Is your partner on their phone and ignoring you? I’ve got a buzzword for that

From microcheating to quiet quitting to weaponised incompetence, new terms to describe relationship failings are abundant. But that doesn’t mean there’s not space for some more ... Are you committing “attention infidelity”? The New York Times alerted me to this expression, coined by the public opinion researcher Daniel Cox in a new book on the “crisis of human connection”. It’s exactly what you’d expect: failing to focus fully on your partner because you’re indulging in what the NYT calls, rather judgily, “the banal distraction of dead-eyed scrolling”. Who are you calling dead-eyed? This reel of an armadillo in a paddling pool has my animated attention! Surely we’re all a bit attention-unfaithful – only saints don’t sometimes absent-mindedly thumb through medieval manuscript hedgehog memes while their partner relates a boring anecdote about how they thought they saw a strange bird that turned out to be a plastic bag. What I find more interesting is how we seem now to need a lexicon of relationship bad behaviour. Continue reading...