After online dating, online making up

People have long used technology to find partners, and now it is playing a growing role in relationships

Here is what Steve S and Sarah B do when they fight: They take a breath, go to their smartphones, and click on Couple Counseling & Chatting, a free app created by their real-life therapist, Marigrace Randazzo-Ratliff.

Unlike Samantha, the husky-voiced operating system in the movie “Her” who had an intense personal relationship with the protagonist, the app does not organise their desktops or schedule their meetings. Nor, for that matter, does it engage in erotic activities. Rather, it helps the couple, who have been married 10 years and have two small children, figure out why they’re arguing.

“When you’re feeling good about each other, you work together and discuss solutions even over the most difficult challenges,” said Steve, 44, a brand development manager in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, who asked that his last name not be used so he could speak more freely about the relationship. "When you’re not feeling good about each other, you fight, even over the most irrelevant things. We use the app to help us learn what’s really causing us to be in a place where we’re going to rely on conflict.”

People have long used technology to find partners. But now technology is playing a growing role in relationships, according to a new report from the Pew Research Internet Project. Among the newer apps are Couple Counseling & Chatting, Embre and Romantimatic; older apps include Fix a Fight and Love Maps (which is designed by the relationship experts John and Julie Gottman of the Gottman Institute in Seattle).

Leslie Malchy, a couples therapist in Vancouver, British Columbia, says apps like these have the potential to be useful, particularly as “an adjunct to the therapy process.” But she wouldn’t recommend this approach to couples in extreme distress. Indeed, she said, some partners might hide behind apps “in order to remain distant.” There are no scientific studies exploring how or even whether relationship software might help couples in crisis.

But Randazzo-Ratliff said her free app, Couple Counseling & Chatting, grew out of 25 years of experience as a couples counselor. “I wanted to teach people about conflict and conflict resolution,” she said. “There are stressors in life, bad habits from your past, different things that hang you up - and we take all our stress out on our spouse, unfortunately. The point is to get calm so you can show you’re on the same team.”Users fill out a self-evaluation, answering questions like: How do you deal with anger?

Are you passive-aggressive? Directly confrontational? Once the partners determine their arguing style, they are given homework: Sit down and discuss a specific situation, say, or get in the bathtub and rub each other’s feet. After an assignment is completed, couples move on to the next series of questions. In theory, they could do it forever.

The app has a “situation evaluation” component to help identify external issues that may be affecting the relationship: work, a recent loss, family problems, major changes. Those who want personal feedback can text and get an answer in real time, which is also free.

Since its release on Feb. 12, Couple Counseling & Chatting, which is available on Android systems and in the Apple app store, has had more than 17,000 downloads, Randazzo-Ratliff said - about 70 percent of them by men.

Conflict mitigation

Romantimatic, which was released on Jan 16 and can be downloaded for $1.99 from the Apple app store, is more of a “conflict mitigation app,” said its founder, Greg Knauss, 46, a computer programmer in Woodland Hills, California, who has been married for 18 years and has three teenage sons.

The app, which has sold more than 1,100 copies, lets users schedule and send messages to their beloved as often as they like. They can create their own love sonnets or send prewritten missives, like virtual Cyrano de Bergeracs: “Totally swamped, but can’t get you off my mind.” “Hey. I’ve got this extra back rub here. Do you know someone who might want it?”

Knauss knows he’s not Emily Dickinson, but that was never his goal. “By communicating on a regular basis - and by having the foundation of good will that comes from that - when conflicts do arise in the relationship, they can be dealt with easier, faster and more sensibly,” he said. Others are not so sure. On The Atlantic’s website, Evan Selinger, an associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote that Romantimatic was “outsourced sentiment.”

Dr Daniel Bober, a psychiatrist who works with couples in Hollywood, and is also an assistant clinical professor at the Yale School of Medicine, is skeptical of relationship apps in general. “It’s ironic that people are using an app for conflict resolution,” he said, “because part of the nature of conflict resolution is communication, and so much of communication between human beings is nonverbal” and requires face-to-face interaction.

David Barsky, a 19-year-old computer science major at Brandeis University, has been using Romantimatic to fire off gems to his girlfriend, Rachel Tenenbaum, also 19. They have been together for nearly two years, but Tenenbaum, who studies psycholinguistics at Northeastern University, felt that her boyfriend wasn’t as affectionate as he might be.

“She said that on a logical level she understood that I loved her, but she also wanted the reinforcement of a nice text message once in a while,” Barsky said. He began using Romantimatic every few days to send her a templated message or one of his own.

Tenenbaum did not know at first that he was getting some digital hand-holding; when he finally confessed, she thought it was fine, as long, she said, as he really felt what he was saying and the messages were genuine. “It’s definitely helped, and now he’s getting to the point where he sends spontaneous affectionate messages on his own, which means a lot to me, and he seems more affectionate in general,” she said.