How much attention do you need?

A question like this is nearly impossible to answer meaningfully because we have no common unit of attention. How do we compare?

One way I thought of is how many times a day you need to connect with your significant other. Connection could be through a date, a phone call, an email, a text or any number of other ways—I suppose even including smoke signal.

I tend to write a lot of emails, and after a while, the person I’m corresponding with gets overwhelmed and stops replying. Or maybe they decide I’m not worth it, any more. I also get quite anxious sometimes about whether someone likes me or how much they like me, and if I don’t get a communication three or four times a day, I start to freak out.

This is primarily with people I particularly care about. If the relationship is much less in depth, then I am much more patient and much less in need.

Lots of variables: who you are relating to and what kind of relationship you have with them; what kind of attention; how you quantify that attention and I don’t know what else.

What kind of attention do you need? How much of it? What happens if you don’t get it? How do you handle that? Why is your level of need the way it is?