I think my boyfriend is addicted to screens and I don’t know what to do.
Hello, this is my first time posting here as I’m usually just a lurker on the AITA thread but I’m in need of some serious unbiased advice. My boyfriend and I are hitting a major bump in the road. Or I guess more accurately I keep talking about the bump only to be told the bump is an ant hill and everything is fine. I feel like my boyfriend is constantly scrolling reddit, and if he’s not doing that then he’s playing some sort of game (sometimes multiple games at once on different monitors).
Recently it feels like unless I ask him to go out and do something then we don’t do it, and the moment that whatever it is is over he’s immediately back on his phone scrolling through reddit. If we watch a TV show together most of the time we can’t make it through a single episode without him pulling out his phone and ignoring everything else around him to the point that I give up repeating what I said about whatever is on. I don’t care if he really likes what’s happening on the TV, 6 out of 7 days a week I leave home before 6AM and this is really some of the only time we have to sit and just be with each other. When we lay down to go to sleep he used to hold me until we fell asleep and now he spoons with me for maybe a minute before searching for his phone to scroll reddit. He literally holds his phone right next to my head and scrolls through reddit. If we drive over an hour to go see his family that he was bitching about missing he ignores all attempts of conversation to scroll on his phone (most recently he did this during christmas). His excuse is always that his family can be a lot, or that his work day is really stressful with having to deal with people, and recently it’s that he’s hit a mental slump so he just needs a minute to himself to do something he enjoys. I feel more isolated by the day and I don’t know what to do anymore. He scrolls on reddit until the wee hours of the morning or watches tournaments on his phone with airpods and then complains about being tired the next day or has major headaches. I’ve tried suggesting melatonin, setting a better sleep schedule, trying medication, limiting screen time before bed, etc to try and help this but he is uninterested. I’ve asked if he wants to go to therapy/talk to a psychiatrist to try and sort out why sleep is so hard for him and he says it won’t help. I’ve told him he can use my therapist to talk about hitting a slump and he immediately brushed me off. I begged him to just think about it but recently he said that it won’t help and he’s not interested. This is getting to the point that I feel genuine resentment and rage towards him and the stupid shit he does online. Unless sex is on the table then I am fighting everything else for any type of attention, and even then five minutes after he’s back on the computer or laying in bed scrolling reddit. It makes me feel dirty, like I’m just some cheap entertainment for a dopamine hit before he’s back on his phone. I don’t know what to do or how to bring this up to him, I was honestly really hoping he would take my offer up on therapy and we’d be able to do some couples counseling too but that is a solid no-go at this point. I want to be supportive but I feel really isolated. How do I bring this up without making him feel attacked?