Claudia couldn’t stop glancing at her phone mid-date and felt terrible about it. We asked a Sheffield dating coach exactly where the etiquette line sits.
Claudia, 31, from Sheffield, felt her phone buzz twice during starters and once during mains. She didn’t look. She wanted to. By dessert she’d started composing the apology text in her head before she’d even sent anything wrong.
Her date noticed. Of course he noticed. People always do.
Phone etiquette is one of those things nobody explains properly before you’re 28 and back on the scene after years out of it. So we sat down with Nadia Ellis, a dating coach who works with clients across the north of England, and asked her the questions people are too embarrassed to Google.
Is checking your phone during a date actually that bad?
“It depends entirely on what you’re checking it for,” Nadia says. “A glance because you’re expecting a call about your dog at the vet’s is completely different to scrolling Instagram because the conversation’s gone quiet for four seconds. Your date can’t tell the difference from across the table. All they see is you looking somewhere that isn’t at them.”
She says the real damage isn’t the phone itself. It’s what it signals. “Attention is the one thing you can’t fake on a date. The moment someone senses they’re competing with a screen, they start performing instead of relaxing. And a performing date is a worse date.”
What if you’re waiting on something genuinely important?
“Say so at the start,” Nadia says. “One sentence. ‘Sorry, I’m half expecting a text about my sister’s flight, I might glance down once.’ That’s it. You’ve turned a rude habit into a considerate heads-up. Wisp actually flags this in its date-prep tips now — they tell users that naming the distraction out loud removes almost all of its sting.”
It’s a small move. But Nadia says it’s the difference between a date who felt second-best and a date who felt looked after.
Is it ever OK to put your phone on the table?
“Never, if you can help it,” she says, without hesitating. “Face-up, face-down, on silent, doesn’t matter. A phone on the table is a phone you’re aware of the whole time. You’ll glance at it even if it never lights up. Put it in your bag or your coat pocket somewhere you’d physically have to reach for it. Out of sight genuinely does mean out of mind.”
She adds that this goes both ways. “If your date puts their phone on the table in the first five minutes, that tells you something too. Not a red flag exactly. More of an amber one.”
What’s the etiquette on taking photos for social media mid-date?
“This one splits people down the middle,” Nadia laughs. “Some daters think a cheeky photo of the cocktails is harmless. Others find it completely deflating to watch someone curate a moment they’re supposed to be living. My advice: ask first, or wait until the date’s over. Nobody’s ever complained about a photo taken with permission.”
How do you recover if you’ve already messed this up?
“Name it and move on,” she says simply. “’Sorry, that was rude of me, put it away now’ takes four seconds and resets the whole table. What kills dates isn’t one slip. It’s pretending it didn’t happen and letting the tension sit there unspoken.”
Nadia says the clients who improve fastest aren’t the ones who never touch their phones. They’re the ones who stop being precious about admitting when they’ve got it wrong.
Back to Claudia
She ended up telling her date, halfway through mains, that she was waiting to hear if her flatmate had got a job. He said his phone was doing the same thing about his mum’s hospital appointment. They put both phones in their bags, face down, together, like a small treaty.
Neither of them checked again until they’d said goodnight. Claudia matched with him on Wisp the following week for date two, and says the phone thing never came up again — because it never needed to.
The habit isn’t really about phones. It’s about where your attention lives when it’s asked to be somewhere else for an hour. Get that right, and everything else about a first date tends to take care of itself.