I’m sick of seeing this attack on men. You can not paint us all with such a broad brush. Many of us can be focused and attentive so…hey look a penny!
::wanders off::
There is no doubt, in my minnd at least, that what your father heard was “blah blah blah extra crispy; blah blah extra crispy; blah blah blah blah extra crispy” and then, in the store, said to himself, “Oh, yeah, she said something about ‘extra crispy’; that must be what she wants”.
Damn. I was going to post exactly this, almost word for word.
My dad will focus on the morning newspaper. You pretty much have to walk up and tap him on the shoulder to get his attention if he’s reading. Mom and I were tag-teaming him just the other day, to see how long it would take to get him to respond.
“Dad?”
“Bob?”
“Hey Dad?”
“Bob?”
“Dad?”
“Honey…?”
He never looked up.
Sounds like disrespect to me. If it doesn’t bother you, that’s cool, but I’m with Lissa. I wouldn’t waste my time with someone who didn’t care to listen to what I had to say, you might as well live alone.
But then I don’t think Al Bundy humor is funny either, and I think Raymond is the exact opposite of how a husband should behave. To each his or her own, people will put up with different things.
Were Men not Oprah!
Actually it’s not. It’s preoccupation. It’s just something that most men do. And it’s the price you pay for sharing a life with a man for a long period of time. It’s worth it. But I still make him clean his toilet. (Do NOT get me started about the male’s inability to aim!)
I have problems listening to my wife even when I am paying attention to her. If there is running water nearby (shower, sink, dishwasher, sprinklers, etc.), her voice goes in and out of the sloshing sound. The same with TV, radio, music, car running, etc. where the sound is near the same frequency range of her voice. It also doesn’t help when she talks to me while facing the other direction or even walking away and she mistakenly assumes that I am hearing every word she says. I don’t know if other guys have that problem, but at least I have an explainable reason.
Is he Lil Jon?
[sub]hhhhhoooooooooooWHUT?[/sub]
That’s so funny! My mom and I used to do that to my dad, too! Only we’d giggling furiously the whole time. After a good five minutes, Dad, completely clueless, would say, “Hey, what’s so funny?” It was a game we played often once we discovered how hilarious it was.
I’m ashamed to say, though, that I’ve become my father in this respect.
BTW, Fuji, I emailed a link to this thread to Mr.Cinnamon, referring him to your post in an effort to express why I’m not ignoring him on purpose. Thank you I couldn’t have said it better myself had I been distracted enough to explain.
Is that a physical hearing deficiency? I have that same problem. Foreground sounds blend in with background noise. That’s not usually the reason I don’t hear, but when I’m trying that can be a factor. Of interest, I’m usually the one who assumes everyone else can hear perfectly fine, so I often talk while walking away to go on to a new task. I am such a PITA! 
My husband does the same thing, I really feel he has a touch of ADD, which makes him either unable to focus on anything for very long, or to hyperfocus and really not notice anything other than the car commercial.
Plus, he (not me) is the one who often prattles on boringly, so I often tune him out.
So we often don’t listen to each other.
We’ve come to an arrangement: if it’s something important, where a response is required (as opposed to chatter, where ‘Unh’ is an acceptable response), we say ‘Can I have your attention for a minute.’
It sounds stilted, maybe, but now we’re both quite clear on the difference between ‘You really need to listen to this’ and ‘I just feel like chatting.’ Very useful.
I was thinking that my husband is pretty good with the listening till I read this and realized that I do something similar. There are times I will tell him something and I will preface it with a loud “listen to me, are you listening?” Usually it’s about something dumb like don’t move the blanket while I’m in the bathroom because I’m cooling off the sheet, so I can guarantee it will lose its effectiveness soon.
Having difficulty understanding the speech of women or young children is one sign of noise-induced hearing loss. Men in particular will lose higher frequencies earlier in life than women.
Most of the spectral cues for speech are found in the frequency range of 2-5kHz. When noise induced hearing loss occurs it ususally starts in the 3-5 kHz range which affects your understanding of consonant sounds.
So if you have the habit of telling someone “well, I can hear you, but I can’t understand you…” it’s because the lower (and slightly louder) vowel sounds are coming through, but your missing the Ps and Ts etc. and it’s affecting your comprehension.
Background noises, say like the rumble of traffic or music with bass, that contain a greater mix of lower frequencies (that you can hear better) will tend to drown out the frequencies you’re struggling with.
I have to agree with this, too. My husband does this all the time, and he talks a LOT more than I do. But if a TV, computer or radio is on, it’s like he’s hypnotized or something. For example, this weekend my husband was playing video games on his PC. I was painting the dining room (what? it’s fun!). He wanted to have lunch with me, so told me when to tell him I was hungry. So I walked into the back room, said, “Hey, I’m hungry. I’m going to eat now. What about you?” He was so absorbed in his game, but he said yes, and when he didn’t show up ten minutes later, I walked in again and told him I was going to make lunch for myself and that, if he didn’t come with me, he was on his own. He said, “OK, be right there.” So I walked into the kitchen, he didn’t come, so I made lunch, called, “Hey, I’m eating now! Get out here if you’re hungry!” He didn’t show up, so I went ahead and ate. Then 20 minutes later, he comes out, says, “Hey, what do you want for lunch?” When I told him I’d already eaten, he was shocked. He loses all sense of time when he’s in front of his computer, and had thought only five minutes had passed between the time I first told him I was hungry and the time he came out, when in reality it had been 30.
I’ve never thought of it as disrespect. I mean, the poor man still can’t focus on making pasta and heating up the sauce at the same time because they’re in two separate pans. When I really need him to pay attention to me, I make damn sure he does, but if I don’t, it’s really not worth getting mad over every time it happens.
Logical fallacy. How are we supposed to know that it’s important if we’re tuning you out?
Yeah, kind of like that, but most notable with running water. I suspect alot of men “suffer” from this.
Thanks, Eats_Crayons. Mr.Cinnamon is always telling me that I have noise-induced hearing loss from listening to music in my car too loud. I can barely hear it when he’s in control of the volume. But I like to hear everything in the music not just the loudest parts. I also have a tendency to bump up the bass a bit further than he prefers although not to the extreme. When I’m in his car, his settings make the music sound too tinny. So am I hard of hearing or what? Maybe it is time for a hearing test.
Gah. When will people learn? You can eliminate half the problems in your life just by not watching TV. It seems that everyone who says ‘i tune out my wife’ lists TV as a culprit. Just stop watching the darned thing.
My husband never hears anything I say until I repeat it a few times. It’s a combination of him not paying attention and him not having good hearing.
His hearing is failing, though it isn’t bad enough for hearing aids yet. He says he’s always had difficulty isolating sounds from background noises, and that has gotten worse in the time I’ve known him. Even if music is fairly loud in the car, for example, he can hear that it’s music but can’t distinguish the tune.
NIHL affects your frequency response. You damage your hearing so you start missing frequencies, so you crank up the volume to hear them – exacerbating the problem by further damaging your hearing so your frequency response gets even worse.
It happens a lot. I work in the performing arts industry, and mostly with the music industry. I know a lot of folks who have NIHL in specific frequency ranges. (And since I’m around loud music a lot , I always carry earplugs with me.)
If the music is mixed properly, your speakers are good, and you’re listening to music from CD and not radio (broadcast music is compressed quite a bit so there’s a lot you lose in fidelity) then you should be able to hear everything well without resorting to extreme volume.
In general, if other people can hear your music when your headphones are on your head, you are causing damage to your ears. Wreck the cilia (the vibro-fur in your inner ear) and that hearing isn’t coming back.
If you get a hearing test, they should be able to determine which range of frequencies you’re missing. If you get a stereo with a good equalizer, you can boost the frequenices you need without bring the overall sound level up to dangerous decibel levels.