Michelle Stensler, a local Deaf woman, is befuddled as to why her dips in the dating pool never seem to heat up.
“I’m sending all the right signals,” she explains, giving our reporter a flirtatious shoulder nudge and giggle. “But I keep going out with hearing guys who see ‘Deaf’ on my profile and worry too much about accommodating me instead of noticing that I’m ‘looking for something short and hot.’”
Stensler, born Deaf in a Deaf family, primarily uses American Sign Language and doesn’t care what hearing people have to say. “I’ll look right at those luscious lips, and they’ll think I’m trying to, I don’t know, follow the conversation or something. I’m not trying to find a soulmate in a hearing guy from Tinder.”
On almost every date, she notes, the other party enthusiastically faces her in a lighted area and speaks clearly and slowly. They also avoid talking while eating or covering their mouth. Which, in Stensler’s case, is entirely unnecessary. “I’d rather we move to a dark corner and start going at it. Stop being respectful.”
Stensler remembers one particular date when, after about thirty minutes of silent nods, writing back and forth and not-so-subtle advances, her date wrote that he’d shave his mustache before their next date to make lip reading easier. “He should shave it because it feels awful to kiss. But … next date? Lip reading? Me?”
“Everyone just assumes I lip read,” she says. “Like it comes free with the Deafness. I was born with libido, not some oralist superpower.” Stensler explains that her audiologist tried to teach her how to read lips when she was young, but she was distracted the whole time by how fine the doctor was. “My jaw was on the floor instead of practicing vowel shapes.”
Stensler concludes, “I guess men just like to talk, and hearing people assume we want to listen to them.”