The second observation
If you have to explain the day, you were not there.
A memory you have to describe to the person who was standing next to you was never a shared one.
What a real memory does
You say four words and the other man is already laughing, because he is back in it. Nothing has to be set up. Neither of you has to establish when it was, who was there or why it was funny.
That is what being present together leaves behind. It is not sentimental and it is not about big occasions. It is usually something very small that happened on the way to something else.
Now apply it
- Twenty years of colleagues: what did you actually do together, beyond being in the same building?
- A long marriage: what can you both get back into in one sentence?
- Your oldest friend: when were you last somewhere, rather than in touch?
- Your children: what will they be able to say four words about?
Most men find at least one of those uncomfortable. It is worth sitting with rather than arguing with.
What it is not a verdict on
Not your marriage, not your family, and not anybody's love for you. Two people can be devoted to each other for decades and have been present for almost none of it, because presence and commitment are different things and only one of them shows up in the diary.
This site will not tell you what to do about that. It gives no relationship advice, and it has nothing to say about your particular wife, partner, children or friends, because it does not know them.
Why it is getting harder
More of what we do together now happens with a screen in it. Two men can spend an evening in the same room, both entertained, and leave with nothing either of them could get back into in four words.
That is an observation about what a shared memory needs, which is attention in the same place at the same time. It is not a complaint about phones and nobody here is being told off.