Having hearing loss while your spouse can hear well can make everyday life harder. Simple conversations can become frustrating for you because you aren’t hearing it all. As for your spouse, needing to repeat themselves a lot can be frustrating for them. Being the one with the hearing loss, you may feel left out at times in social situations because your spouse is able to easily communicate with those around you two while you struggle to keep in the conversation. Feeling disconnected from the group is understandable.
For the hearing spouse, it’s tough to fully understand what it’s like to live with hearing loss. They don’t realize how tiring it is to focus on lip-reading or how left out you feel. Sometimes, the spouse might feel ignored or upset when you don’t respond right away or even at all. Once we had a spouse say to us “I’m afraid of what the neighbors think of me, they must think I’m crazy! I’m sure they can hear me yelling at him. But I must for him to hear me.”
Patience and treatment are the keys to the relationship when one has hearing loss while the other doesn’t. Both need to try to understand and sympathize what the other is going through and how each of them feels. And of course, treating a hearing loss can help with a lot of the negative feelings each is experiencing.
Kristin Seiler
Lemme Audiology Practice Representative
