We’ve all heard stories of women who, tired of watching their husbands spend hours playing Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, pack their bags and exit through the main door. In most cases, the husbands don’t even notice as their head is buried too deep in the game.

The latest one doing the rounds tells of the man from Florida whose wife spends the day playing scroller games and Pikmin 3 and sending Facebook game requests. Rest assured that there’s no happy ending here.

When it comes to relationships, there’s an app for everything. One app called 30 Day Relationship Challenge promises to help you build a stronger relationship in, yes, you guessed it, 30 days. Relationship Success Secrets doesn’t keep secrets at all and gives you tips on how to attract the love of your life. Another app called Twyxt is a private messenger which also includes a relationship journal.

But even as technology tries to help us build and strengthen relationships, those same relationships are falling out of love.

But is technology to blame? True, trying to communicate with someone who only replies in monosyllabic grunts as he is too busy sending messages or playing Candy Crush Saga can be frustrating. Pamela Eyring, director of the Protocol School of Washington, calls the feeling a person suffers when trying to communicate with another person who is too busy engaging with technology “Blackberry abandonment”. She has another term for people who are obsessed with their mobile phone: “cell-fishness”.

Our attention is split between texting, watching the telly and reaching another level of the game we’re playing

The irony of it all is that while most gadgets are intended to keep us more connected, we’re failing at what EM Forster encouraged us to do in the epigraph to Howards End: only connect. And that’s because our attention is split between texting, watching the telly and reaching another level of the game we’re playing. And that leaves us with no time for the deep emotional engagement that is necessary for a meaningful relationship.

While it may be true that technology gets in the way of face-to-face contact and conversation, there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here. On one hand, some argue that an obsession with technology may fuel social isolation. On the other, it’s also true that in a loving relationship, televisions are switched off, mobile phones ignored, messages dismissed and games postponed in favour of some good old-fashioned conversation.

So what came first: a strong internet connection or a weak emotional one?