‘Attention Infidelity’ Is Ruining Romance
A few weeks ago the independent movie “Before Sunrise” popped into my mind. A 1990s classic and the first in a trilogy, the film is about two cerebral 20-somethings, Céline and Jesse, who meet cute on a train to Paris. They decide to hop off in Vienna, and spend a day together bantering, interacting with locals, wandering the beautiful city without purpose and falling in love. They relate in spite of cultural differences (he is American, she is French, they both talk to Austrians) and gendered ones, too. As I was replaying the movie in my mind, I had a thought that made my stomach drop: My children may never get to experience this. By “this” I mean the uninterrupted attention, general serendipity and conversational vulnerability that I got to experience before smartphones.
“Before Sunrise” even somewhat presaged our screen-addled present. In her review of the film in The New York Times, Janet Maslin notes Jesse’s commentary on the “dubious spiritual value of technology,” when he states, “You never hear somebody say, ‘Well, you know, with the time I’ve saved by using my word processor, I’m going to go to a Zen monastery and hang out.’”Mine is not a new fear, and I realize it is born out of a kind of nostalgia. From the pollster and public opinion researcher Daniel Cox’s forthcoming book, “Generation Uncoupled: America’s New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection,” I learned a new term: “attention infidelity.” Cox defines it in a somewhat unusual and expansive way: when a partner’s digital life intrudes on an in-person connection. This kind of “infidelity” can include looking at sexually explicit material or engaging in suggestive social media interactions, but more often it is just the banal distraction of dead-eyed scrolling. “Instead of reaching for each other,” Cox explains, “we snatch up our digital devices that flood us with an endless stream of hyper-curated content."
Though couples of any age experience this to some degree — my husband and I try to leave our devices in the kitchen after dinner so we can actually talk to each other — people like us who got together before the smartphone at least had the benefit of cementing our bonds with long stretches of concentrated attention. That kind of sustained focus breeds deeper understanding across differences and more grace. Some may dismiss this kind of worry about young people’s nascent relationships as a technological moral panic. But Cox, who is the director of the Survey Center on American Life at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, has compiled a list of sobering statistics that show that screens are a driving factor in how disconnected teenagers and 20-somethings are from one another. Gen Z-ers, the first generation that can’t remember a world without smartphones, participate less in “embodied social experiences” than their counterparts in every other generation. They’re less likely to work, go to church, attend parties, date or play sports, Cox notes. About half of teenagers describe themselves as “almost constantly” online. There is no other change that has occurred in the past few decades that would explain this unique decline. Young people’s very online isolation, which was worsened by the Covid lockdown, means they have much less practice interacting with new people and navigating the usual friction and established norms. This, Cox writes, has left them lonely, unmoored and distrustful of each other. While dating has always been challenging and provided fodder for complaint, today’s teenagers and 20-somethings have a starting point of greater suspicion, which can be poison for the creation of romantic relationships.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing