One in three busy Brits believe it’s acceptable to answer a mobile phone call during sex, it has been revealed. The true extent to which our hectic lives and busy work schedules intrude on our most intimate moments were revealed in a study carried out among more than 2,000 adults.
As well as the third who said taking a call mid-romp was fine, 51% revealed they thought it was perfectly okay to take a call at a wedding.
54% said they had no problem picking up the phone whilst out for dinner, while another 57% said even the toilet wasn’t out of bounds, with men more likely than women to think it’s ok to talk in the loo.
The figures were revealed in research carried out by Vodafone, which marked the recent launch of Vodafone Red.
Srini Gopalan, Consumer Director at Vodafone UK commented:
”It seems as a nation we’re desperate not to miss out on the latest gossip no matter what we’re up to.
“But this doesn’t mean you have to take a call even when you’re responding to the call of nature, having a romantic dinner or in bed.
“Now Brits have unlimited calls, they don’t need to interrupt quality time with their partner to answer their phone as there’s no need to worry about the cost of returning a missed call.
“Even cutting a chat short when you do call back for fear of running out of inclusive minutes is now a thing of the past.”
The comprehensive study into modern phone use reveals the crucial role that mobile phones play in everyone’s lives, with 90% of people saying they had received a very important call on their mobile.
Over a quarter said they had been given a job offer, nearly 15% said they had been told about the birth of a child and a surprising 1% even said they had been proposed to via their mobile phone.
The research also revealed that whilst the majority of us have between one and 50 numbers in our phones, we only speak regularly to between five and ten of those people.
Eight out of ten of us even have numbers in our phone that we have never called and probably never will.
The research also examined why many of us choose to text rather than call: the results showed convenience, time, cost and bizarrely, how much we like the recipient of our text all play a part, with teens most likely to go through this thought process when they reach for their phone.
But the research also showed that despite their love of texts, younger mobile phone users would actually want to talk more often and make more calls if they didn’t have to worry about the impact on their pocket.
Worryingly, nearly 40% of those who were polled said they felt the art of conversation was dying, while another 21% said they felt social media and text based communication was to blame.
Almost one in five said they felt listening skills were dying out amid the tech boom and 17% bemoaned the fact that people don’t seem to have the time for talking anymore.
Srini Gopalan from Vodafone continued:
”It’s time to revive the art of conversation. People still want to talk but they want to do that without worrying about the cost.
“We’ve seen from our research that the younger generation in particular would call more people more often and would talk for longer if cost wasn’t a factor. And there are clearly plenty of people in everyone’s address book that we don’t catch up with often enough.”