Toggle navigation
Toggle navigation
Home
DCUM Forums
Nanny Forums
Events
About DCUM
Advertising
Search
Recent Topics
Hottest Topics
FAQs and Guidelines
Privacy Policy
Your current identity is: Anonymous
Login
Preview
Subject:
Forum Index
»
Off-Topic
Reply to "Would you marry a disabled person."
Subject:
Emoticons
More smilies
Text Color:
Default
Dark Red
Red
Orange
Brown
Yellow
Green
Olive
Cyan
Blue
Dark Blue
Violet
White
Black
Font:
Very Small
Small
Normal
Big
Giant
Close Marks
[quote=Anonymous]My ex-husband is profoundly deaf but primarily an English speaker, with some signing as a back-up. Something like 90% of hearing-deaf marriages end in divorce, as ours did. Considering our incompatibility, our marriage would have ended if he were a concert pianist. But being married to a completely deaf person is really hard. You have to interpret at parties where it's too loud/dark for him to speech read, which means no independent conversations of your own. No concerts. No movies except a handful of captioned ones. You can't whisper to each other in bed without turning the light on. When the baby cries, he doesn't wake up and you end up doing 100% of nights on your own. I remember him waking me up when he was ready for work and saying "how'd the night go?" I wanted to kill him. But then, it would have felt weird to get him up just to bring the baby to me, even though my c-section recovery was horrible. When he'd yell from the next room, I'd have to go to him, but I couldn't yell to him. He had serious communication problems with our daughter when she was a toddler, and continues to be somewhat challenged in communicating with her. It's borderline dangerous to try to talk in the car, and my daughter can't talk to him at all from the back seat. People who are deaf since birth or childhood can often have a more isolated approach to the rest of the world, because they have been shut out of many conversations through life, especially if they have been mainstreamed and not in the (signing) deaf community. For a hearing person, that capacity for solitude can be very challenging. I know of two hearing-deaf couples who have worked out well so far. You have to be a very laid back person and it helps not to enjoy music too much, because for someone who uses speech reading and their limited residual hearing to communicate, background noise is challenging. Studies show that in most hearing-deaf marriages, the hearing parent becomes the primary parent if the children are hearing. It can be a big strain on the hearing parent and a source of discord for the couple. I don't know if I would marry someone with a mobility impairment, but people should not take the challenges of hearing-deaf relationships lightly. It is like two very foreign cultures, but without the capacity to assimilate fully. [/quote]
Options
Disable HTML in this message
Disable BB Code in this message
Disable smilies in this message
Review message
Search
Recent Topics
Hottest Topics