I mentioned in a previous article or two that I am Deaf (capital D, please), but in case you, dear reader, didn’t happen to peruse those, I shall reiterate: I’m Deaf. And more to the point, I’m late-deafened, which means I wasn’t born Deaf, nor did I lose my hearing at a young enough age to forget what it means to hear. I lost it at eighteen, nearly nine years ago, and you can bet I still remember what it means to hear. And you can bet I miss it like hell and am currently fighting with my insurance about covering the Auditory Brainstem Implant I desperately need. But let’s go back to the point of this article.
So, I’m late-deafened. ASL (American Sign Language) is not my native language, nor did I even begin studying it until fairly recently. I am not fluent by any stretch, but I do all right. I can still speak clearly, though my voice is slightly warped from years of not hearing it. I often find myself on the cusp of both the Hearing and Deaf worlds—as in, I’m not fluent in ASL, I cannot sign at the ridiculously fast pace that native signers can, and those native signers often become frustrated with me because of it. I also can’t hear, though I function like a hearing person. Add it all together, and I’m stuck in a very narrow crevice, which makes everything from ordering a pizza to finding The One difficult.
The latter will be the topic of this missive.
I’m twenty-six, which means I’ve been of acceptable dating age for over ten years now. In high school, I was only hard-of-hearing, which came with its own pitfalls. Generally, I tended to avoid commiserating with anyone, because it didn’t take very long for me to discover that my peers loathed having to repeat themselves a half-dozen times whenever I said “what?” over and over again. As a direct result, some, especially potential boyfriends, considered me aloof and cold. Recently, a former classmate confessed to me that he would’ve asked me out, but he thought (and I quote), I “hated everyone”. Of course, this wasn’t the case at all. I just couldn’t understand half of what was being said to me and people would then become frustrated and scoff “never mind” after my fifth “what?”, then walk away. Repeat this routine dozens upon hundreds of times. To quote one of my favorite movies, Jawbreaker (totally underrated and completely awesome), “High school is hard enough without added anxiety!” I’d say you are very right, Julie Benz. My hearing loss was that “added anxiety” tenfold.
Fast forward to the summer after my graduation, and I was losing my hearing entirely. Naturally, I was terrified, and it would be years before I was comfortable enough with my situation to start dating again. In fact, I didn’t really pick up the practice until I started college at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2010, where there was a good-sized population of Deaf/HoH students amongst the hearing ones. Now, you’d think it would be easier for me, finding a guy who had the same communication problems I had. Wrong!
As a late-deafened individual, I’m firmly ensconced in that narrow crevice between the Deaf and Hearing communities. At RIT, the Deaf/HoH population and the hearing population rarely intermixed, unless said hearing person was majoring in ASL interpretation. There was a distinct, albeit invisible line between Deaf and Hearing, which is often the case in the real world. I straddled that line, frequently bouncing from one to the other, not unable to decide where I wanted to be, but unable to communicate with either sect. I was not one-hundred percent confident in my ASL abilities, and I unfortunately met quite a few who didn’t tolerate my “hearing-brainedness” (my wanting to hear/functioning like a hearing person). As for the hearing contingent, I simply couldn’t understand over half of what they said. I can read lips well, but the more familiar I am with a person and their speech patterns, the easier it is—IE, I can lip-read my family near perfectly, but someone I barely know would cause me great difficulty.
At RIT, I dated members of both Hearing and Deaf/HoH communities. My first attempt to “get back on that horse”, so to speak, was a blond Deaf boy, a year my senior (quite unexpected, because when I started college at 23, most were younger than I was). I met him online, though he was a student at RIT; I would come to, sometimes reluctantly, meet many of my dates online, as that adorable “meet-cute” that is so prevalent in rom-coms is kind of impossible for me. Case in point, if I were to run into The One at the coffee shop I used to frequent, and he’d open with a dumb/sweet comment about my completely un-coffee-tasting coffee (I preferred Salted Caramel Mochas, which were less coffee and more liquid cake), I more than likely would have no idea what he was talking about and my “One” would get away due to language barriers.
Anyway, this blond Deaf boy was called Matt*. He was a former cook for his local army base. He was also recently dumped by his fiancée. When Matt stumbled upon my Facebook profile, he messaged me right away due to, by his own confession, my pictures and not much else. He was cute and didn’t seem serial killer-y, plus he went to RIT, so I figured why not. I gave him my text number.
First mistake. It wouldn’t take long for me to learn that poor Matt was not really looking for a girlfriend, per se, but a replacement for his former fiancée. The next morning, I had received about thirteen texts from Matt, the earliest having been sent at 6:30 AM, a seemingly innocuous “good morning J” text. The second was sent fifteen minutes later. The third was sent five minutes after that. And so on. The last one I received was at 11, just as I was waking up, accusing me of ignoring him. I, not wanting to offend him, apologized, and we began texting back and forth for a few hours. The second red flag arose when Matt invited me to his family’s Thanksgiving and Christmas…in Michigan, when RIT was in Rochester, New York, before he had even seen me face to face. I have a general “three strikes and you’re out” rule, so I attempted to alleviate the sudden tension/block out the alarm bells I experienced by cracking a lame joke, saying I was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas, and didn’t that suck? Haw-haw.
We met in person at the end of the day. He asked me out for that evening (it was a Saturday), but I was new at school and still in need of necessities (food, notebooks, tampons) so I said that I needed to head to Target to run errands and suggested tomorrow instead. He insisted on tagging along to Target. Weird location for a first date but not entirely red flag worthy, so I acquiesced.
At Target, Matt stuck to me like Velcro. Once we returned to campus, he texted me five minutes after I had settled in for the evening, five minutes after leaving, and proceeded to outline his expectations for a girlfriend.
Red flag number three.
Then, he asked me how I had become Deaf. I told him it was through an illness, and I had become fully deafened at eighteen. His reply: “Aww, I swear I’ll love you anyway!”
Keep in mind, we’d just meet face to face.
Red flag number four.
Matt continued to text me incessantly for three weeks, even after I told him—repeatedly—that I just wanted to be friends. After every time I reiterated this, he would send me a “whyyyy? 🙁 🙁 :(” until, thankfully, he seemed to get the picture.
Needless to say, my first experience back in the dating saddle hadn’t gone too well.
