To be fair, you don't know if that couple is just out for dinner because they didn't make anything at home that day. You don't know if they've been around eachother and off their phones for the past 24 hours. I have the opposite anecdotal experience to yours. Lots of people at restaurants are not on their phones but I've also stopped caring to look honestly.

Or maybe one of them is responding to another human being in their life over their phone, and as that results in a break in conversation, the other person starts using theirs.

One question could be: which set of people know more about each other at the end of dinner.

Dinner time used to be a time of the day where couples and families would have the first chance since breakfast to discuss their day. With all of different available forms of communication today, my partner and I already know what happened during the other’s day and we are doing something like planning the next adventure.

I work from home and “retired my wife” six years ago. She’s home most of the time unless she’s out either teaching fitness classes or taking fitness classes. We talk all of the time off and on during the day.

We also travel a lot (nothing glorious or expensive and I know all of the credit card hacks), if you see us on our phones when we are out, we are usually looking at our shared calendar/Google sheet plotting and planning what we are going to do next.

We are 51/50 and have a window where our kids are grown and our parents see mostly healthy and independent and we are both in good shape and gym rats

> When Joe Rogan is more interesting than talking about your day with your spouse or friend ...

... you may (just may!) have been married for a rather long time. I still think that is sad, but in a different sort of way than it would be for younger couples/pairs.

I think maybe this happens in waves? I’ve been with my SO a while, over a decade at least, so we’ve run through the backlog of stories. But there’s usually at least one or two new things to talk about from our independent lives. I guess if we were both retired, we would probably spend less time apart, and have less time to accumulate stories the other didn’t know about.

Although sometimes we just play the crossword, taking turns on one of our phones, when waiting for the waiter.

Rogan pushes fairly regressive and misogynistic narratives, so I would expect a "Rogan guy" to not have a great relationship with his wife and would not at all be surprised they stopped getting along or just lacked a lot in common anymore, unless she's also a Rogan type.

Way to totally miss the point. You can just pretend he said The Young Turks instead if you care to follow along with the conversation.

Put another way, we are all competing with professional entertainers now. Sink or swim...

People were doing this with the TV, the radio, the newspaper. To an extent at least. The phone is so easy to use it can come out in pretty much any situation. Even at the urinal.