Hilary Duff just lived the dream.

She took a $1,200 slab of surgical-grade stainless steel and glass—a device engineered by the world’s brightest minds to be the center of our personal universes—and she chucked it into a bush. It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a "whoops, I dropped it" moment at the grocery store. It was a deliberate, high-velocity rejection of the digital leash.

During a recent appearance on the Informative podcast, the actress and erstwhile Lizzie McGuire detailed a "drag-out fight" with her husband, Matthew Koma. The climax didn't involve a witty monologue or a slammed door. Instead, it involved Koma’s phone meeting some California landscaping.

We’ve all been there, mentally if not physically.

The smartphone is the third wheel in every modern marriage. It’s the uninvited guest at dinner, the glowing rectangle that sits between you and your partner in bed, and the ultimate witness to your worst moments. When Duff launched that phone, she wasn’t just attacking Koma’s hardware. She was attacking the conduit of his attention. She was aiming for the source of the distraction, the very thing that allows a person to be physically present while mentally 3,000 miles away in a Twitter thread or a group chat.

Tech companies love to talk about "connection." They sell us these devices with soft-focus ads featuring grandparents seeing their grandkids on FaceTime. They don’t show the other side. They don’t show the specific friction of trying to have a serious conversation with someone whose thumb is twitching toward a notification. They don’t mention that the "Always On" display is also an "Always Distracted" invitation.

Throwing a phone into a bush is a uniquely modern form of catharsis. It’s expensive, sure. An iPhone 15 Pro Max screen replacement will run you $379 if you aren't paying for the monthly extortion known as AppleCare+. But in the heat of a "drag-out," that $379 feels like a bargain for the silence that follows.

There’s a certain irony in the mechanics of the recovery, too. Duff admitted she eventually had to go find it. Imagine the scene: the adrenaline of the fight has faded. The righteous indignation has been replaced by the grim reality of the "Find My" app. You’re crawling through dirt and spiders, listening for a high-pitched ping emitted by a device you just tried to execute.

It’s the ultimate walk of shame.

We’ve built a world where you can’t actually kill the thing you hate. You can throw it, drown it, or bury it under a pile of mulch, but eventually, you’ll need it to call an Uber, pay for a coffee, or double-check the calendar for the kids' soccer practice. The phone always wins. It survives the bush. It gets wiped off, plugged in, and returns to its place on the nightstand, ready to be the catalyst for the next argument.

Koma, for his part, seems to have taken the hardware assault in stride. He’s a musician; he’s used to things being broken on tour. But there’s a deeper tension here that no software update can fix. We are living in an era where our most intimate relationships are mediated by companies in Cupertino and Seoul. We spend thousands of dollars on "Pro" tools that we mostly use to annoy the people we love.

Duff’s story resonated because it’s a rare moment of celebrity honesty about the toxicity of our hardware. We’re told these devices make our lives better, more efficient, more "seamless." But seams are where things hold together. When you remove the seams, everything just falls apart.

Maybe the problem isn't the fight itself. Maybe the problem is that we’ve reached a point where the only way to get a partner’s undivided attention is to physically remove their ability to look at anything else. It’s a desperate move. A messy move.

The bush, presumably, was unavailable for comment. It’s likely still holding onto some of the debris—a stray SIM card tool or a lightning cable that fell out of a pocket during the struggle. A small monument to the night the digital world lost a round to a hedge.

If you find yourself standing in your front yard tonight, weighing the balance of your phone in your hand while your spouse says something you don't want to hear, just remember the cost of the repair.

Is the silence worth four hundred bucks and a scratch on the bezel?