Connection Has Always Required Intention

Amy Reamer, LMFT, RPT-S President Elect, Virginia Association for Marriage and Family Therapy

We've been talking a lot about screens lately.

How much time we spend on them. What they may be doing to our relationships. How often we're physically with one person while our attention is somewhere else entirely.

So naturally, I want to tell you about my son's birthday dinner.

Stay with me. I promise I'm going somewhere with this.

Today is September 23. My middle son's birthday was September 19, and tonight my husband and I are finally taking him out to dinner.

We didn't forget his birthday. He was working.

He owns a business, River City Escape Room, and this year his birthday happened to fall on a Saturday. If you own an escape room, a Saturday birthday does not necessarily mean cake and a day off. It may mean running games for everyone else who decided to spend their Saturday celebrating something.

In our family, though, celebrating a birthday on the "wrong" day isn't particularly unusual.

My husband and I both started our careers in emergency services. Emergency services are notoriously unconcerned with your birthday, Christmas morning, Thanksgiving dinner, or the fact that the rest of your family happens to be off that day.

So we adapted.

We celebrated on different days. We moved meals around. We figured out when everyone could be in the same place and made that our time together.

Later, when I moved into mental health, I spent several years doing intensive in home counseling. That meant a lot of evenings in clients' homes while my own children were still young and living at home.

There were plenty of nights when I met my husband and the kids for dinner, spent that little pocket of time with them, and then headed back out to a client's house.

It wasn't some carefully designed family ritual.

It was simply what we did.

We found the spaces where connection could fit, and we protected them.

Now I own businesses. My son owns a business. In some ways, owning a business gives you much more control over your schedule than working for someone else.

In other ways, your schedule looks at you, laughs, and reminds you that Saturday is still the busiest day at the escape room.

And that is what all of this has to do with screens.

This year's VAMFT conference theme is Beyond the Screen: Thriving Together in a Digital World, and we're thrilled to welcome Dr. Stacy Jagger as our keynote speaker. As we've been planning the conference and thinking about technology, screens, relationships, and connection, I keep coming back to something that feels important:

Screens are not the first thing that has competed for our attention and our relationships.

They won't be the last, either.

Work has competed for our attention. School has. Parenting, caregiving, household responsibilities, financial pressures, hobbies, exhaustion, and overfilled calendars all have.

Long before we carried smartphones in our pockets, families were figuring out how to stay connected when life kept getting in the way.

What technology has done is add another very powerful competitor.

And unlike my old intensive in home job, which required me to physically leave my family and drive to someone else's house, technology doesn't require us to go anywhere.

That's part of what makes it different.

Work can follow us home in our pockets. Entertainment is available every minute of the day. A person hundreds of miles away can have our attention while someone we love is sitting three feet from us.

We can be physically present and relationally somewhere else.

But maybe the fundamental challenge isn't entirely new.

Connection has always required intention.

For our family, sometimes that meant celebrating Christmas on December 26.

Sometimes it meant grabbing dinner together before I headed back out to see another family.

Tonight, it means celebrating a September 19 birthday on September 23.

And in a digital world, sometimes it means noticing that our body is sitting at the table with the people we love while our attention has wandered somewhere else, and choosing to bring it back.

That doesn't make screens inherently bad any more than work is inherently bad. My career has mattered deeply to me. My son's business matters deeply to him. Technology brings enormous opportunities for learning, creativity, community, accessibility, and connection.

The question isn't whether we can eliminate everything that competes with our relationships.

We can't.

Maybe the better question is:

In a world full of things competing for our attention, how do we keep choosing one another?

Our family has been practicing some version of that question for a long time.

Tonight, the answer happens to be dinner four days late.

And yes, we did use a phone to take the picture that goes with this article.

Because being intentional about technology doesn't necessarily mean putting it away. Sometimes we use it to capture the moments of connection we want to remember.

Then we put it back down and return to the people sitting across the table.

What does choosing connection look like in your family?

Maybe it's a tradition you protect, a meal you make time for, a birthday you celebrate on the "wrong" day, or a conscious decision about when the screens come out, and when they don't.

What competes for your family's time and attention? And what intentional choices help you keep finding your way back to one another?

Join us at Beyond the Screen: Thriving Together in a Digital World, the VAMFT conference featuring keynote speaker Dr. Stacy Jagger.

Learn more and register: vamft.wildapricot.org/Beyond-the-Screen