I was once on a date with someone who gave me 100 percent of his attention while I was talking. It was so shocking that I stopped mid-sentence, lost my train of thought, became flustered, and started giggling like a nervous girl.

He looked at me and asked if I was alright, I replied: “Are you alright?” He said, “Yes, why would you ask?” I replied, “Because you aren’t saying anything.” He said to me: “It’s because I was listening.”

I was blown away. At that moment, he had me. Hook, line, and sinker. That’s how to get a girl to like you — if he had asked me to run away with him, I’d probably have thrown caution to the wind and started packing. According to a study done by Tinder, 55% of women like it when a man puts his phone down during a first date.

The gift of someone’s full attention and absolute presence is a lost art these days and let me tell you, that old-fashioned skill is exactly how a man can attract a woman. 

As women, we’ve grown used to men half-listening, looking over our shoulders on dates to see who walks in the room, and watching them bring their cell phones to rest on the dinner table as though someone more exciting might call during our time together. And we’re all guilty of this.

We have grown so used to multi-tasking and being on our phones that even when we’re face to face, we’re not truly present. 

We don’t listen, we lay in wait to speak next, and when we share stories, rarely does anyone ask a question to dive deeper. Instead, someone runs with the conversation baton bringing it back to the almighty subject of them and their seemingly similar experience.

We uh huh one another and multi-task our time away from dawn to dusk. We’re not even present with our beloved pets. How many times has your dog stood there with a toy, tail wagging, gazing patiently at your face while you text, type, or turn the channel?

We hand our children video games and call that parenting. We send abbreviated texts and call it communicating. We’re too lazy to even pick up the phone and speak voice-to-voice during a fight. We text. They say that no one ever rested on their deathbed and wished for another day of work or another dollar. According to research, one of the biggest regrets of the dying is wishing they lived more authentically.

My bet is we’ll wish for another hour of looking into our loved one’s eyes, or the ability to walk that sweet fur face one last time. We won’t be wishing we sent another email or watched another Netflix show. We’ll wish we had the opportunity to spend time with the people we love, in their presence.

Tamara Star is an author, culture creator, and CEO of TStar Recruiting. Her work has been featured in Yahoo News, Good Morning America, Sirius XM, The Huffington Post, and DayBreakUSA.