All real living is meeting.
Martin Buber
Rafic told me about sitting down to a welcome weekend lunch with his spouse. After fifteen years of marriage, he knew for sure that their intimate life needed improvement, and he figured that this was a good opportunity to invite a conversation. “Have you ever thought that it might be fun for us to play some sexual games together?” he timidly asked.
Crickets.
She was scrolling on her phone.
His hopes for their relationship wilted like his body had after she’d scrolled away their last together time. His thoughts drifted to the sexy new intern at work.
Pollster and public opinion researcher Daniel Cox, in his forthcoming book Generation Uncoupled, calls this relationship toxin “attention infidelity.” It’s what happens when a partner’s close relationship with their screens intrudes on their IRL contact, their in-person connecting. Whether you call it “attention infidelity,” “digital distraction,” “screen addiction,” or just “ignoring me,” it can be as fatal to a relationship as an assassin’s brain stem kill shot.
Attention infidelity can be this powerful because it messes with a vital life project, the basic human task of identity-building. Recall some ways you’ve heard this theme expressed:
- “No [hu]man’s an island.”
- “Relationships are where we become who we are.”
- “You can believe another person into being.”
- “The most important feeling is the feeling of being felt.”
- In Zulu/Bantu culture, “Ubuntu” means “humanity, where a person is a person through other persons.”
Psychotherapists call the event “confirmation,” where what is confirmed is my sense of self, my reassurance that I matter. Humans fundamentally need confirmation; philosopher Martin Buber writes,
Sent forth from the natural domain of species into the hazard of the solitary category. . . , secretly and bashfully [the hu]man watches for a Yes which allows [them] to be, and which can come to [them] only from one human person to another. It is from one [hu]man to another that the heavenly bread of self being is passed.
Rafic probably won’t be driven into existential crisis by this one instance of his wife’s disconnected scrolling, but too much of this bad thing will poison their love.
The other, equally important, experience that attention infidelity destroys is presence, here-and-now attending. One observer aptly described this capability as “being present to the presentness of the other and able to call them into presence with him.”
Presence is the interpersonal experience that is broken every time your cocktail party conversation partner looks over your shoulder to find the next person they can assault with their vacuous small talk. You know they’ve stopped paying attention to you.
You’re present when fifteen minutes of conversation go by in seconds, when you smell their breath and it’s a good thing, when a feeling they express hits your stomach, when you’re thoroughly grateful for this together time.
Confirmation and presentness are best when experienced warm, at the temperature of living humans, not chilled by strategic calculation, quantifying, or a Zoom screen. They’re often enriched by closeness and touch, a responsive handshake, shoulders brushed in passing, a hug, or, if you’re courageous, with extended, silent, eyes to eyes.
All this sounds strangely countercultural to Millennials and those in Gen Z, Alpha, and Beta. The dissonance happens because folks born after 1981 get acculturated to being more uncoupled and, as a result, more lonely than they could be if they swore off cheating with screens.