How Couples Negotiate Noise
- “I just can’t live another minute with those sports announcers screeching at me from the TV.”
- “I’ll drive but I’m not listening to Sinatra.”
- “I know you’re hot but I can’t sleep with the sound of the air conditioner.”
Two recent books, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want by Garret Keizer and George Foy’s expressed intolerance for noise in Zero Decibels: the Quest for Absolute Silence stirred my thinking about how couples negotiate noise.
Notwithstanding definitions that include volume and decibels, noise is perhaps best defined as “unwanted sound.” As such the definition of noise is particularly contextual and subjective.
