Many aspects of your daily life can be impacted by Hearing Loss. Neglected hearing loss, for instance, can impact your professional life, your favorite hobbies, and even your relationships. For couples who are coping with hearing loss, communication can become strained. This can cause increased stress, more quarrels, and even the growth of animosity. In other words, left uncontrolled, hearing loss can negatively impact your relationship in substantial ways.
So, how does hearing loss effect relationships? These difficulties happen, in part, because people are usually not aware that they even have hearing loss. After all, hearing loss is typically a slow-moving and hard to recognize 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 problem. This can lead to both partners feeling alienated and can make it hard to find workable solutions.
Relationships can be helped and communication can begin to be mended when hearing loss is diagnosed and couples get practical solutions from us.
Can hearing loss impact relationships?
When hearing loss is in the early phases, it’s difficult to detect. This can result in significant misunderstandings between couples. As a result, there are some common problems that develop:
- Feeling ignored: When somebody doesn’t respond to what you say, you’re likely to feel dismissed. This can frequently occur 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 ignored.
- Couples often 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”. In some circumstances, selective hearing is a conscious action, in other cases, it’s quite unintentional. Spouses will often begin to miss particular words or phrases or these words and phrases will sound garbled when one of them has hearing loss. This can frequently be mistaken for “selective hearing,” resulting in resentment and tension in the relationship.
- Arguments: It’s not unusual for arguments to take place in a relationship, at least, occasionally. But when hearing loss is present, those arguments can be even more aggravating. Arguments can become more frequent too. Hearing loss associated behavioral changes, such as requiring volumes to be painfully loud, can also become a source of tension
- Intimacy may suffer: In lots of relationships, communication is the foundation of intimacy. This can cause a rift to build up between the partners. Increased tension and frustration are often the result.
These issues will often start before anyone is diagnosed with hearing loss. If somebody doesn’t know that hearing loss is at the core of the issue, or if they are dismissing their symptoms, feelings of resentment could get worse.
Living with a person who is dealing with loss of hearing
If hearing loss can lead to 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:
- Encourage your partner to come in for a hearing exam: We can help your partner manage their hearing loss. When hearing loss is well-managed, communication is generally more successful (and many other areas of tension may go away 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. We can help your partner better regulate any of these potential issues.
- When you repeat what you said, try using different words: Usually, you will try to repeat what you said when your partner doesn’t hear you. But instead of using the same words again and again, try to change things up. Some words may be more difficult to hear than others depending on which frequencies your hearing loss impact most. Changing your word choice can help strengthen your message.
- Patience: When you recognize that your partner has hearing loss, patience is particularly important. You might have to repeat yourself more frequently or raise the volume of your voice. It might also be necessary to speak in a slower cadence. The effectiveness of your communication can be dramatically improved by exercising this kind of patience.
- Try to talk face-to-face as often as you can: For someone who is dealing with hearing loss, face-to-face communication can give lots of visual cues. You will be supplying your partner with body language and facial cues. It’s also easier to preserve concentration and eye contact. By giving your partner more visual information to process they will have a simpler time understanding what you mean.
- Help your partner get used to their hearing aids: This can include things like taking over chores that cause significant stress (like 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 accustomed to their hearing aids.
After you get diagnosed, then what?
A hearing test is a fairly simple, non-invasive experience. Usually, you will simply put on a pair 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 test.