Woman A: In the past, I liked "hearing impaired" or "hard of hearing." I didn't like to refer to myself as being deaf because to me, being deaf meant I had absolutely no hearing.

Since my eardrums still work, I can sense vibrations from noisy things like stereos, megaphones, or shrill whistles if I'm within vicinity, but without my bilateral cochlear implants, my brain is oblivious to sounds.

So I decided to survey several DOD people to find out why this natural attraction to each other happens. Some are married to hearing spouses; others to deaf spouses from hearing families; some are partnered with other DOD people; some are from public school backgrounds; others are from deaf schools; and so on.

Yet most of the people I talked with said the same thing: it’s probably because we grew up in the same culture with the same values.

There’s a lot more to it than learning that sign for bulls%*t that everybody seems to already know. Some are now barely only able to name a snail or a turtle. Visiting your local deaf club is an excellent way to study or practice sign language long after the certificate is hung on the toilet wall. When I was a kid, I visited deaf clubs almost every week.

Or should deaf clubs do more to welcome sign language learners, hearing or deaf, with open arms? Andy volunteers for the Peterborough and District Deaf Children’s Society on their website, deaf football coaching and other events as well as working for a hearing loss charity.

Contact him on twitter @LC_Andy P (all views expressed are his own).

She said she worried about how she would sound to the people she had sex with, especially since she'd read a lot of comments online that mocked deaf people having sex. Referring to myself as deaf made me feel like all hope for me ever being able to hear was lost.

In this week's Sex Talk Realness, spoke with three women who are deaf to find out what it's really like to date as someone who is differently abled. Now, I have started to refer to myself as deaf because I no longer think it's such a bad thing.