Comments on: Can Deaf-Hearing Relationships Really Work?

By: alex wood

alex wood — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 10:25:26 +0000

i’ know jeremy had a wonderful relationship with kirk in ithaca and i need to contact you jeremy asap. footor2@aol.com please contact me your friend alex and the pugs

By: joseph rainmound

joseph rainmound — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 22:01:41 +0000

Everyone loves Jennifer Nelson…

I remember an article in the Wash Post or some paper like that which said hearing gay guys liked to **** deaf gay guys and listen to the noises they made. So unusual and exotic… Is this audism? No, just a bizarre fetish…

By: wish i could help

wish i could help — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 16:48:48 +0000

Definitely do try and meet other ‘mixed’ couples.

By: Can you hear me now?????

Can you hear me now????? — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 04:00:17 +0000

I am a hearing woman who just started dating a HOH man. I am finding that our communication issues leave me feeling anxious and often confused. I have concidered this and have tried to simply ask for clarity and be more patient! We have some real chemistry and I would love to get to know him better, perhaps a relationship. I really hope this can work. I am willing to put the effort foth. He can read lips well, we text and I can fingerspell and understand some ASL (took it in hgh school). I was planning on taking ASL as my language next symester anyway- so that should help. One thing that doesn’t seem to translate well is humor. I wish I had some guidence in this.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 18:53:18 +0000

You don’t seem to have ever had a problem, David. :)

By: Just Ask

Just Ask — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 16:31:13 +0000

Hey, just ask. Don’t let certain people’s certain criteria scare you off. ;)

By: David Stuckless

David Stuckless — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 23:20:04 +0000

I’m just trying to figure out how to weasel a date out of this whole argument.

By: Curious Eyes

Curious Eyes — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:19:35 +0000

JM, your comment definitely rang a bell with me. I’ve been with deaf men, and with hearing men, and all I can say is that it’s 6 of 1 and half a dozen of the other. I’m a culturally deaf woman who uses ASL and I also have good speech and lipreading skills; I come from a hearing family and am pretty comfortable with the hearing world. Yet my true friends and emotional center are in the Deaf community. You can imagine what my social life is like, constantly straddling those two worlds. With a deaf husband or boyfriend, I may have to mediate for him when we’re in the hearing world, or my hearing husband/boyfriend would have to mediate for me and the hearing world. I was lucky with my hearing boyfriend and his wonderful hearing friends who were very good about accommodating my communication needs. He in turn had a bit more trouble with my deaf friends because they signed so fast and did not always check to ensure that he was involved with the communication. My deaf friends, sad to say, tended to rag on him just for the fact of his being hearing. My point is that communication goes beyond just the modality, you also have to be able to say what you feel, take the other’s perspective, and to resolve and let go of friction and conflicts.

By: Food For Thought

Food For Thought — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:08:36 +0000

Quite true, JM. The first year or two, it’s a lot about the twosome. But, after a while, it’s all about the community on both sides and how to adapt with communication challenges. The key here is recognizing the power structure–man and woman, hearing and deaf. Or woman and woman. Man and man. It bears in mind that “love, lust…” isn’t enough. It’s a romantic ideal to say the basic language is love. To make the relationship succeed, compatability between two people has to happen. It’s not about what’s common, but how to make the common things between two people stick and still want to be together.

There are many mixed couples that I admire. There are also many deaf-deaf couples that I admire. It really is a matter of how much of a couplehood both people want together.

On the other hand, I can say from experience in both hearing-deaf and deaf-deaf relationships that there’s absolutely nothing like effortless and natural communication. There is just no substitute for it. If I had to choose a perfect hearing man and a perfect deaf man, I’d pick the latter without question. That doesn’t mean I won’t date hearing men. It just means there is a preference.

By: Adam Stone

Adam Stone — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:37:57 +0000

“The hearing date might have a pair of big, puckered lips that actually move and are lipreadable.”

Hilarious. There should be a parody of Charlie Brown’s “Happiness is a Warm Puppy” book for deaf-hearing relationships.

Happiness in a Deaf-Hearing Relationship is:
-Big, fat readable lips
-The hearing person reachable via text messaging
-Never adjusting the TV volume and making the captions disappear for a short while while watching TV together
-Fingerspelling sweet nothings

and so on…okay, I’m sure other can come up with better examples. Go for it!