Imagine a scenario: You’re riding the T home on a Tuesday evening and for a moment, you put down your phone to look out the window. The sunset is making ripples of pink along the Charles River, and it reminds you of that time you and your wife went kayaking a few years ago. You smile, then pick up the phone to text her.

“I think we should buy a kayak,” you write.

“What the heck are you talking about?” she responds.

Poof, in an instant, the reverie is gone.

When technology wriggles its way into our daydreams, it can have unpredictable results in our relationships, sometimes leading to misunderstandings or bruised egos. Or so says a theory put forth by a trio of researchers in Spain, who recently published their findings in the journal New Media & Society.

To conduct their research, the team conducted interviews and field studies that looked at the little “non-moments’’ in our days — the solitary instances where we lapse into idle musings about the future, our relationships, or wherever our minds might wander. There was a time, of course, when those moments were just ours, and we used that time to literally “collect” our thoughts and possibly share them in some form with loved ones later.

But today, the researchers argue, our technology allows us to communicate these thoughts immediately “with another person who does not happen to share this ‘here and now’ with us.” That’s where the trouble can arise.

While some respondents found that sharing their nearly unfiltered daydreams with their partners was met with enthusiasm, many found themselves feeling disconnected if their loved one didn’t respond in kind. “We found a lot of hurt feelings, anxiety, a fear of being not important or being neglected,” said one of the study’s authors, Natàlia Cantó-Milà, a social research professor at the Open University of Catalonia, Spain.

Cantó-Milà said she found some long-distance couples had developed ways to calibrate their emotions, so that they wouldn’t feel hurt if one person didn’t respond to a communiqué quickly. But the ever-present nature of technology, she said, has shifted the way we remain connected with our partners. As she and her co-authors wrote in the paper, the “moments of longing get shorter” — but it’s not necessarily a good thing.

The Social Media column appears every other Saturday in the Boston Globe’s Living Arts section.