Hearing loss can impact many areas of your day-to-day life. Neglected hearing loss, for instance, can affect 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 tension, more disputes, and even the development of animosity. In other words, left uncontrolled, hearing loss can negatively affect your relationship in significant ways.
So how are relationships affected by hearing loss? In part, these tribulations happen because the individuals are not aware of the hearing loss. After all, hearing loss is usually a slow-moving and difficult to notice condition. Communication might be strained because of hearing loss and you and your partner might not even be aware it’s the root of the problem. Practical solutions might be difficult to find as both partners feel increasingly alienated.
Often, a diagnosis of hearing loss along with helpful strategies from a hearing specialist can help couples start communicating again, and improve their relationships.
Can hearing loss affect relationships?
When hearing loss is in the early stages, it’s difficult to detect. Couples can have considerable misunderstandings as a result of this. Consequently, there are some common issues that develop:
- Intimacy may suffer: Communication in a relationship is often the foundation of intimacy. This can cause a rift to build up between the partners. Increased tension and frustration are frequently the consequence.
- Feeling ignored: When someone doesn’t respond to what you say, you’re likely to feel dismissed. When one of the partners has hearing loss but is unaware of it, this can often take place. Feeling as if your partner is not paying attention to you isn’t good for long-term relationship health.
- Arguments: It isn’t unusual for arguments to occur in a relationship, at least, occasionally. But when hearing loss is present, those arguments can become even more frustrating. Arguments can happen more often too. Hearing loss associated behavioral changes, such as requiring volumes to be painfully loud, can also become a source of tension
- Couples often mistake hearing loss for “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 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 garbled when one of them has hearing loss. This can sometimes result in tension and resentment because one spouse confuses this for “selective hearing”.
In many cases, this friction starts to occur before any formal diagnosis of hearing loss. Feelings of bitterness may be worse when parties don’t know hearing loss is the root issue (or when the partner with hearing loss insists on ignoring their symptoms).
Advice for living with someone who is dealing with hearing loss
How do you live with somebody who is dealing with hearing loss when hearing loss can create so much conflict? This will only be an issue for couples who aren’t willing to develop new communication strategies. Some of those strategies include the following:
- Patience: This is particularly relevant when you know that your partner is struggling with hearing loss. You may have to repeat yourself more often or raise the volume of your voice. You might also have to talk more slowly. This kind of patience can be a challenge, but it can also drastically improve the effectiveness of your communication.
- Encourage your partner to come in for a hearing exam: We can help your partner manage their hearing loss. Many areas of stress will fade away and communication will be more effective when hearing loss is well controlled. Safety is also a concern with hearing loss because it can cause you to fail to hear the doorbell, phone, and smoke alarm. You might also fail to hear oncoming traffic. Your partner can get help controlling any of these potential problems by scheduling an appointment with us.
- Use different words when you repeat yourself: Usually, you will try to repeat what you said when your partner doesn’t hear you. 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). Your message can be reinforced by changing the words you utilize.
- Try to communicate face-to-face as often as possible: For someone who has hearing loss, face-to-face communication can give an abundance of visual cues. Your partner will be able to read facial cues and body language. And with increased eye contact it will be easier to preserve concentration. By giving your partner more visual information to process they will have an easier time understanding what you mean.
- Help your partner get used to their hearing aids: This can include things like taking over tasks that cause significant stress (such as going to the grocery store or making phone calls). There also may be ways you can help your partner get used to their hearing aids and we can help you with that.
What happens after you get diagnosed?
Hearing tests are typically non-invasive and quite simple. Typically, you will simply put on a set of headphones and listen for specific tones. But a hearing loss diagnosis can be a significant step to more effectively managing symptoms and relationships.
Encouraging your partner to touch base with us can help guarantee that hearing loss doesn’t undermine your happiness or your partnership.