Love and Attention Are Acts of Will

Attention as a necessary criterion for love

I have written extensively on Medium about relationships. Particularly about negative dynamics that are lopsided, featuring chasing and/or yearning to connect with the potential of a partner as opposed to the person they are already showing themselves to be.

If you take a meta-view of the problematic variables of such dynamics, you will quickly start spotting a few patterns. Some of those are:

• Asymmetry of willingness, motivation to honour the relationship with their time, attention and presence
• One part of the dynamic tends to deprioritise the relationship while another over-prioritises it. Something that becomes especially destructive in a fundamentally unbalanced relationship.

For those who are the over-doers in these relationships, the emotional toll will soon start to compound. But with an ever-growing sunk cost, it also gets more difficult to walk away. With the motivation being torn between staying and going, many people end up rationalising why staying can pay off. After all, this feels easier and less emotionally taxing in the short-term.

This piece is written as a reminder to those of you who are overdoing, overstraining and trying too hard to fix a broken dynamic. It will feel hard to hear these words at first, but you would be better off aligning yourself with the reality of what a long-term relationship requires from both partners than to continuously flogging that horse when it is not budging.

In a loving relationship with another partner, you should not need to constantly question or wonder whether your partner finds you worthwhile.

Viewing love and attention as acts of will is going to serve as a better guide towards the type of relationship you deserve.

Why are you pursuing someone that you have to chase?

Very few things will make a person feel less worthy than chasing attention from someone that they wish to be seen by. This is particularly true for romantic relationships, but can also be relevant for certain family relationships, friendships and in the workplace.

In situations where people know they are chasing a disappearing act, the act of chasing can itself become compulsive and addictive.

(Read my article about chasing here below for a fuller explanation. )

Love that requires a chase is not really love.

Love that has you working hard to earn someone’s attention may feel like chemistry, but it is rarely what love stories are made of. Certainly not the real-life ones!

The people you are ‘working’ hard to get crumbs of attention from will ultimately leave you feeling empty and unsettled. What joy is it really to try and convince someone that you are worth their while?

Even in their eyes, you will decline in value as you will inevitably send off a signal of not being worthy of someone’s freely given time and affection.

The degree of excitement that you experience when they are finally present (no matter how present they can be for short bursts of time) is often the result of the prior emotional deprivation their minimal efforts leave you feeling, rather than a true reflection of how great a love story the two of you are part of.

The more of this type of treatment you allow, the more you are teaching them that you are ok with bare minimum treatment and, even more importantly, you are also anaesthetising to the pain that this crumb-allowance of time and energy should rightfully be causing you.

It is important to take a few steps back at this point and reinstate a more solid understanding of what a real and healthy relationship actually requires. The next session will look at that.

Attention is an act of will

(With gratitude to Scott Peck and Thích Nhất Hạnh)

Two of my favourite writers, Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Zen master and ‘Father of mindfulness’ and Dr M. Scott Peck, an American Psychoanalyst and best-selling author, have both made extremely valuable contributions to the topics of love and commitment, with both emphasising the need for involving commitment and discipline in building lasting loving relationships.

‘The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.’
– Thích Naht Hạnh

In 1978, Scott Peck released the book ‘The Road Less Traveled’, an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of spirituality and psychology, and who doesn’t mind a truth-telling take on life and our responsibilities.

Among the many useful chapters, those on attention and love are exceptional. Do read this book if you get a chance! And if it was useful in 1978 when the book was written, it could not be any more relevant now.

The rise of technology has made our attention more threatened than ever before, and the often transactional nature of online dating has made behaviours such as ghosting, inconsisteny and discarding of partners a normal phenomenon.

Common as they may be, these are not to be normalised.

A loving relationship requires two people showing up. By their own free will and not as the result of your constant prodding.

Peck argues that what people call ‘love’ early on is often projection and fantasy, not commitment. Real love begins after the infatuation fades, when attention, effort, and responsibility are required.

As Scott Peck puts forward in his book, giving someone our complete attention means that we choose to put aside other preoccupations to attend fully to the relationship. This means making the relationship a priority that is guaranteed to have a time allowance, even during periods when this is not easily arranged.

Naturally, being someone’s high priority in terms of time allocation may not be able to occur every single day. But if your partner is not willing to prioritise or give their full energy and attention to the relationship somewhat regularly, please trust that your relationship will eventually suffer the consequences of neglect.

In the chasing dynamics I hear about in my role as a Psychologist, you quickly realise that not only is the ingredient of presence absent in most bad relationships, but its absence is continuously being rationalised! From both partners.

For the one who is not willing to direct their attention fully to their partner, there tends to be a shopping list of rationalisations to fall back on. Anything from work, to business, to other people calling for their attention. And on the side of the receiver (or in this case, receiver of crumbs), the rationalisations often circulate around the assumption that their partner has a temporary lapse in their willingness to attend to them.

While nobody can spend all of their time attending to another human being, you will feel the difference between someone who is making things other than the relationship their priority choice.

The point here is quite simple in theory, but difficult to accept in practice. Nobody will summarise this point better than Scott Peck himself:

The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another, we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person’s growth. When we love ourselves, we attend to our own growth. The act of attending requires that we make the effort to set aside our existing preoccupations.

From Scott Peck ‘The road Less travelled’ 1979

Love is presence

Thích Nhất Hạnh repeatedly returns to the same deceptively simple idea: Love is presence. In a dating culture that often confuses anxiety with chemistry and absence with mystery, this distinction is very key for how you appraise whether your partner is invested and has a shared agenda for wishing to be in the relationship with you.

Where attention is inconsistent, love cannot take root. In mindfulness terms, being present by choice is going to have the same effects as tending to crops in our garden; those that you water and look after will flourish, while those that you neglect and leave to fend for themselves will often wither away and die.

To dedicate our presence means that you are channelling your energy towards something that you wish to grow. When only one of two partners in a relationship is prepared to nourish the relationship with their chosen presence, all growth and development will stagnate!

A word on commitment

Much like you would not be able to walk out of your job from time to time just because of fluctuating motivation to commit to it, relationships require a high level of commitment that takes us through the tough times and convinces us to show up even when things get challenging.

Without this commitment, the relationship with pretty much anything in life will end up being guided by the feelings of the moment. With new calls for our attention emerging daily, humanity has not had a chance of keeping up with how we protect our time and focus.

Paying attention looks different in 2026 than it did in 1979. But our skill is not lost. We all have the same amount of time available to us.

As someone so cleverly pointed out somewhere online, ‘we all have the same 24 hours as Beyonce’ . This is a frightening fact on some levels, particularly if you apply it to productivity. When you apply this limited-time concept to relationships, you quickly realise that unless you are made a priority by the person you love and your partner has a degree of discipline in showing up for the relationship, the many competing tasks that need to feature during those 24 hours will take precedence.

‘When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?’ -Thich Naht Hanh

Commitment is grounded, chosen and reciprocal. Love is something we do, not something that happens to us. If you are the one doing all the work, all the committing and the only one dedicating your mindful attention, you owe it to yourself to redirect your energy towards your own healing until the day when someone shows up who does not view loving you as a chore.

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Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase a book through these links, the author will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

References and purchase links:

M Scott Peck; The Road Less Travelled

Thich Naht Hanh; True Love