What if?
Comments for other hearing partners of deafened folk
Out of the following please pick the stupid question.
“Excuse me sir, is this your motorcycle?”
“Can you tell me what speed you were doing?”
“Do you want fries with that?”
Obviously it’s the last one, of course I want fries!
I was recently asked a far odder question – “would you have gone out with Sue when you first met her if she’d had the health problems she’s got now?” My response, “yes of course, we’re happy together and Sue’s deafness and Meniere’s have no bearing on our relationship.”
And I mean that, we’re happy and the only health changes I could wish for would be for her benefit not to make my life easier. By that I mean that the adaptations we’ve had to make to our lives together don’t trouble me apart from how much they represent what Sue can no longer enjoy, or do.
After further thought on that question I realised that if Sue’d been deaf and suffered with Meniere’s attacks back then, we’d never have met at all because a mutual friend introduced us in a loud biker bar. Like many (I’d guess, most) deafened people and Meniere’s sufferers, Sue doesn’t do noisy locations, let alone loud bars.
Nowadays she wouldn’t go into somewhere like ‘The Station Hotel’ (that romantic venue where your boots stuck to the carpet if you didn’t keep moving) on a bet, let alone for an enjoyable night out. So we’d have missed each other on life’s conveyor belt and ended up with other people. And this really isn’t a belated Valentine’s message, but I wouldn’t want to be any happier than I am with Sue.
However, I’ve learnt one scientific fact – you can’t change the past. Although ‘Back to the Future II and III’ shook my convictions and let’s not even mention the time travel to change the past theory of Terminator II and III.
There’s a lot of folk who don’t go out and socialize because it’s just too much of a struggle to make the effort worthwhile; deafness isn’t the only cause of isolation and exclusion but as this is Hearing Link I’ll selfishly stick to hearing problems, but we must remember there are many reasons for people not to be able to ‘mingle’.
Partners, if you sometimes feel put upon with the extra chores and lack of individual choice (such as nipping down pub for a few pints) that you didn’t sign on for, consider that keeping your deafened partner as happy as you can is worth the extra effort and you wanted to be happy with them in the first pace. So, well done.
PS. I don’t include myself in that ‘well done’ bit. My life, my choices and Sue is my choice for a partner.