I used to think the transaction in a sugar arrangement was money.

It took me about six months to understand it's more complicated than that.

Money is part of it, obviously. But money is actually the easy part — it's countable, it's transferable, the value is legible to everyone in the room. What's harder to account for, and what I've come to think matters more, is attention.

Attention is what he's actually spending when he clears his Tuesday evening. Attention is what's in the text that arrives two days after you mentioned something in passing — when he references it, and you realize he was actually listening. Attention is the thing that's scarce for men at a certain point in their lives. Their schedules are full. Their mental bandwidth is occupied. The question of what gets noticed — really noticed — is the question of what they actually value.

This took me a while to see because I had been measuring the wrong things.

I was thinking about dollars and dinners and the practical logistics of whether this was worth my time. I was not thinking about what it means when someone treats your time like it's worth something. These turned out to be different questions.

Here's a concrete version of what I mean. I went on dates with two different men around the same time, early in all of this. One was more generous in a direct financial sense. The other remembered, in our fourth conversation, that I had mentioned offhand being interested in a particular writer, and he'd read something by her and wanted to know what I thought.

The second one had my attention in a way that had nothing to do with money.

I'm not saying attention replaces other things. I'm saying it's a currency with its own exchange rate, and a lot of people — on both sides of an arrangement — don't account for it correctly.

Women undervalue their own attention. They give it freely because it feels natural to be curious about people, to ask follow-up questions, to remember what someone said. But that attentiveness is actually a significant offering. It's rarer than you might think. Men in their forties and fifties often describe the experience of being genuinely listened to as something they haven't had in a long time.

Men undervalue their attention too, in a different way. They assume that the financial component is what they're offering, and that's the part that requires effort. But the attention — whether it's there or not — is often what determines whether the arrangement has the quality they're actually hoping to find.

The arrangements that feel good to be in, from what I've seen and experienced, are the ones where attention flows in both directions. Not symmetrically — the structure isn't symmetric — but genuinely. Where each person is actually interested in what the other one has to say.

The arrangements that feel hollow are ones where the money is present but the attention isn't. Where it becomes clear that one person is mostly performing interest while their focus is elsewhere. That's a different transaction. Not a bad one necessarily, but a different one, and worth knowing that's what it is.

What changed for me when I started thinking this way: I became more honest about what I actually wanted. Not just what I needed in a practical sense, but what kind of presence I wanted to be around. That clarity made it easier to know when something was worth continuing and when it wasn't.

Attention is what it feels like when someone actually shows up. It's harder to fake over time than almost anything else.