519 - Competing for Attention: Why Your Partner's Distraction Hurts
Attentiveness in relationships
It’s normal to want attention, especially from partners and people who love you. Attention acts as a resource in relationships, and sometimes when we have a deficit of it, it doesn’t feel good. It can be hard if your partner is distracted by their phone, other partners, other priorities, etc., but never fear! We have some tips on how to be more mindful and intentional about attention in your relationships.
What does attentiveness in relationships even look like? Lots of ways! It can look like:
A partner taking your bids
Responsiveness, like responding to your conversation, requests, texts etc. within a reasonable time frame.
Remember that “reasonable” can be subjective and is up to the people in the relationship to negotiate.
Cues that a partner is listening to you.
Classically this is eye contact, though that may not be the case for everyone.
This can also look different depending on your macro culture.
Remembering important details, such as:
What your partner has going on that day or week.
What they are excited about or hopeful for.
What they are stressing about.
Thoughtfulness/mindfulness/consideration:
Anticipation of the other’s feelings and needs (within reasonable parameters).
Awareness of and communication around the impact your actions might have on the other person.
The ability to communicate clearly when attention isn’t immediately available.
Conversely, what does inattentiveness look like? It can show up in a variety of ways, just like attentiveness. A few include:
Distraction:
Getting sucked in by phone or other media when other person is trying to talk to you.
Forgetting or disregarding important events, plans, dates.
Being neglectful of a partner’s emotional needs, such as:
Avoiding intimate conversations, positive or negative.
Consistent pattern of withholding emotional support.
Consistent pattern of prioritizing other plans, events, or people over the relationship.
Poor communication and meta-communication, like:
Lack of responsiveness to calls or texts without explanation.
Keeping partner “in the dark.”
Lack of curiosity about other person and lack of effort to remember important details.
Why is this tricky?
This concept can be tricky because we all have moments of inattentiveness in our relationships. Everyone has multiple priorities in life, and no one is able to put their partner first in all situations (nor should they). Particularly in non-monogamy though, this gets very murky and difficult to deal with when multiple people are prioritized. Some of us might feel more upset if a partner’s attention is on another partner versus a platonic friend or work acquaintance.
The research on this topic suggests a few things:
You feel more love and positivity towards your partner when you’re actually paying attention to them.
The longer you’re with someone, the easier it is to ignore them.
Phubbing (phone snubbing, or ignoring a partner in favor of your phone) doesn’t directly cause lower relationship satisfaction, but it can cause more conflict, which in turn can lower relationship satisfaction.
Perceived partner responsiveness increases trust between romantic partners. This trust leads to higher commitment to the relationship. Committed partners, in turn, display more responsive behaviors, creating a "mutual cyclical growth" process.
The actionable steps
So what kinds of things can we do to combat these issues around attentiveness and distraction? Here are some tips:
Meta-communicate! Communicate expectations around communication and responsiveness in different scenarios, such as:
At work?
When I’m with my friends or family?
When I’m on a first date?
When I’m with another partner?
Communicate expectations around phone usage. This is a negotiation in every relationship, and something that two people need to figure out and experiment with over time. Avoid casting your communication preferences as correct and the other person’s as incorrect.
It is worth it to take the bid!
If the person sends you a song/article/YouTube video/meme - engage with it and respond.
Go out of your way to communicate your attention. This may depend on the scenario, but it could involve physically putting your phone away, angling your body towards the other person.
Create rituals of connection, big or small. Some examples are:
Always texting goodnight/good morning.
Regular date time, etc.
In addition to regular thorough check-ins/RADARS, more frequent small check ins or temperature checks can be helpful too. Some possible topics could be:
What’s on your plate today?
How are you feeling about this week?
Is there any way I can make your life easier this week?
If you’re a hinge, work on developing good hinge skills.
Remember, not everyone needs to feel like #1 all of the time. But we all want to feel like we’re #1 at least some of the time.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about attentiveness and attention as a resource in relationships. We all want to feel loved, important, and listened to, but if your partner is distracted by work, distracted by their phone, by other partners, or just other life priorities, it can be really distressing to feel like there's a lack of attention. Today, we dive into why this can be so upsetting, and the most important things to know about attentiveness and how to cope if you're suffering from that lack of attention.
If you're interested in learning more about our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show, check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers our communication tools for all types of relationships. You can get more information about where you can buy it at multiamory.com/book.
Dedeker: How do you all feel like your attention span is these days?
Jase: We were just talking about this yesterday,-
Emily: Really?
Jase: -where I was saying that this week, I'd been having a really hard time staying focused and feeling like I'm pulled in so many directions, even though I'm not on social media very much at all, but there's still enough different ways people can get in touch with me, multiple different email accounts, just lots of different things going on that it's just so easy to go down all these rabbit holes and to have a hard time focusing on just one thing.
Emily: We're recording this the week that the Supercast change is occurring. I've definitely been looking at that, like when all the emails roll in, that somebody has switched over from Patreon, for example. The phone in general, I really do have to put it in another room when I want to get work done because it's so easy to just pick it up and get that little bit of dopamine hit and check out what's going on on Twitter or The New York Times or something like that.
Dedeker: That is something I've learned about myself. I use a lot of apps that really restrict my social media usage, or at least I attempt to get it to restrict my social media and YouTube and New York Times usage. I found that even then, there's still so many ways to distract oneself from the task at hand.
Emily: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: For sure. I feel like these days I do have to create more of a ritual in order to actually get my attention back, like throwing the phone in the garbage. Sometimes I even have to leave my house because it feels like there's too many things here that can distract. I have to go to a third location entirely.
Emily: Often, I'll distract myself from doing a task at hand by completing other smaller tasks.
Dedeker: That's a good move.
Jase: Exactly. Yes. I do that all the time.
Emily: I wanted to make sure that I vacuumed today. I'm looking at my vacuum cleaner that's still out sitting over there. I needed to do other things in order to get ready for recording today. I don't know. It's difficult. There are so many tasks to do in such a small amount of time, and you really do have to prioritize what it is that you're going to do because sometimes you can't get it all done. You just can't.
Dedeker: Well, let's talk about your attention span, specifically in relationships. What are the times you find it easy to give attention to a partner, when are the times that it's difficult to give attention to a partner?
Jase: I find that this, for me, has to sometimes be a very clear, intentional shift from the "trying to manage everything," paying attention to all the things going on, to now I'm just paying attention to the person that I'm with. I would include friends in this as well. If I'm hanging out with a friend, it's getting that mental shift into, "This is the main thing I'm focusing on now," versus, "I need to keep checking my messages. Need to see if someone texted me." I think sometimes for me, it's like I need to find a way to close those other things before I can give that attention to the person that I'm with.
Sometimes I found it helpful to instead of trying to carry those things in the background or sneak in some texts to say, "Hey, you know what? I actually need 10, 15 minutes. I need to resolve this conversation," or, "I need to send these links to someone," or, "Let them know. Hey, okay, I'm done with work for the day," or, "I'll get back to you tomorrow," or something like that. It feels like sometimes a really difficult mental shift if those doors aren't closed.
Emily: Right now, I'm only really engaging in one relationship. When I had more than one, I did find this to be really difficult. I would have one partner texting me when I was with another partner. To not want to immediately talk to that partner who was texting and engage with that was really difficult.
I do think that that thing that you just said, Jase, of intentionally saying either to the partner who's texting you, "Hey, I'm on a date right now," or something. "I'll get back to you when I can, but it may take a little while," or saying to the partner that you're with, "Can I just take five minutes to quickly resolve this or quickly talk to this person, and then I'll be right back with you?" It's difficult, and especially, I think this can get really tricky in relationships and cause somebody to feel like they're being pushed to the wayside, left out, or something along those lines. That's really hard to navigate at times.
Dedeker: I think that it's important to pay attention to attentiveness and attention in relationships, even if you're in your very traditional monogamous relationship. Of course, this really gets dragged out into the open when you're managing multiple partners because I think everybody needs attention from you at some point, right? Otherwise, I think they wouldn't be in a relationship with you if they didn't need your attention whatsoever. There are some people who handle this really, really well, then some people who handle this really, really poorly.
Then also, I feel like this is often fodder for sometimes more mainstream questions about non-monogamy or critiques of non-monogamy where people have asked you, "Well, what happens if two partners are going through a crisis at once? What do you do?" In my personal experience, I found that's almost never happened. There was one time that it happened that I had to do some actual triage there. It ended up being okay, ultimately. Outside of the rare occurrence of multiple people being in crisis at once, there's just the every day of when people need your attention, whether it's for I need your support, I need your listening ear, I need you to pick up some groceries, or I need to tell you this joke and share this meme with you, or whatever, right?
Emily: Absolutely.
Jase: Sometimes it can be hard to filter out on the fly which of those are actually important to pay attention to right now, and which ones or not. I have found that for myself, I tend to do the best when I'm more clear about blocks of my time where I am or I'm not available. Even sometimes when I felt too stressed and overwhelmed by messages from the two of you while I'm at work or something.
Dedeker: We love doing that.
Jase: There are some days where that's fine, but there's other days where it's just like, "I'm already feeling pulled in too many directions. This is too much more." I do think there's a little bit of managing expectations too, or trying to understand for yourself when you have the bandwidth to give attention and when you don't, and when you might be compromising on something else to do that. I think that can, at least for me, take a lot of time and be an ongoing process of trying to figure that out.
Dedeker: Today, we're going to dive into what attentiveness even is in relationships, what attention looks like in relationship, what a lack of attention looks like. We're going to dive into what the research says about attentiveness within relationships. Then we're going to talk about what can we do about this if this is a problem in particular. We want to start with looking at, "What does attention actually look like in relationships?"
Emily: One of the ways that attention can manifest in a relationship is a partner taking a bid. What I mean by that is the little things that your partner does to get your attention and get you to engage with them. That might be, "Hey, look at this funny meme that I just found. I'm going to send it to you, and I want you to comment on it," or, "Look at this YouTube video," or coming up and even kissing you on the cheek, for instance. Something along those lines that are just a small, tiny gesture or ask for attention.
We talked about this in our Communication Hacks: Booster Pack episode, which we recently remastered, so you can check that out. Multiamory 480. The Gottman Institute, the Gottmans, John and Julie, are the ones who coined this term. They found that the healthiest and happiest relationships were those that took their partner's bids about 80% of the time. That's pretty high.
It's not 100% of the time because, of course, you're going to be in a situation where you just can't quite engage all the time, absolutely, or where maybe you just don't even notice that a bid is happening. I think that occurs sometimes just because you're distracted, you're in your own world, you're dealing with something at work, and so therefore, you can't necessarily take the bid at that time. If you're doing it about 80% of the time, then you're probably in a pretty healthy, happy relationship.
Jase: I think that just learning about bids and understanding that they exist and that they're really meaningful is something that has very much changed the way I respond to those little things from friends and family as well as partners of realizing, "Hey, this is actually an important way for me to show that I care." Also, realizing if one is not being received, that I've offered kind of understanding, "Hey, maybe this is a conversation that I should have with this person because they're missing this. Maybe they don't know," because I didn't know before I learned about it either, that this is really important.
Emily: Attention in a relationship also looks like responsiveness. What we mean by this is responsiveness to things like texts, requests, or conversations, things along those lines in a reasonable timeframe. Now, reasonable is a subjective term. It's really up to people in the relationship to negotiate. Definitely, there are people out there who are not particularly good texters, for instance. Reasonable may mean something different for them than it does for what you expect in your relationship, for example. Maybe it might take a few hours to respond to a text if it arrives in the middle of a workday, for instance.
One of my partners is a bartender, and I know because I work at the same restaurant that he bartends at, it's super-duper busy sometimes. That means that he's not going to be able to respond if I text him in the middle of that. That makes sense to me. I know that circumstance is going to cause a person to not necessarily be able to text back right away, and that's okay, but if it's an entire day, that might be a little weird. What happened here? Did you not receive the text? Did the fact that you're on an Android and I'm on an iPhone, screw something up? What's going on here?
Dedeker: It does happen. It does happen.
Emily: It does.
Jase: Yes. My mom and I were just talking about that this weekend where she had sent me some messages that I never got because she's on an iPhone-
Dedeker: It's happened to me too.
Jase: -and it sent to the wrong place.
Dedeker: We live in different countries now.
Emily: Yes, it's happening more often recently. I don't know.
Jase: Hopefully, those EU lawsuits forcing Apple to open up their messaging platform comes through and then we all don't have to have this problem all the time.
Emily: Love that.
Jase: I digress. Another piece of this is, is your partner paying attention to you when they're with you, when you're talking to them? Cues that a partner is listening to you. Normally we think of this as being eye contact, though this might not be true for everyone. I've talked in the past- this seems to vary by the day- but sometimes eye contact, for me, makes it actually harder for me to pay attention to what somebody is saying. I'll try to check in by looking at them, but also be looking away, but not at something else, so they don't think, "Oh, okay, he's distracted by this other thing," but there's kind of a sense of trying to split the difference in terms of how much I'm showing to them that I'm paying attention to them.
This could be something that for you is needing to negotiate, needing to just get to know each other and understand how you show that you're paying attention and acknowledging that that's there. This can also really vary depending on your macro culture. The classic example of this is the Japanese aizuchi. What this is, is the little sounds that you make or little things that you say while somebody else is talking to show that you're paying attention. Our version of that in English is while someone's talking they're like, mm-hmm, ah, whoa, yes, mm, no way, ah, mm-hmm, yeah. It's all those little things to show you're paying attention.
In our American culture, if you do that too much, people will feel like you're trying to rush them or you're impatient with them, or you're just trying to get a word in edgewise versus in Japan, if you don't do that, people assume you're not paying attention. It's like just a normal cultural way of showing, "Yes, I'm paying attention, I'm engaged with what you're saying." There can be this very big cultural difference there. That's also something to keep in mind as well as the smaller microculture differences.
Dedeker: I think attention in relationship looks like remembering important details. This is something that's also often referred to as cognitive room, the Gottman’s call it your love maps. As in you're paying attention and remembering to things like what your partner has going on that day or that week. What are they excited about or hopeful for? What are they stressing out about? What's going on for them at work? Are they still recovering from some sort of injury or a health thing? You're remembering to check up on that. I think that there's definitely that quality to attentiveness in relationship.
I think there is also a sort of amorphous quality to attentiveness. It's a little bit of, "You know it when you see it." I try to think of it as thoughtfulness, mindfulness, or consideration. I think these are things that could include behaviors where you're anticipating the other person's feelings and needs. Again, within reasonable parameters, not under the whole mind reading expectation or stuff like that. You are putting your thought and attention on that or you have awareness of and you're able to communicate around the impact that your actions and decisions might have on somebody else. You're paying attention to not just the impact on yourself of your decisions, but also on the people around you and the people that you care about.
I think this includes things like the ability to communicate when your attention is not going to be immediately available. This idea of being able to tell someone, "Hey, I'm about to head out the door right now to meet up with my date, but I'm going to call you once I'm back home tonight." It's hard for me to find a through line with all those things. It's just something in there about being thoughtful and being considerate that I think is a big part of attentiveness in relationships.
Emily: On the flip side, a lack of attention can probably look a lot of ways that you all are familiar with out there. Things like distraction, which is getting sucked in by your phone, by text messages, other media, when a person's trying to talk to you for instance.
Jase: The worst is when you're at a bar or a restaurant with TVs. It's always so hard-
Dedeker: Oh yes, that's hard.
Jase: -because it just pulls your attention so easily.
Dedeker: That's really hard.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. Things like forgetting or disregarding important events, plans, or dates. Oh gosh, this really pissed me off a lot in my last relationship because I felt like I really made an effort to remember things that were coming up and I felt like that was a more challenging thing for my partner to be able to do. Whether that's just a memory thing or it needs to be written down or whatever, when that isn't similar between partners, that can be really, really challenging when somebody just constantly forgets about what it is that you're doing in a day or what your week is going to look like or when something important is about to happen.
Dedeker: Totally.
Jase: I will say as someone who has a hard time remembering that, remembering to put it in my calendar so that I have a reference for it is really important.
Emily: Absolutely. Also, being neglectful of a partner's emotional needs. Things like avoiding intimate conversations, whether they be positive or negative, not doing that at all can feel disrespectful and like you're not respecting the attention that they want or need from you in that moment. Also, having a consistent pattern of withholding emotional support. If your partner is in need sometimes or is going through a period of time where they really need emotional support from you and you just simply don't want to give that to them, that can feel really disrespectful and really like you not going to want to give your attention to them.
Dedeker: I think there can be something in there. I want to clarify that people are allowed to have boundaries, and if they're just like, "Oh my God, I'm at capacity and I can't show up for my partner right now in the way they want me to," if you can communicate that in a compassionate way and negotiate that, that's great. I think there's something here about maybe not even noticing the emotional state that your partner is in, or not even noticing that they might need some support, whether they've said that expressly to you or not, I think falls under that umbrella.
Emily: Also having a consistent pattern of prioritizing other plans or other people or events over that relationship, that can be really, really difficult and feel like your attention is completely on someone or something else and not on the relationship.
Jase: Yes. Also, poor communication and metacommunication in terms of the quality of the communication. This could be a lack of responsiveness without explaining why, where normally, you're responding quickly, and then suddenly you just drop off the face of the planet for a couple of days and then get back to someone. Maybe there was a good reason for it, but if you didn't communicate about the fact that you were going to be somewhere without reception, or you're going to be with your family and less responsive, or something like that, that can feel shitty for that other person because it's like, "Suddenly your behavior's changed, and I don't know why." It's just this keeping your partner in the dark about what's going on with you.
I'd say another one is, kind of like Dedeker was talking about withholding mental room for information about someone else. It's also having curiosity to learn stuff about that other person to store in your mental room. It's like wanting to know about this person. What do they care about? What are things that they've got going on? Not just talking about your own stuff. Having a good give and take. Also actively paying attention, asking questions, and then remembering that information.
Where all of this gets tricky is that we all have moments where being attentive or being inattentive can happen in our relationships. All of us have multiple priorities in life so we're not able to put one person first all of the time in every single situation. I would argue we shouldn't be trying to do that. I think that's a little bit of a myth that that would make a good fairytale monogamous relationship. Even if you're monogamous and perfectly happy with that, having that one person be the only focus of your world is not a recipe for happiness and well-being for either of you. We've all got other priorities.
Then, if we add in non-monogamy and polyamory, this can get complicated, where we now have multiple people who may become a priority. Someone might feel more, I guess we'll say spicy, but not in a sexy way, in a this is more prickly, this hurts more if a partner's attention is on another partner versus if their attention is on work or a friend. I think some of that has to do with the way we've been socially conditioned to think about those things, but that doesn't mean that those feelings aren't real when they come up. That's definitely something to be aware of. That's what we want to get into later in this episode is acknowledging that and moving forward with it.
Dedeker: We're going to dive into what the research has to say about attention and attentiveness. The first study that I have here is a 2014 study by Langeslag, van der Veen, and Röder, Attention Modulates the Dorsal Striatum Response to Love Stimuli. This was published in Human Brain Mapping.
Jase: That's a banger of a title, I've got to say it is.
Dedeker: It really is. First caveat out of the gate is that this was a very small study. It was only 15 people. The average amount of time that these people had been in relationship was 5.1 months.
Jase: Lots of NRE, lots of exciting new relationships.
Dedeker: Yes, lots of NRE. Take a lot of the grain of salt, but basically what they did is they showed participants a series of photos. They would show them their romantic partner's face next to their friend's face, for instance, or it might be next to an unknown person's face, or they'd do different combinations of that. Two photos of unknown people, two photos of their friends, or a friend and their romantic partner. All these kind of things. They were told to either focus on or ignore certain images.
They might be specifically told, "Hey, this time around, ignore your friend's face," or, "Ignore the stranger's face specifically." They found that the dorsal striatum, which is a brain region associated with love and with reward, had greater activation in responses to images of a romantic partner but only when they were instructed to actively pay attention to those images. Now, when they were told to ignore images of the romantic partner, the activation in that area was reduced.
They also found that the longer that the participants had been in a relationship, the smaller the response was to their partner's faces when they were told to ignore their image. Here's what all this means, is that basically, you feel more love and positivity about your partner when you're actually paying attention to them. Big surprise. Also, the longer that you've been with someone, basically, the easier it is to ignore them.
Jase: Woah.
Dedeker: Which also is not that much of a surprise based on our lived experience.
Jase: I guess not.
Emily: Is that the case with friends, too?
Dedeker: I don't know. The study didn't go into-- they were specifically looking at what happens when you either ignore or pay attention to a romantic partner's face.
Emily: Fascinating.
Dedeker: I don't think they went to the friends' part.
Jase: I would be very curious to see how that would play out if it was a new friendship that they had just had versus a much longer-term relationship, since clearly, the average relationship time being 5.1 months means all of these were still in that pretty hot and heavy, excited mode of things. It would be really interesting to see how that would change later on.
Emily: Absolutely.
Dedeker: Again, it's a small study, but maybe this validates a little bit that phenomenon that we see all the time when people are non-monogamous and they fall in love with somebody new, they get into NRE with somebody new and it's very easy for them to put all their attention on that person. Respond right away with their text messages, and make sure they prioritize them in the calendar. Whenever they hang out with them, their phone is in the garbage because it's easy for their phone to be in the garbage because they're just so amazed-
Emily: They've never done that.
Dedeker: -and focused on this person, whereas with their existing relationship, it seems like that the longer that existing relationship has been around, it's easier to maybe-- I don't know if this automatically means it's easier to take someone for granted, but at least it's easier to put them in a different bucket in your brain of, "I don't need to pay as much attention to this person."
Jase: Maybe another way to look at this, because they talked about the reduced activity in that part of the brain when actively not paying attention to the romantic partner, again with this new exciting romantic partner, and that there was less decrease when told to not pay attention to a friend or to a longer-term relationship, also makes me feel there's that "I'm with one partner, and my new shiny partner is texting me," that choosing to ignore them is harder. Maybe thinking of it less of like, "It's easier to ignore an existing partner or a friend," thinking more like, "What if that's normal, and just somehow our brain chemistry makes it harder to ignore the new shiny person?"
Emily: That's the NRE.
Jase: The NRE, I guess. Yes.
Emily: Fascinating.
Dedeker: That would probably make sense.
Emily: Probably.
Dedeker: I think that this episode would not be complete if we weren't also discussing phone usage. I think that's why attention span is such a hot topic these days is because we're all wringing our hands about, "Oh my God, all of us are addicted to our phones," and, "It's so easy to get distracted," and, "Oh no, is my attention span ever going to come back?" Of course, there's 6 cajillion studies that find that being distracted by your phone in the presence of a partner has a negative effect. I think that's probably fairly obvious. However, I chose to highlight this one in particular because I think it had the best title.
This is a 2016 study published by Roberts and David, My life has become a major distraction from my cell phone: Partner phubbing and relationship satisfaction among romantic partners, and that was published in Computers in Human Behavior.
Emily: I love it.
Jase: Amazing. I love it.
Dedeker: It cuts a little close to home.
Jase: Yes. Yikes.
Dedeker: There's this term floating around, I'm sorry, I didn't do the research to figure out who coined this term, sorry to whoever you are, but phubbing, this idea of phone snubbing. This idea that if you're with a loved one, you tune out and you're on your phone, or maybe you both tune out and you're on your phones. In this particular study, researchers developed a nine-item scale for specifically measuring what they call Pphubbing or partner phubbing, like partner-specific phubbing. Now, some examples from this scale include things like;
- During a typical mealtime that my partner and I spend together, my partner pulls out and checks his or her phone.
- My partner places their phone where they can see it when we're together.
- When my partner's cell phone rings or beeps, they pull it out even if we're in the middle of a conversation.
- During leisure time, that my partner and I are able to spend together, my partner uses their phone. If there's a lull in our conversation, my partner will check his or her phone.
Stuff like that. Now, what they found is that Pphubbing doesn't directly cause lower relationship satisfaction. Instead, they found it causes more conflicts about phone use, it is then these conflicts that then reduce relationship satisfaction. They also found that when Pphubbing occurs, specifically, people with anxious attachment styles are more likely to perceive it as a threat to the relationship, which is more likely to cause conflict.
Another thing they found is that Pphubbing can have an indirect influence on depression, as in, it can go through this process of undermining relationship satisfaction, which does affect life satisfaction, which can influence. Now, that's a little bit of a windy road to go on, but it was something that they did want to highlight. I think it really cuts more to the heart of it's maybe less about the phone and more about how you feel if someone's not being attentive to you that you love.
Jase: I think this is something that is another area where metacommunicating is interesting. I'd be curious if they were to do further studies where they included some of that, of the times when I'm going to have my phone out because the babysitter might call me while my kid's at home, or because I'm just on my lunch break from work and I need to pay attention. There's some reason versus I'm just always defaulting to this during our conversation. I think that would be an interesting modulating factor to speak about it scientifically.
Emily: I just wonder how many people actually know, A, the term metacommunication, and B, are actually meta-communicating in these moments because I am astounded at the amount of people that I see in the restaurant that I work, just on their phones while on a date.
Dedeker: Oh, drives me wild.
Emily: It's incredible.
Dedeker: I'm starting to worry that me saying this is going to make me sound like an old person because I always, I was like, "Maybe that's just normal for the kids these days."
Emily: Maybe.
Dedeker: "Maybe everyone's cool with it," but no, it depresses me when I see it.
Emily: Even friends too.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: I'm like, "Aren't you going to see each other to hang out and catch up? Yet you're sitting there on your phones. It is strange to me, but I love that idea, Jase, I just don't know how realistic it is.
Dedeker: Then there's another complicating factor here is that the phone can represent many, many things. It's not always, "Oh, I'm bored and so I'm going to endlessly scroll on something to distract myself." It can represent something very functional like you're saying, of, "Actually, I need to pay attention in case the babysitter calls."
For a lot of people who are non-monogamous, the phone represents another partner, and then it becomes a little bit tricky. It can't be quite as easy as, "Oh, I'll just throw my phone in the garbage and it'll be okay," and it's also not quite as easy as like, "I need to be glued to my phone the entire time in order to maintain a relationship with this person." There does need to be a lot of that metacommunication and negotiation, which we'll get into later in the last part of this episode.
Any guesses about why this behavior is upsetting? Why we get so upset when we feel like someone's not paying attention to us, or they're Pphubbing us?
Emily: Because it feels like they don't care about us.
Jase: I feel like it would really trigger that fear of abandonment of like, "This person's not paying attention to me. I'm clearly not important to them, so I can probably get tossed to the curb more easily."
Emily: Sure.
Dedeker: Sure. It is interesting that I do think our phones specifically, it's like it offers more of these small opportunities to send that message sometimes to sprinkle in I think these tiny little-failed bids for connection as opposed to the big catastrophic ones. I do think those things build up over time.
Emily: I think you're absolutely right. I think I just want to throw out there in terms of the metacommunication, my partner is really good at this. He has to send a bar report every single evening at the end of work, and he's always like, "Let me do this real quick so that I can be with you and present with you, but I got to take five minutes to do this." That alone, that's all that you need. Everyone just meta-communicate, like Jase says.
Dedeker: The reason why this behavior can be so upsetting is because perceived responsiveness is a key factor in establishing feelings of relationship security. I found this term perceived responsiveness used in this 2023 literature review by Arican-Dinc and Gable titled Responsiveness in Romantic Partners’ Interactions. This was published in Current Opinion in Psychology. Now, I just copy and pasted the abstract here because I think it sums it all up pretty nicely. I'm going to read the abstract of this literature review to you.
"Close relationships such as romantic partner dyads involve numerous social exchanges in myriad contexts. During these exchanges, when one of the interaction partners discloses information, the other partner typically communicates a response. The disclosure then evaluates the extent to which that response conveys that the responder understood their thoughts, goals, and needs validated their position, and cared for their well-being. The degree to which the disclosure believes that the partner showed this understanding, validation, and caring is known as perceived responsiveness.
Perceived responsiveness has long been viewed as a fundamental construct in the development and maintenance of intimacy in romantic relationships. Perceived responsiveness is a common currency that lies at the heart of interactions across multiple contexts, such as social support, gratitude." What they call capitalization interactions, which I thought was sort of a funny turn of phrase, but they're referring that to when you share good things with a partner, not just negative things. Like when you're sharing a victory or something really good that happened in your day, and you want to share that joy with them but also that responsiveness is important there too.
Jase: It just makes me think of old-timey positively capital old chap.
Dedeker: It's capital. That's a good tip, that if you don't know what to say when your partner shares something good, reach for capitalization.
Jase: Capital. That was a capital interaction you just shared with me.
Dedeker: In the literature review, they found that higher levels of perceived partner responsiveness are associated with lower levels of partner-specific attachment anxiety and also partner-specific avoidance, which was interesting. This effect is especially pronounced for individuals who are generally insecure in their attachments, that when you're insecure and you feel like there's more responsiveness, it tends to help.
Perceived partner responsiveness increases trust between romantic partners, and then that trust leads to higher commitment to the relationship. People who have higher commitment in their relationships, in turn, tend to display more responsive behaviors, which creates what they call a mutual cyclical growth process. How this security feeds into itself in this way that you create that commitment which creates more security, which means you're more likely to be responsive, which creates even more security.
Emily: This is really fascinating and I agree with it pretty much completely. However, if you are a person who has more of an anxious attachment style, how much do you need to be working on that in order to lower your anxiety about whether or not this person is going to abandon you because of what it is that they are doing in terms of these responses?
I agree that a lot of this is part of the potential issue that responsiveness does often mean certain things to people and that if they're not getting it in the way that they want, it can mean, "Oh, shit. Oh, shit. I'm going to be left." I have been there. Oh my gosh. Part of me also realizes that that's my own work and that I have to look at the facts of the full situation, not just the specific moment of responsiveness or not. I guess I question that a little bit here.
Jase: It's making me think of times where I've been with someone like a friend or a romantic partner- actually family members do this to me fairly often too- where we'll be having a conversation and you'll have that drop where maybe you've been going back and forth, and then you're saying something and then there's that pause where they've clearly checked out, maybe they had to look at their phone, maybe something came up that distracted them. There's a little bit of a sinking feeling that I think just happens naturally.
Then I've noticed that there are times where I'm able to see it and I'll inwardly roll my eyes a little bit and be like, "Okay. This person's clearly not doing a good job of managing their attention," so maybe I'll even offer like, "Do you need to take some time to take care of that or whatever?" Then I can think back to times, particularly in romantic relationships where I was feeling a lot more insecurity or struggling more, and then it's harder to have that, "Okay. Take care of your thing," and instead it's more builds up in this, "Now I'm mad about this, I'm upset about this."
Emily: Exactly. I think it's that difference between sometimes the leeway and understanding that we give friends and other people in our lives that are not our romantic partners and that our romantic partners have to be this perfect entity that will always respond to us in the way that we want them to. It's just not feasible. It's not going to happen. Ideally, if they're doing it that 80% of the time, I think then you can hopefully feel pretty secure in that attachment, but it's probably not going to happen 100% of the time. Part of that is your own shit to deal with and work on and be understanding in the moment.
Dedeker: I think with so many things in life and in relationships, it is figuring out what's actually reasonable. What's just my anxiety talking or my past trauma talking or something like that? That takes work to sort out. I think the two of you have been sharing that it can depend on is there a built-up well in this relationship already of a certain amount of security of like, "I know this person responds to me most of the time, and so that means that this one time when they're slightly less responsive or slightly less attentive, it's easier for me to let it go because ultimately, I know I feel held and understood and supported and things like that," versus if you're in a relationship where that feels more inconsistent.
Emily: Sure.
Dedeker: If you've done the work to through, maybe it's not your own anxiety or it's not your own trauma or stuff like that, that's also important to pay attention to, I think. I don't know. It all gets tangled up in each other-
Emily: It does.
Dedeker: -and it does take work to disentangle it.
Jase: That's the beauty of relationships too, is that it is about our own stuff as well as our together stuff. There's always going to be-
Emily: Let's together stuff.
Dedeker: Let's together stuff, yes.
Jase: -let's together, pay attention to each other. We're going to go on to looking at some of the tools we've talked about and how we can implement these with this research in mind to have better attention in our relationships.
Emily: With these three wonderful studies that Dedeker presented to us and all of these existential questions that we've posed to one another, what the heck do we do about all of this? As Jase said, as we've been talking about over and over again, metacommunication is really, really important. That just means communicate expectations around communication and the responsiveness that you're able to have in the moment at different scenarios, like are you at work? Am I with friends and family? Am I on a first date? Am I with another partner? How much am I going to be able to talk to you during that time? If you can set expectations and stick to them, I think that will allow for that understanding and also for that safety when they are giving you that responsiveness that you need and that you crave.
Jase: This is something I was thinking about during that last study we talked about, about paying attention to a partner and them feeling like I've not only been heard but also understood to a certain extent. One of our metacommunication tools that we've talked about many times is the Triforce of Communication. That's something that if you don't know about it, you can go check out. It's in one of our first nine episodes as well as a whole chapter in our book. This idea of getting to the heart of, "Is my partner sharing this because they want my support or are they sharing it because they want solutions? Or are they just sharing it because they want someone to share this with?"
Even just knowing that can go a long way to them feeling like they were actually understood. If it's that first basic level of, "Did you give me advice when that wasn't what I was looking for? And now I feel like I wasn't understood," even if all of the intentions all around were good, or they're looking for solutions and you're just like, "Yes, that seems hard." To them, it can feel like you're not really there with them. You're not really understanding what they're going for. That's a good example of how a quick metacommunication can bring you a lot further toward that understanding and not only hearing each other but understanding the meaning behind it.
Dedeker: While you're metacommunicating, it's great to communicate expectations around phone usage. Now, Jase, you and I are mostly aligned on this, but there's definitely some places where we're not aligned on this. It drives me nuts if either of us are on our phones during watching a film or something. I feel like you're much more comfortable with that. We call these the IMDB lookup fights because Jase always wants to look up everybody on IMDB.
Jase: Yes, I want to look up the actors. Where do I know them from? What is that?
Emily: Dedeker is like, "Don't do that."
Jase: Dedeker always gets annoyed.
Dedeker: I'm like, "Don't."
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: I have a very silly personal rule whenever going out to dinner, which is that there can only be one phone active at one time. It's almost a little bit like there's an improv game like this, like that sit, stand, lie down Improv Game, where basically if I pull out my phone to look at something and then if Jase also pulls out his phone, I immediately put my phone away. It doesn't matter if I was in the middle of something or not, because I'm just like, "I don't want to be that couple."
Emily: It's just like a physical micro script.
Dedeker: Yes, yes, exactly. You do get annoyed with me sometimes.
Jase: I do, but it does help that I know that that's the rule. At least I understand the internal logic to it so if I see you, I'll sometimes have that urge to pull out my phone and I'll pull it out, but then just set it down and be like, "No, never mind." She's looking something up.
Dedeker: Here's the deal, though, is that because I do judge those people who sit there on a date, just on their phones, or they go meet up with their friends and they're just on their phones. I never want to look like that, and then my freaking nightmare came true once, Jase.
Jase: Oh, it was so awful.
Dedeker: You remember, and I will never let you live this down.
Emily: What happened?
Dedeker: One time we went to dinner and I think--
Emily: God forbid.
Jase: Here's the thing. We were actually looking up something together that we were talking about. This was not even a bad example.
Dedeker: We were, but I'd already been like, "I don't know about this. Can we just do this on one phone?" There had already been a little bit of conflict around that-
Emily: Of course, yes.
Dedeker: -but you were like, "Whatever. It's fine." We're both looking up something together on both of our phones and this really sweet older couple comes up to us. This woman touches me on the shoulder, and she's like, "Put your phone away. You're not going to remember what's going on in your phone, but this moment between the two of you, you're going to remember."
Emily: You're like, "God damn it. One time. One time."
Dedeker: Exactly. It was one time.
Jase: Yes. Dedeker was like, "This is the nightmare scenario I've been trying to avoid all this time and it just happened."
Emily: That was just the universe telling you you were correct, Dedeker.
Dedeker: I know. I wanted to chase them down and be like, "I know. I know."
Emily: Amazing.
Dedeker: Anyway, don't be like me.
Emily: Or do be like you.
Dedeker: Yes. Don't be like me in that moment. Do be like me all other times.
Emily: It was one time.
Dedeker: What I want to highlight here is that this is a negotiation in every relationship. Sure, I have my "one phone active at a time" rule, but that may not be the correct rule or guideline for you to follow. I have my own agreements and ways that I like to conduct myself as far as communicating with other partners when I'm in the presence of a partner and stuff that I've negotiated with people. What I've decided or any of the three of us have decided is not necessarily what's going to be right for you. This is going to be negotiation that's going to happen in every relationship. It's something that the people in the relationship need to figure out and experiment with over time. Please, especially as you're in the process of negotiating this with a partner, avoid casting your communication preferences as correct, like I just did just now, and the other person says incorrect if you want to be able to have a good discussion.
Jase: Yes. If you don't care and you just want to assert your dominance, then you can be like Dedeker
Dedeker: In your later life, if you really want to make people feel bad, go and interrupt people in the restaurant on their dates and give them pithy wisdom about how to be present.
Jase: Oh, goodness. Okay, moving on to another piece we talked about was bids and taking bids, ideally wanting to be taking and having your bids received and taken 80% of the time.
Once you're aware of this, which you are now because you've listened to this episode, to just acknowledge that and try to err on the side of taking the bid, because more often taking it is going to be worth it in terms of your happiness and well-being. It can be such a small thing from you, but can make a really big difference in total in your relationship. If someone sends you a song, an article, a video, or a meme, engage with it and respond. If they send you a bunch of those in a row or they send them to you really long New York Times articles, like Dedeker sends me sometimes-
Dedeker: Oh, man.
Jase: -when I don't have time to read them, then go back to the previous stuff about metacommunicating and just saying like, "Hey, that sounds really interesting. I can't look at it right now." Just acknowledging it. Turning toward the other person is the way the Gottmans describe it. I'd say another thing to put here is that when it comes to not completely accepting a bid, there's also a middle ground there. There's the anti-bid, of, say, your partner comes up and they're being a little bit cuddly or affectionate, turning toward them and hugging them back or kissing them back would be taking the bid.
Saying like, "Ah, get off of me," is fully opposite, opposed to the bid, but there's also a middle ground of a quick hug, and it's like, "Hey, just give me a second. I need to pay attention to this thing," where you're acknowledging. I'm not fully taking the bid, but I'm at least not making you feel like I ignored your bid or completely didn't want it. There's room in there for a little bit of flexibility. It's not like, "Oh, I just have to always do anything my partner asks me to do."
Then go out of your way to communicate your attention when you are paying attention. This may depend on the scenario, but it could involve physically putting your phone away, angling your body towards the other person. I know this is always what Dedeker wants from me when she comes into my office. She wants me to turn my chair away from my computer screen to look at her.
Dedeker: I have to specifically ask for your eyeballs. I have to be like, "Can I please have your eyeballs? Thank you."
Jase: Sometimes then it's like, "Okay, I know she wants my eyeballs." I'll say, "Let me finish this email and press send before I--"
Dedeker: To perhaps right out.
Emily: You'd take them out of your body, and then you throw them at her.
Dedeker: Finally what I've always wanted.
Jase: Yes. All of this, we're bringing this up because it's a little silly, but they are examples of we need to communicate explicitly about it sometimes and say, "Hey, give me a second to finish this thing first, and then I want to pay attention to you." Or for me, realizing it's worth it to turn my chair so she feels heard and feels like I'm paying attention to her, and gets that physical sensation. Even if I want to say, "Oh, yes, I can pay attention to you while I'm looking at these other things."
Emily: You can create rituals with your partner, big or small, something like always texting "Good night," or, "Good morning," or letting a person know when you got off of work or that you got home safe, something along those lines, having a regular date time. Things like that, just little rituals that make sure that both of you know, "Okay, we are setting up an intentional time to communicate, to check in with one another, to be there for one another, and show each other that we care." That can really go a very long way towards turning towards your partner like we've been talking about and showing them that you're there for them.
Dedeker: In addition to doing more regular and more thorough relationship check-ins or radars, also more frequent small check-ins or temperature checks can be helpful, too.
Asking someone, "What's on your plate today?" which is always what I ask Jase, basically first thing in the morning or maybe last thing at night before you go to sleep, and sometimes it's an effective question, sometimes not. Or asking, "How are you feeling about this week?" or, "Is there any way I can make your life easier this week?" Or, "Oh, I know you have a hard day at work coming up today, how can I support you in that?" It doesn't take very much time and it can really go a long way to really inject more of that sense of attentiveness.
Jase: Also, if you are a hinge, meaning that you're someone who has, let's say, two different partners who don't have a direct relationship with each other- we call that the hinge- work on having good hinge skills. This comes up with the stuff we talked about of when are you responding to one person when you're with another? How do you want to manage that? How do you want to communicate that? How do you want to make sure everyone feels important to you? One thing you could do is check out our episode 334, What Makes a Good Hinge?
There are also many resources out there, podcasts, and other books that talk about being a hinge, or maybe looking up some blogs about it. So many polyamory issues and challenges come from someone not hinging to their highest potential, not being the best hinge they can be. It can be a challenging place to be in and to do it well, but it's worth developing those skills because it really can go a long way to your polyamorous relationships being a lot happier.
Emily: A last little takeaway here is to remember that not everyone needs to feel like they're the number one person in another person's life all of the time. That's not a realistic thing to want, but it is realistic to feel like the number one person, at least some of the time. Maybe even sometimes quite a bit of the time, 80% of the time, or 70% or something.
Emily: Something along those lines that you are super important to your partner or partners and that they show that importance to you. This is true whether or not you're looking at your live-in partner of 20 years, or someone you're hooking up with for a threesome one single night, or a new partner that you have a ton of NRE with, all of the above. Ideally, you should still feel like you're number one to them some of the time. If you do, then you're probably going to have a pretty successful and happy relationship.