Many facets of your day-to-day life can be affected by Hearing Loss. Your hobbies, your professional life, and even your love life can be affected by hearing loss, for example. Communication can become strained for couples who are dealing with hearing loss. Animosity can develop from the increased tension and more frequent quarrels. In other words, left uncontrolled, hearing loss can negatively impact your relationship in substantial ways.
So how are relationships impacted by hearing loss? These difficulties occur, in part, because individuals are usually unaware that they even have hearing loss. After all, hearing loss is usually a slow-moving and hard to notice condition. As a result, you (and your partner) may not detect that hearing loss is the base cause of your communication problems. This can lead to both partners feeling alienated and can make it difficult to find workable solutions.
Often, a diagnosis of hearing loss along with practical strategies from a hearing specialist can help couples start communicating again, and better their relationships.
Can hearing loss impact relationships?
When hearing loss is in the early phases, it’s difficult to detect. Couples can have considerable misunderstandings because of this. The following common problems can develop because of this:
- Feeling ignored: When someone doesn’t respond to what you say, you’re likely to feel disregarded. When one of the partners has hearing loss but is unaware of it, this can often occur. Feeling like your partner is not paying attention to you isn’t good for long-term relationship health.
- Arguments: Arguments are rather common in pretty much all relationships. But when hearing loss is present, those arguments can be even more frustrating. Arguments can become more frequent too. For others, an increase in arguments could be a result of changes in behavior (for instance, boosting the volume on the television to painful volumes).
- It isn’t uncommon for one of the partners to blame hearing loss on “selective hearing”: Selective hearing is when someone easily hears something like “let’s go get some ice cream”, but somehow misses something like “let’s do some spring cleaning”. Sometimes, selective hearing is totally unintended, and in others, it can be a conscious decision. Spouses will frequently start to miss particular words or phrases or these words and phrases will sound garbled when one of them has hearing loss. This can often be mistaken for “selective hearing,” causing resentment and tension in the relationship.
- 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 frequently the result.
Often, this friction begins to happen before any formal diagnosis of hearing loss. If someone doesn’t know that hearing loss is at the core of the issue, or if they are disregarding their symptoms, feelings of resentment could be worse.
Advice for living with someone who has hearing loss
If hearing loss can create so much conflict in a relationship, how can you live with someone who has hearing loss? This will only be an issue for couples who aren’t willing to develop new communication strategies. Here are some of those strategies:
- Try to communicate face-to-face as often as possible: Communicating face-to-face can provide a wealth of visual cues for somebody with hearing loss. You will be supplying your partner with body language and facial cues. It’s also easier to maintain concentration and eye contact. This supplies your partner with more information to process, and that usually makes it easier to understand your intent.
- Use different words when you repeat yourself: Usually, you will try to repeat what you said when your partner doesn’t hear you. But instead of using the same words over and over again, try changing things up. Hearing loss can affect some frequencies of speech more than others, which means some words may be harder to understand (while others are easier). Your message can be strengthened by changing the words you use.
- Encourage your partner to come in for a hearing exam: We can help your partner regulate their hearing loss. When hearing loss is well-managed, communication is generally more successful (and many other areas of stress may recede as well). Additionally, managing hearing loss is a safety issue: hearing loss can effect your ability to hear the telephone, smoke detectors and fire alarms, and the doorbell. It might also be difficult to hear oncoming traffic. We can help your partner better regulate any of these potential issues.
- Help your partner get used to their hearing aids: Maybe you could do things like taking over trips to the grocery store or other tasks that cause your partner anxiety. You can also ask your partner’s hearing specialist if there are ways you can help them get accustomed to their hearing aids.
- Patience: When you recognize that your partner has hearing loss, patience is particularly important. You might need to change the way you talk, like raising your volume for instance. You might also have to talk more slowly. This type of patience can be challenging, but it can also dramatically improve the effectiveness of your communication.
What happens after you get diagnosed?
A hearing test is a relatively simple, non-invasive experience. In most circumstances, those who undergo tests will do little more than put on specialized headphones and raise a hand when they hear a tone. But a hearing loss diagnosis can be an important step to more effectively managing symptoms and relationships.
Take the hearing loss associated tension out of your relationship by encouraging your partner to come see us for a hearing assessment.