Their wives complain that their husbands didn’t
notice that the furniture was repossessed or
that their old cat died and was replaced by a
dog. My third husband was like that. At some
point in my marriage I discovered that he
didn’t know the color of my eyes. He didn’t
know the color of his eyes either. He wasn’t
color-blind: he was just indifferent. I asked
him as a personal favor to learn the color of
my eyes by heart and he did. My friend Irene
even suggested creating a support group for the
wives of such mathematicians.
I'm generally very apathetic which makes my partner question whether I love them sometimes. It is peculiar why we should love.
I absolutely hate that. I have a pretty good memory, I do remember lot of random trivias about conversations. And yet my SO can always find something that I missed, and likes to ask me about it few weeks after it was first spoken. I try to convince her to find another way of "checking" my attention, because this won't "fix" my memory. It'll only make me paranoid.
EDIT:
Another thing that I actually learned for her is the color of her eyes. I'm not indifferent. I simply don't notice. Maybe it's because of being myopic for most of my life, or maybe because I'm wired differently - but my brain just doesn't register those details unless I explicitly focus on them. Similarly, I often can't tell when someone brightened or darkened their hair (that is, unless it's something like going from blond to black). I suck at remembering faces, couldn't describe them from memory to save my life, and usually I even quickly forget what clothes someone is wearing. So my only countertip to this article is - for the love of $DEITY, don't assume everyone is sensitive to minor appearance changes. For some, it doesn't register. And it's not because of indifference.
This so much, and not just with my partner. I will have complete, coherent conversations, but a part of my mind is off thinking about Willmore Flow or some such nonsense, and I will have zero recollection about the content of the conversation later...
I have worked with software development for quite some time. The nasty thing is that lately it has become so easy to connect to work, fire up the dev-environment from home on evenings and weekends to continue tinker with that piece of code or that nasty bug.
Imagine having a job where your problem is not constrained to a person that has to be in your vicinity for you to work or a job where you cannot at least fake that you have problems with your internet connection :)
You cannot easily unscrew your head at the end of the day and it is only too natural to continue to linger in your head in problem-solving mode. Imagine doing this for the greater part of your life and you may end up with exactly the problems described here.
_Yes.