However, my husband and I didn\u2019t just stumble into this midlife renaissance. Our story is a long \u2014 and in many ways \u2014 quiet one.<\/p>\n
We waited until marriage to have sex. This was mostly for religious reasons (we\u2019re politically liberal evangelical Christians \u2014 we exist!), and because we both believed sex was special \u2014 so special it should be done and developed with a special person.<\/p>\n
At the beginning, it was thrilling \u2014 less because we were good at it (we definitely weren\u2019t) and more because we were having sex at all. Then, gradually, we got better. We got to know each other\u2019s bodies the way you learn to drive around your town: a few awkward turns at first, then smooth and intuitive ones.<\/p>\n
Then we had kids, which, as many people know, is the great erotic buzzkill of adulthood. Still, we kept going. Not constantly. Not creatively. But consistently enough to know we still wanted each other.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the last decade, something else shifted. My husband stopped watching porn. It was a personal choice, rooted in his desire to honor God by honoring our marriage. I didn\u2019t ask him to, but I noticed when he did, and it changed the texture of our intimacy. He saw me differently. I was the only source of any of that energy. He really looked when I changed clothes and forced himself to peel open his eyes when I got up early, just to say, \u201cI wanted to catch my favorite show.\u201d He was giving all his attention to me.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t fully realize how much I\u2019d been giving mine to the news.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s funny how easy it is to split a life into separate screens. Kids on iPads. Parents on laptops. Couples drifting apart, not through malice or neglect, but through thousands of tiny, unintentional choices to disengage from the room they\u2019re in.<\/p>\n
As a cognitive scientist, I think a lot about joint attention: the ability to share focus on something with someone else.<\/p>\n
Consider the moon landing. People all over the world (including my mother, as a child in South Korea) gathered around the one television set in the neighborhood to watch a single, shared moment unfold in breathless anticipation.<\/p>\n
Now, our attention is rarely attuned to the same thing in the same way. It\u2019s fractured. Even though it sometimes feels like we\u2019re all having the same experience (almost everyone has a cousin who posts weird conspiracy theories on Facebook), our attention is profoundly splintered. Each of us is served a uniquely personalized stream of content. No two \u201cFor You\u201d pages are exactly the same. We\u2019re never concentrating on the same thing at the same time.<\/p>\n