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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/30\/opinion\/attention-infidelity-ruin-romance.html?emc=edit_nn_20260930&nl=the-morning&segment_id=227287",
    "parsed_content": "AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSee more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra m\u00e1s de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de b\u00fasqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google You\u2019re reading the Jessica Grose newsletter. A journalist and novelist offers her perspective on the American family, culture, politics and the way we live now. Get it sent to your inbox.A few weeks ago the independent movie \u201cBefore Sunrise\u201d popped into my mind. A 1990s classic and the first in a trilogy, the film is about two cerebral 20-somethings, C\u00e9line and Jesse, who meet cute on a train to Paris. They decide to hop off in Vienna, and spend a day together bantering, interacting with locals, wandering the beautiful city without purpose and falling in love.They relate in spite of cultural differences (he is American, she is French, they both talk to Austrians) and gendered ones, too. As I was replaying the movie in my mind, I had a thought that made my stomach drop: My children may never get to experience this. By \u201cthis\u201d I mean the uninterrupted attention, general serendipity and conversational vulnerability that I got to experience before smartphones.\u201cBefore Sunrise\u201d even somewhat presaged our screen-addled present. In her review of the film in The New York Times, Janet Maslin notes Jesse\u2019s commentary on the \u201cdubious spiritual value of technology,\u201d when he states, \u201cYou never hear somebody say, \u2018Well, you know, with the time I\u2019ve saved by using my word processor, I\u2019m going to go to a Zen monastery and hang out.\u2019\u201dMine is not a new fear, and I realize it is born out of a kind of nostalgia. From the pollster and public opinion researcher Daniel Cox\u2019s forthcoming book, \u201cGeneration Uncoupled: America\u2019s New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection,\u201d I learned a new term: \u201cattention infidelity.\u201d Cox defines it in a somewhat unusual and expansive way: when a partner\u2019s digital life intrudes on an in-person connection.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThis kind of \u201cinfidelity\u201d can include looking at sexually explicit material or engaging in suggestive social media interactions, but more often it is just the banal distraction of dead-eyed scrolling. \u201cInstead of reaching for each other,\u201d Cox explains, \u201cwe snatch up our digital devices that flood us with an endless stream of hyper-\u00adcurated content.\u201dThough couples of any age experience this to some degree \u2014 my husband and I try to leave our devices in the kitchen after dinner so we can actually talk to each other \u2014 people like us who got together before the smartphone at least had the benefit of cementing our bonds with long stretches of concentrated attention. That kind of sustained focus breeds deeper understanding across differences and more grace.Some may dismiss this kind of worry about young people\u2019s nascent relationships as a technological moral panic. But Cox, who is the director of the Survey Center on American Life at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, has compiled a list of sobering statistics that show that screens are a driving factor in how disconnected teenagers and 20-somethings are from one another.Gen Z-ers, the first generation that can\u2019t remember a world without smartphones, participate less in \u201cembodied social experiences\u201d than their counterparts in every other generation. They\u2019re less likely to work, go to church, attend parties, date or play sports, Cox notes. About half of teenagers describe themselves as \u201calmost constantly\u201d online. There is no other change that has occurred in the past few decades that would explain this unique decline.Young people\u2019s very online isolation, which was worsened by the Covid lockdown, means they have much less practice interacting with new people and navigating the usual friction and established norms. This, Cox writes, has left them lonely, unmoored and distrustful of each other.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhile dating has always been challenging and provided fodder for complaint, today\u2019s teenagers and 20-somethings have a starting point of greater suspicion, which can be poison for the creation of romantic relationships. Drawing on large surveys, books and qualitative interviews with young people, Cox reveals how fearful they are of being vulnerable, because any misstep can lead to global and permanent humiliation on social media.The example of \u201cWest Elm Caleb\u201d came to mind when I was reading Cox\u2019s book. Caleb was a New Yorker who went viral in 2022 because a few women posted about how he would ghost them instead of breaking up with them properly. What followed in the wake of his virality was \u201ca massive online harassment campaign against a fairly average 25-year-old whose biggest crime so far is being a bad communicator,\u201d as Rolling Stone\u2019s Brittany Spanos put it. The rise of online dating, where relationships start on digital territory, only exacerbates this dynamic.This kind of technologically driven apprehension particularly affects heterosexual coupling. In a phone call, Cox told me that while there have been gender divides in every era, what is new for Gen Z-ers is the way the algorithms of social media are warping their views of all kinds of interactions and reinforcing \u201cinitial biases.\u201d Cox cited a 2025 Washington Post analysis of over 1,000 users, which found that \u201cgender is one of the biggest predictors of what\u2019s in your feed.\u201dIn the worst cases, gender-specific feeds lead to misogynistic manosphere influencers gaining a foothold in young men\u2019s minds, which Cox rightfully condemns as toxic in his book. But our feeds are also creating news silos that may affect our perception of the world in more subtle ways. At minimum, they mirror a lack of a shared reality that might provide a basis for conversation and connection. (I saw this in action when I discovered that my husband knew nothing about the Lindsay Clancy verdict, even as I had been served wall-to-wall content about it for weeks.)Two things give me hope about the social and romantic lives of young people. One is that at least some Gen Z-ers seem to know what they\u2019re missing. Ethan Hawke, who played Jesse in \u201cBefore Sunrise,\u201d told The Times in 2020 that his daughter watched the movie with friends, \u201cand there was a certain envy they had for a time where you didn\u2019t have email. Life insisted that you live in the moment more.\u201d Having seen technology colonize their lives, they refuse to give another inch to A.I.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe other is that Americans in a wide variety of demographics are disgusted by the way screens have come between them and other people, and want to create a better world for our children. Cox is most certainly to the right of me, and while I did have some partisan quibbles with his book, I overwhelmingly agreed with his broad analysis and specific dismay with the status quo. He understands something I also hold to be true: giving another person your full attention is a gift, one we should all be more conscious of giving each other.End NotesI am sick about the sexual assault allegations at Cornell. Beyond blind rage I don\u2019t have anything particularly coherent to say about it for now, but I have been doing a lot of reading. First, I recommend this article from May in The Times about New York State\u2019s unfair and outdated rape laws, and how they make it \u201cdifficult to charge people with rape if the accuser chose to become intoxicated.\u201d I also recommend reading this New York magazine interview with two editors from The Cornell Daily Sun about their reporting on the case.Finally \u2014 in a sadly related issue \u2014 The 74, a nonprofit newsroom focused on education, recently published an investigation into almost 2,000 child sex abuse claims involving New York State K-12 schools. These claims were made because of a 2019 law that \u201callowed any living survivor of childhood sexual abuse to bring a civil case during a two-year look-back window and permanently extended the statute of limitations from age 23 to 55 for future civil cases,\u201d explained the reporter, Amanda Geduld. Nearly one-fifth of these claims were made against adults who had access to their victims through schools. \u201cMultiple teachers were credibly accused of sexual abuse in one school, and then permitted to quietly move on to a new one,\u201d Geduld found.Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2026-09-30T09:08:10+00:00",
    "author_name": "Jessica Grose",
    "site_name": "The New York Times",
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    "ai_headline": "Attention Infidelity Is Ruining Romance",
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