ATTENTION IS THE MOST BASIC EXPRESSION OF LOVE
“Attention is a resource: a person has only so much of it… What if we saw attention in the same way that we saw air or water, as a valuable resource?”
And what if we better aimed this resource toward the person we say is most important in our lives? What if we made it a practice to prioritize our partner as the most important recipient of our attention?
Attention is the most basic expression of love.
If there is one obstacle these days to strong and healthy partnerships, it is arguably our inability to aim consistent attention toward our partner. In this age of technology, our attention has been hijacked by clever engineers (and their confounding algorithms) who fashion our devices — laptops, iPads, smartphones — to capture our focus and concentration — and it’s not in the direction of our loved ones. As a result, we seem to have little time for each other; our attention aims elsewhere.
