Transcript: How not to teach your girlfriend about being deaf (Repeat)

This is a full transcript of How not to teach your girlfriend about being deaf as first broadcast on 14 April 2017.

BETH - Hey it's Beth Rose here from the team and you know, at BBC Ouch, ti is the season… for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. We're just days, hours, moments away from BBC Ouch Storytelling Live event at the BBC's Blue Tent, depending on when you're listening to this. We're all so excited about it because there are some brilliant stories coming your way very soon.

But, we thought we'd give you a retro-treat first. Remember our very first storytelling event? - Way back in March 2017 when we took over a London comedy club.

Gianluca Trombetta told us a very funny story about how not to teach your girlfriend about being deaf. It's a repeat, but it's definitely worth a second listen.

AUDIENCE - [applause]

GIANLUCA - Hello. I didn't expect that response. Okay, so I grew up with hearing loss, moderately severe, which means that essentially I can't function in society without my hearing aids. So I've got these small devices, they're really tiny, I don't know if you can see them from over there. And the funny thing is that I didn't wear them until I was like 20 years old, so for the first 20 years of my life I didn't hear much. So how did I get by? I essentially just hung out with a lot of loud people. [laughter] Literally.

So I grew up in Italy so you've heard some of those people over there, [strong Italian accent] they speak very loudly over there, so it wasn't that difficult to find them. So I have a girlfriend, her name is Elise, she is British, from Newcastle but she doesn't have a Geordie accent otherwise I'm not sure I would understand anything she is saying.

She instead has a posh really gentle accent, but she speaks very loudly and she moves her hands a lot and as an Italian I find this very attractive. [laughter] The only thing, she can speak quite fast so one time I remember she was trying to buy a flat in London and she was finding it very hard, I remember she was saying to me, [feminine voice] "Oh Gianluca, buying a flat in London is so hard," she actually speaks like this, and after a couple of months things got increasingly better and I remember she was saying to me,

"Oh now things are so much better because I've found a new sister." I was like, "New sister? I thought you were an only child. What has having a sister to do with this?" "No, no, no, a new solicitor." [laughter]

Right, so a lot of misunderstandings can happen when you hang out with someone who has hearing loss, and you know, when we moved in together communication was a little bit complicated [laughs] because she is not used to speaking to someone who has hearing loss, so she speaks to me as if I have perfect hearing. And even if I wear hearing aids, the thing is that I can't hear 100%. So to give you an example, if I am in the kitchen busy doing something like cooking and you walk into the room and start talking to me right away when I'm not seeing you I can't hear, very likely, the beginning of what you just said.

Even worse, if you speak to me from a different room. So I had to tell Elise, "Look, when you speak to me speak while facing me and speak loudly, don't cover your mouth, don't mumble etc, and don't speak to me from another room."

But Elise will forget about these things so I had to come up with a new strategy. So my strategy was dog training. I was going to train Elise as if she was a dog and I thought that was a good idea, right. So every time I couldn't hear her I will interrupt Elise and I will call her by her name, I will tell her what she did wrong. [laughter] "Elise, you didn't speak while facing me," or "Elise, you were mumbling," or "Elise…" I'm annoying myself now, imagine how annoying I was to her. [laughter]

So obviously I thought this was a great idea and I kept going, I took it one step further, I introduced the marks on the wall. So we had a chalk board at home, so I'd say, "Okay every time, Elise, every time you make a mistake we're going to make a mark on the wall." [laughter] Right?

And she was like… Well, she did not make any marks on the wall but she made mistakes, and I was like making marks on the wall instead. Actually it didn't work out because believe it or not I realised one day that she wasn't a dog. [laughter]

But it used to be different back home, I come from a family, we are 14 people, you know, many children and everyone is loud, everyone is very loud, you can't really understand how loud they are, and every time I go back for Christmas I have to take my hearing aids off. [laughter] It's just crazy.

But, you know, I'm glad I have hearing aids because when I didn't wear them, as a child for example, I didn't know that some things made a sound. So this sucked because I wanted to be a ninja and I couldn't, a ninja in the sense that I really loved to be really stealthy and scary, I don't know why, I just liked that. And I remember once I wanted to give a fright to my mum and I remember she was watching TV downstairs and I was upstairs and I was like, oh yeah [laughs] it's the right time. And so I was looking at her and I started going down the stairs very stealthy and I was slowly, slowly getting around the couch, I go one foot from her ready to jump on her and she turns around and says, "Gianluca, what are you doing there?" And I'm like, "How did you know?" So I didn't know at that time that my trousers, they were synthetic trousers, they made a really loud noise. [laughter]

So I thought I was being really stealthy but I wasn't, right.

But I learned that so now I'm a really good ninja and Elise loves that. [laughter] And so as you can imagine I didn't solve our communication problems being a ninja, what really worked was, you know, something really weird, we call it micro date, right? We had to think about how to solve our communication problems in a completely different way, so what we decided with the micro date, the way this works is that every night or every other day we will sit down for ten minutes, maybe over dinner, and we would discuss what things went well, what didn't go well and Elise usually will open this micro meeting by saying, "How did it go today? Could you hear well? What can we do better?" And after a couple of meetings we decided a couple of ground rules.

The first rule was that we would always speak in the same room, no exceptions. And the second rule was the attention rule, so Elise will always try to get my attention first and I will always give my attention to her, so I will stop doing something and tune in.

This worked because we were both relaxed, and we were open to accept criticism, and it wasn't like I was trying to interrupt her all the time which was really frustrating.

And Elise even came up with her own ways of calling my attention that wasn't by using my name all the time which is a bit awkward in the house, "Gianluca, Gianluca," and so what she did was to start using filler words, so before starting to speak to me she will start saying, "By the way," or "You know what?" and this is great because it gave me the time to tune in and I miss much less now but I still miss things, but a beautiful thing is that I don't get frustrated anymore because I know that she cares. Thank you.

AUDIENCE - [applause]

BETH - I'm a really big fan of that story and you know what? He travelled all the way over from Bali as part of a trip to London to take part - he's a digital nomad, so the beach is basically his office.

So, by now you definitely know we have an event at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on August 9th. Tickets have gone, but you can stay tuned because we have some really special podcasts coming. Not only will you hear some of the storytellers, and their live routines, but also Emma Tracey is back, so get ready to tune into some great, new, podcasts including, the disabled dad's take over.

And as ever, keep in touch. You can find us on Facebook, just search BBC Ouch, on Twitter we're @bbcouch and of course you can email us, [e-mail].