freedom of sharing an entire space with the love of your life is actually a complicated game of Stratego, in which the only way you’re allowed to hang up an ABBA poster (historic, tasteful) is to let him proudly display the plastic hot dog he found on the street (weird, probably started Covid). 

But there’s another, smaller dilemma that no one warns you about: How are you supposed to have phone time before bed? 

As I mentioned in Monday’s post, I started watching movies to fall asleep as early as 11 years old and continued watching or listening to something every night until my boyfriend and I moved in together in 2020. That hour or so in bed letting a blue light slowly erode my retinas was my little feral rat time when I could dissociate and drift off into a peaceful (read: fraught and unsettled) sleep. 

But then, suddenly, there wasn’t room for a laptop in my bed. Anything I put on, my boyfriend could hear, too—when he was also trying to watch or listen to something. I tried to compromise with headphones, but would jolt awake to the sound of my AirPods warning me they were running out of battery.