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

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.

This summer, there was debate around what constitutes “microcheating”; last year, I read about women “quiet quitting” relationships; the “mental load” has been striking chords for a couple of years, with its companion concept of “weaponised incompetence”. It’s reminiscent of the proliferation of negative phrases around work that emerged post-pandemic – resenteeism, fauxductivity, coffee badging, polygamous working (quiet quitting, of course, also originated in the work context). Maybe it reflects the fact that relationships are also (hard) work, or maybe we just love a bit of pop psychology.

Assuming it’s the second, I’ve been trying to think up other highbrow phrases to conceptualise the age-old business of being a bit of a dick to your partner, so that I can turn them into a book myself. So far, I’ve invented “cultural pre-emption betrayal” (sneaky solo viewing of the next episode of a show you’re watching together), “premium resource caching” (hiding good food), “semi-hostile infantilising” (telling your partner how to do something with the exaggerated patience you’d show a two-year-old) and “fiscal obfuscation” (when you say something was “not very dear” when it was, in fact, very dear).

I reckon some of these may have legs, but I’ve had to stop for now, because my husband wants to tell me about our energy tariff – time to demonstrate some attention fidelity.