Hearing loss can affect many aspects of your daily life. Your hobbies, your professional life, and even your love life can be impacted by hearing loss, for instance. 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 unchecked, hearing loss can negatively impact your relationship in substantial ways.
So how are relationships affected by hearing loss? In part, these hardships happen because the individuals are not aware of the hearing loss. Hearing loss typically is, after all, a slowly developing condition. Communication may be tense because of hearing loss and you and your partner might not even be aware it’s the root of the issue. Practical solutions may be difficult to find as both partners feel more and more alienated.
Often, a diagnosis of hearing loss coupled with helpful strategies from a hearing specialist can help couples start communicating again, and improve their relationships.
Can hearing loss impact relationships?
When hearing loss is in the early phases, it’s difficult to detect. This can lead to significant misunderstandings between couples. As a result, there are a few common problems that develop:
- Couples frequently confuse hearing loss for “selective hearing”: Selective hearing is when someone effortlessly 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 unintentional, and in others, it can be a conscious choice. Spouses will often start to miss certain 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,” resulting in resentment and tension in the relationship.
- Arguments: Arguments are rather common in pretty much all relationships. But arguments will be even more frustrating when one or both partners are dealing with hearing loss. For some couples, arguments will break out more frequently because of an increase in misunderstandings. For others, an increase in arguments could be a consequence of changes in behavior (for instance, boosting the volume on the television to painful levels).
- Feeling ignored: You would probably feel like you’re being ignored if you addressed someone and they didn’t respond. This can frequently happen when one partner is experiencing hearing loss and isn’t aware of it. The long-term health of your relationship can be seriously put in jeopardy if you feel like you’re being disregarded.
- Intimacy may suffer: In lots of relationships, communication is the cornerstone of intimacy. This can cause a rift to build up between the partners. Consequently, hearing loss might introduce friction throughout the relationship, causing more frustration and tension.
Often, this friction starts to occur before any actual diagnosis of hearing loss. Feelings of resentment might be worse when parties don’t suspect hearing loss is the core problem (or when the partner with hearing loss insists on disregarding their symptoms).
Advice for living with someone who has hearing loss
If hearing loss can create so much conflict in a relationship, how do you live with someone who has hearing loss? This will only be a problem for couples who aren’t willing to formulate new communication strategies. Here are some of those strategies:
- Use different words when you repeat yourself: When your partner doesn’t hear what you said, you will usually try repeating yourself. But rather than using the same words again and again, try changing things up. Some words might be harder to hear than others depending on what frequencies your hearing loss effects most. Your message can be strengthened by changing the words you use.
- Help your partner get used to their hearing aids: This can include things like taking over tasks that cause substantial stress (like going shopping or making phone calls). There also may be ways you can help your partner get accustomed to their hearing aids and we can assist you with that.
- Patience: When you recognize that your partner is dealing with hearing loss, patience is particularly important. You might have to repeat yourself more often or raise the volume of your voice. You might also have to speak more slowly. The effectiveness of your communication can be substantially improved by exercising this type of patience.
- Encourage your partner to come in for a hearing exam: We can help your partner control their hearing loss. When hearing loss is under control, communication is typically more successful (and many other areas of stress may recede too). 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. Your partner can get assistance managing any of these potential problems by scheduling an appointment with us.
- As much as you can, try to look right into the face of the individual you’re talking with: For someone who is dealing with hearing loss, face-to-face communication can give an abundance of visual cues. Your partner will be able to make use of facial cues and body language. And with increased eye contact it will be easier to maintain concentration. By giving your partner more visual information to process they will have a simpler time understanding what you mean.
What happens after you get diagnosed?
A hearing exam is a fairly simple, non-invasive experience. Usually, you will simply put on a set of headphones and listen for particular tones. But a hearing loss diagnosis can be an essential step to more successfully 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 exam.
