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Key points
- Feeling like your partner isn’t hearing you is an incredibly frustrating experience.
- When stressed, we attune to high and low pitched sounds—not the sounds of human speech.
- Here are the cues that your partner isn't attuned, and ways to talk that actually work.
One of the most frustrating parts of a relationship is feeling that your partner isn’t listening to you. It can happen in everyday communications, such as when they look down at their phone while you’re speaking, or during important talks, when you’re pouring your guts out and they stare at you with a blank face.
While the impression you get is that your partner doesn’t care, the reality is that they may be physically incapable of listening.
Like all other species on the planet, we are wired for survival. Our systems are hypersensitive to potential danger. When the body goes into a stress response, the muscles in our inner ear tighten, attuning our hearing to high-pitched frequencies (for example, sirens and screams) and low-pitched frequencies (for example, earthquakes and trees falling). When we regulate out of a stress response and feel safe again, these muscles relax, tuning us into the middle-range frequencies where human dialogue resides.
Therefore, when your spouse is stressed about work and constantly checking their phone, it’s not about you not being important. It’s more that they are stressed and seeking to manage the situation. To add insult to injury, a phone ding is the perfect resonance for a stressed-out ear.
When you’re in a serious fight and emotions run high, your partner literally can’t hear you. They are tuned to a different frequency, making true discussion impossible. Even though thoughts and feelings have built to a breaking point and it can feel productive to air these grievances, a fight is not the right way to do it.
Instead, register those thoughts and feelings and find a calm, connected time to discuss them. Know that having the conversation, even when calm, can produce a stress response that makes it harder for your partner to engage; watch for signs that they are stressing out and therefore tuning out. Has their breathing gotten shorter? Did they stiffen up? Are their eyes darting around the room? These are all cues that they’re stressed and potentially unable to hear you.
Share this science with them. By understanding why we tune each other out, we can take active steps to regulate our nervous systems and be there for each other more fully. For example, if a person is stressed about work, instead of answering emails in the living room, perhaps they should step away to handle work and then come back when they can be fully present. Or, if a discussion is going sideways, agree that there is too much stress for the conversation to be productive, and try another time.
When we mess up and handle things poorly, which we all do, this science gives us context on why it went south so quickly. Perhaps it will help us apologize when we’ve shut down, and forgive another when they shut down on us. We can’t help our hardware, but we can understand it, and seek to repair and connect when it fails us. We can keep showing up for each other, middle ear limitations and all.
References
Porges, S.W., & Kolacz, J. (2021). Neurocardiology Through the Lens of the Polyvagal Theory. In Porges, S.W. (Eds.), Polyvagal Safety: Attachment, Communication, Self-Regulation (pp. 1-16). W. W. Norton & Company.
