A 2023 American Psychological Association survey found that 43% of therapists reported seeing a measurable decline in clients’ real-world social skills after 18 or more months of screen-primary social contact. Not a slight dip. A measurable, documented decline.
And yet video calls have never been more popular.
So which is it? Are screens saving our relationships or slowly hollowing them out?
Side A: The Case Everyone Already Believes
The conventional wisdom is easy to repeat. Video calls democratized connection. They kept families together across time zones. They let people with chronic illness, social anxiety, or impossible schedules actually show up for their people. A 2022 Pew Research study found that 55% of Americans said video calling helped them maintain relationships during periods of physical distance.
That is not nothing. That is real.
Therapists who moved their practices online after March 2020 often report something that surprised them. Retention went up. No-shows dropped. Clients who previously canceled because of traffic, weather, or parking anxiety were suddenly logging in from their cars, their closets, their lunch breaks. The access barrier came down. For a specific subset of people, that was transformative.
Erin Hayward, a licensed counselor in Austin who moved her entire caseload online in March 2020, expected her client relationships to suffer. They did not. “My most avoidant clients suddenly had nowhere to hide,” she told me. “The sofa became the couch. There was something almost accidentally intimate about that.”
Did You Know: A 2021 Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab study coined the term “Zoom fatigue” and identified four specific causes: excessive close-up eye contact, cognitive load from decoding nonverbal cues, reduced mobility, and a mirroring effect that forces users to look at themselves. All four increase stress hormones over extended calls.
The access argument is real. For people who were isolated before video calls, screens are unambiguously better than nothing.
But here is what nobody tells you: “better than nothing” is not the same as “good enough.”
Side B: What Therapists Are Actually Seeing
Marcus, a therapist in Portland, expected his client numbers to crater when he moved to video sessions in 2020. Instead, he watched something subtler happen. His clients were showing up more. But they were also getting stuck more. “They were consistent,” he said. “But certain breakthroughs just weren’t happening. The work had a ceiling it couldn’t push past.”
That ceiling has a name in the research.
Social psychologist Robin Dunbar, whose work on social bonding has been widely cited since the 1990s, identified what he calls the support clique: the five to seven people whose loss would genuinely devastate you. His more recent research, published in 2021 in the journal Biology Letters, found that maintaining those core bonds requires regular, physical, in-person contact. Not occasional. Regular. Screen contact helps preserve the connection. It does not deepen it.
Think about the last time you felt genuinely seen by someone on a video call. What was different about that conversation? Was it the topic? The length? Or was it something about the physical space you were both in?
That question is not rhetorical. It matters for what comes next.
The neurological explanation is unpleasant but worth knowing. Physical presence triggers oxytocin release in ways that screens do not replicate reliably. Eye contact through a camera is not the same as eye contact across a table, because your gaze and the camera lens are never in the same position. You are always, on some level, slightly off. Over time, that slight misalignment accumulates. Relationships that exist only on screen, according to a 2022 study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, show reduced emotional synchrony between participants compared to relationships that include regular physical contact.
Warning: If your closest relationships have been screen-only for more than 12 months, you may be experiencing what researchers call “relational drift,” a gradual emotional distancing that feels like nothing because it happens slowly. By the time it feels significant, the gap can be harder to close.
One unnamed couples therapist I spoke with put it plainly: “I watch partners come in and they know everything about each other’s schedule and nothing about how each other smells, moves, fills a room. The spontaneous moments stop coming. The relationship hits a ceiling it cannot push past.”
Pro Tip: If a close relationship has gone fully digital, try reintroducing a small physical ritual before your next video call. Send a handwritten note, mail something small, or plan a shared physical activity for your next in-person visit. Physical anchors, even modest ones, help the nervous system remember that the person on the screen has a body.
The 2am Section
If you are reading this at 2am wondering why a relationship that seemed fine six months ago now feels thin, this section is for you.
You did not do anything wrong. Neither did they, probably.
What happened is this: you both kept showing up to the screen, kept the calendar full, kept the check-ins consistent. And somewhere in the maintenance of all that, the relationship stopped growing. It stabilized at a comfortable distance. Warm. Present. And just a little hollow.
I have been in that exact conversation. It is not comfortable.
Here is what the research and the therapists and honestly just basic human experience suggest: the relationship is not broken. It is undernourished. There is a difference. Broken things require grief. Undernourished things require feeding.
What does that mean practically?
It means the next conversation you have with that person probably should not be about logistics. It should be about something real. Not “how’s work” but “what has been sitting heavy on you lately.” Not “let me know if you need anything” but something more specific.
Here is a communication script you can actually use:
“I feel like we have been keeping up with each other but I miss feeling close to you. I do not need anything specific from you right now. I just wanted to say that out loud.”
That is it. You do not need to diagnose the relationship or assign blame. You are naming a real thing without making the other person responsible for fixing it. That is the move.
It is messier than the advice columns suggest. But it works.
What do you actually want from your closest relationships right now? Not what you think you should want. Not what is convenient. What you actually want.
Sit with that for a second before you keep reading.
For context on how ritual and proximity shape connection over time, the WolfTrend piece on secular rituals and relationship distance covers a related pattern worth reading alongside this one.
Your Next 3 Steps
Step 1: This week, open your contacts and identify your top five relationships. For each one, write down the last time you were physically in the same room. If any of those dates are more than 90 days ago, that relationship is likely in relational drift territory. You do not need to panic. You need to act.
Step 2: Pick one screen-only relationship from that list and schedule an in-person meeting before the end of the month. Not a call. A location. A coffee shop, a park, a front porch. Book it now, before you finish reading this article, because you will talk yourself out of it by tomorrow.
Step 3: Before your next video call with someone you care about, spend 60 seconds alone in a quiet room before you open the laptop. Phones face down. One real question prepared in advance. Something you actually want to know. The call will feel different. Not because the screen changed. Because you did.
You deserve to know this: connection is not a passive thing that happens when two people both log on. It is an active thing. It requires a little more intention now than it used to. That is not a tragedy. It is just the current truth.
Karol Grant writes about relationships, human complexity, and the messy space between who we are and who we want to be. Follow her work at WolfTrend.
