To truly love, you have to be able to listen, say Edward and Sue Hallowell, the authors of "Married to Distraction." But in this fast-paced world, that can be tough. Here’s how slowing down and unplugging can save your relationship.
Chapter two
“Tell me again, honey, why are we driving to Target?” Jim asked his wife as he slogged through slow, serpentine traffic on a steamy summer day. Jim hated traffic jams almost as much as he hated humid heat. The Boston area has a lot of both. The conditions made it difficult for him to keep his mind on anything but the heat, the traffic, and his displeasure at having to contend with either.
“It’s just so hot,” Elaine replied, “and I don’t have any really light clothes. The kids don’t have any, either. Don’t worry, it won’t cost much. Then we can go find a pool.”
Jim kept driving. Three kids in the back squirmed, poked, and giggled, as they alternately tormented and amused one another.
“Hon, you want to go to Target, right?” Jim asked, then waited for a reply. When he heard nothing, he repeated, “Target, right, hon?”
“Jim, I just told you I wanted to go to Target and I told you why I wanted to go to Target. Which part of that didn’t you understand? Or weren’t you listening?”
Jim stammered a bit as he replied, “I’m sorry, I thought I was listening, it’s not like I was trying not to listen, it’s nothing against you or about you, it isn’t you at all, it’s just sometimes I hear words but I don’t get the information. This heat and this traffic are making me crazy. Don’t take it personally.”
“But I do take it personally. I take it personally because it happens so often.” Elaine paused, then decided to go on. “What do I have to do to get you to pay attention to what I have to say? I know my life is not terribly interesting. I know it’s not terribly interesting that I want to go to Target or why I want to go to Target or why I want to do anything, but to have you ask me over and over again where we’re going right after I’ve told you twice, well, it’s insulting. How can I not take it personally? What do I have to do to get through to you?”
“I’m sorry.” Jim had been in this spot so many times before that the only strategy he had left was to take his lumps and repeat his apologies. He knew excuses or explanations would get him nowhere.
“Being sorry, that’s just not enough,” Elaine went on. “Being sorry is nowhere near the point. I don’t want sorry. What good does sorry do me? You’re sorry, but nothing changes. I know, this all seems silly, we’re arguing over going to Target, but do you have any idea what it’s like for me to know that half the time I speak to you I might as well be speaking to a rock?”
“I’m sorry. I try to listen, and I know it’s frustrating for you. This heat and the traffic really put me in a bad place.”
“There’s always an excuse. I understand about the heat and the traffic, but I would be far more sympathetic if there weren’t always some reason. Whatever the reason, it’s almost impossible to get you to listen sometimes. It’s more than frustrating. It makes me feel so alone. And what makes it worse, you don’t really seem to care.”
When we think of intimacy, we usually think of nakedness and vulnerability. We think of opening up and sharing our deepest secrets. We think of revealing our true selves. But before any of that can happen, something else must occur. It is a necessary first step for intimacy, a step that used to be taken for granted. It is called paying attention.
At the very least, intimacy requires attention. Without attention, emotional closeness is impossible. Distraction is to an intimate conversation as water is to fire.
Paying attention sounds so simple. In fact, it sounds like one of the easiest of all mental tasks. Anyone can pay attention. You wake up, you pay attention, and that’s it, until you go to sleep at the end of the day, right? Compared to, say, thinking up a new idea or even thinking at all, paying attention would seem simple.
But it isn’t. It is especially complicated and difficult in the twenty-first century. In decades past, we took paying attention more or less for granted. But technology has changed all that. We have lurched, the older among us rather clumsily, into a new era. Not since Gutenberg invented the printing press has technology so radically reshaped everyday life. We live in the free fall of epochal change.
The “simple” act of paying attention is becoming arduous, like trying to listen to a distant radio broadcast that is filled with static, or trying to see the highway as you’re speeding through a rainstorm without windshield wipers.
In our era of ubiquitous electronic communications technology, in our age that author and newspaper columnist Tom Friedman has called “the age of interruption,” paying attention requires all your mental muscles to swim against currents that pull and tug in an effort to sweep you away from whatever you’re trying to attend to.
This situation is confusing and difficult because it is new. Never before have we been able to ask our brains to process as many data points as we can today. Never before have we been able to do as much in the blink of an eye, in a flash, in a jiffy, as we can today. The techies have even defined a jiffy. It is one one-hundredth of a second. How much can you get done in a jiffy?
We measure our lives in jiffies because never before have we had so much to attend to. Never before have we faced as many decision points, second to second, as we do today. Every moment—every jiffy—we have a choice. Every flash offers a chance for diversion. In every blink of an eye we must decide what to pay attention to, what temptation to resist, what lead to follow, what knock on which door to respond to, and which to ignore. Each of us is an air traffic controller perched in our own personal mission- control observatory tower. Only problem is, our mental control towers, unlike those at airports, are open- air, ready to be invaded by anyone, anytime.
We are “blessed” with so many methods by which we can be interrupted that it can actually feel alien if more than a few minutes pass without an interruption. What did I miss? Am I out of the loop?
So accustomed are we to being interrupted that uninterrupted time—which was once deemed peaceful—can become oddly painful. How boring! Where’s the stimulation? As much as we might complain about being interrupted, we still voluntarily if not compulsively check our messages—voice mail, email, texts—even when there is no need to. We search for an interruption and devote precious neurons to anticipating it, even when none comes. In the midst of working on a project or carrying on a conversation, we stop and check, not our progress with the project or conversation, but our messages.
Add to this techno-flurry the uncertainty and anxiety that beset modern life, and it is easy to see why paying attention takes more than ordinary effort. Let up for a moment, and the demons of toxic worry pounce. Will you have a job next week? Will your kids make it in the world? Can you trust your investments and your advisers? The list is endless.
What you’re doing right now—reading a book—puts you in rare company. By reading this book, or any book, you vault yourself into the ranks of a dying breed of people who ponder and reflect, who actually do stop and think. Reading—or any activity requiring sustained mental effort—demands a level of prolonged attention that fewer and fewer people want to give, are willing to give, or are able to give. Without noticing it, we are losing our capacity to linger and savor the moment. Reflexive impatience makes us rush, even when there is no need to rush. When was the last time you lingered over coffee, or savored a conversation, or took your sweet time in a museum or a bookstore? Don’t you instead usually feel a compulsive inner pressure to hurry up?
But to love, you must slow down. You must pause. You must attend to the other person. Fast love is about as satisfying as fast food. For love to sustain you and give you the deep pleasures it can, pleasures that are unsurpassed in this life, you must linger over your love and savor it. What gives love its particular depth and flavor only comes through over time. The best love is aged love. The rest is infatuation. But to appreciate true love, love that does not alter when it alteration finds, you must take your time—not let it be taken from you. You must allow love to free you up from your worries and your hurry, at least for the moment.
To do so, you must pay close attention. You must look for the ever-so-slight change in expression in the person you’re with, the tilting of the head, the movement of the hands, the sound of surprise at the latest news. For love to be the kind of feeling that it can and ought to be, for love to make all of life’s pain worth enduring and to momentarily assuage that pain, you must let love engulf you like a luxurious, warm bath. Take your time with your love. Go slow. While you can.
Excerpted from "Married to Distraction" by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., and Sue George Hallowell, LICSW, with Melissa Orlov. Copyright © 2010 by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.