Many aspects of your day-to-day life can be affected by Hearing Loss. Your pastimes, your professional life, and even your love life can be affected by hearing loss, for instance. For couples who are coping with hearing loss, communication can become tense. This can cause increased tension, more arguments, and even the growth of animosity. In other words, left unchecked, hearing loss can negatively affect your relationship in substantial ways.
So, how does hearing loss impact relationships? These challenges happen, in part, because people are often oblivious that they even have hearing loss. After all, hearing loss is normally a slow-moving and hard to notice condition. As a result, you (and your partner) might not detect that hearing loss is the root cause of your communication issues. Practical solutions might be difficult to find as both partners feel more and more alienated.
Relationships can be improved and communication can begin to be mended when hearing loss is diagnosed and couples get reliable solutions from us.
Can hearing loss impact relationships?
It’s really easy to ignore hearing loss when it initially begins to develop. This can lead to significant misunderstandings between couples. As a result, there are some common problems that develop:
- Feeling ignored: You would likely feel like you’re being disregarded if you addressed somebody and they didn’t respond. This can frequently happen when one partner is suffering from hearing loss and isn’t aware of it. Feeling as if your partner is not paying attention to you isn’t good for long-term relationship health.
- Intimacy may suffer: Communication in a relationship is usually the basis of intimacy. This can cause a rift to build up between the partners. Increased tension and frustration are often the result.
- Couples frequently confuse hearing loss for “selective hearing”: Selective hearing is what occurs when someone hears “we’re having brownies for dessert” very clearly, but somehow does not hear “we need to take out the garbage before we eat”. Sometimes, selective hearing is absolutely unintentional, and in others, it can be a conscious choice. Spouses will frequently start to miss certain words or phrases or these words and phrases will sound jumbled when one of them has hearing loss. This can frequently be mistaken for “selective hearing,” causing resentment and tension in the relationship.
- Arguments: Arguments are pretty common in pretty much all relationships. But when hearing loss is present, those arguments can be even more aggravating. For some couples, arguments will erupt more often because of an increase in misunderstandings. For others, an increase in arguments could be a result of changes in behavior (for instance, increasing the volume on the television to painful levels).
In many cases, this friction begins to occur before any actual diagnosis of hearing loss. Feelings of resentment might be worse when parties don’t know hearing loss is the core problem (or when the partner with hearing loss insists on disregarding their symptoms).
Living with a person who is dealing with loss of hearing
If hearing loss can create so much conflict in a relationship, how do you live with someone who is dealing with hearing loss? This will only be a problem for couples who aren’t willing to establish new communication strategies. Here are a few of those strategies:
- Help your partner get used to their hearing aids: This can consist of things like taking over chores that cause substantial anxiety (such as going to the grocery store or making phone calls). You can also ask your partner’s hearing specialist if there are ways you can help them get used to their hearing aids.
- Patience: When you’re aware that your partner is dealing with hearing loss, patience is particularly important. You may have to repeat yourself more often or raise the volume of your voice. It might also be necessary to talk in a slower cadence. The effectiveness of your communication can be substantially improved by practicing this kind of patience.
- Try to talk face-to-face as often as possible: Communicating face-to-face can supply a wealth of visual clues for someone with hearing loss. You will be supplying your partner with body language and facial cues. And with increased eye contact it will be easier to maintain concentration. This supplies your partner with more information to process, and that usually makes it easier to understand your intent.
- When you repeat what you said, try making use of different words: When your partner doesn’t understand what you said, you will typically try repeating yourself. But try switching the words you use rather than using the same words. Hearing loss can affect some frequencies of speech more than others, which means some words may be harder to understand (while others are easier). Changing your word choice can help strengthen your message.
- Encourage your partner to come in for a hearing exam: Your partner’s hearing loss can be controlled with our help. Many areas of stress will fade away and communication will be more successful when hearing loss is well controlled. Safety is also an issue with hearing loss because it can cause you to fail to hear the doorbell, phone, and smoke alarm. It might also be hard to hear oncoming traffic. We can help your partner better manage any of these potential issues.
What happens after you get diagnosed?
A hearing exam is a relatively simple, non-invasive experience. In most instances, those who undergo tests will do little more than wear specialized headphones and raise a hand when they hear a tone. You will be better able to regulate your symptoms and your relationships after you get a diagnosis.
Encouraging your partner to get in touch with us can help guarantee that hearing loss doesn’t sabotage your happiness or your partnership.