'Smartphones killing intimacy in relationships'

Heavy smartphone use during midnight hours is destroying intimacy in relationships, leading to break-ups, cheating and divorce, says a study.

As the quality of our physical connections gets diluted, people expect less and forget what real romance is, it added.

Researchers from the Oxford University in Britain studied 24,000 married European couples.

They found a direct link between use of social networking sites and marital satisfaction.

"The more couples read about others' exciting lives on social media, the more likely they were to view their own with disappointment and disdain," the authors noted.

In a separate study, researchers from the University of Missouri in the US interviewed hundreds of Facebook users aged between 18 and 82.

They found as the use of social media increased with the help of smartphones past midnight, actual intimacy suffered.