How to gently bring up social media addiction?

Marital Issue

Hey, ladies; hope this comes across the way I mean for it to.

Recently there's been a bunch of friction where she tells me that she feels alone in the relationship or that I'm not checked-in for as much of it as she would like (context below, if it helps), and that she's overwhelmed with household work / planning / etc.. No kids, and we also pay a housekeeper to come in every week and cover chores that neither of us want to do (minimizes fighting).

I was recently fixing up something on our WiFi router and the dashboard showed me nearly 100GB of Instagram/Facebook activity through her phone over the last 30 days. Doing a quick Google shows me that this amount of data is used at roughly 750MB-1GB per hour of Reels / doomscrolling. Simple math says that this is 100hrs or more of time burned on social media per month, which is a little bit worrying. I knew she doomscrolled a bunch, but not this much.

SO - here's my ask. How do I express this worry to her in a respectful way? I worry about the effects of this much doomscrolling, but also find it incredibly unfair that she can spend that much time glued to her phone and still give me flack for things left undone around the house while I work as much as I do. I'm not asking her to take on my responsibilities; those I'm happy to bear, but it's really hard to hear criticism about my limited free time when she burns so much time online.

Thanks for any advice you may have!

For added context, my wife and I have an expensive lifestyle and I spend a lot of time at work to make sure we have what we need (70hrs+ most weeks); this is in addition to my share of household responsibilities in evenings and weekends. She works from home for 40-50hrs, and handles stuff like laundry and meal prep during those working hours or lunchbreaks as well. There is no question that she does more to run the house than I do, but if you add up hours spent with work + chores, I'm the one putting in more (again, different categories, but more raw time spent).

Posted Sep 21, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

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