Sometimes, when you’re lying in bed, snuggled up close to your wife, she says those magic words you want to hear. They include, “I love you,” “Wanna mess around?” and “I took out the garbage for you.” Sometimes, she says something else.

This is one of those sometimes.

The other night, my wife brought up a topic I know had been on her mind for at least a year. “I think it’s time,” she said, in grave, halting tones, “for you to get a hearing aid.”

“What?” I said. After 25 years of marriage I had no idea my wife couldn’t take a joke.

“I don’t need a hearing aid,” I assured her. “Ear wax, runs in my family. On both sides.” I offered to prove it to her by taking one of those ancestry DNA tests. “It’ll be expensive, but if it doesn’t come back as 60 percent Eastern European, 8 percent Middle Eastern, and 32 percent ear wax I’ll get a hearing aid.”

The next day, I found myself at the hearing aid store. My wife, who perhaps could use a hearing aid herself—ha, ha, ha (in case she’s reading this)—only caught the last five words of that sentence.

There are a number of reasons not to get a hearing aid. And let me state, unequivocally, and before going any further, that vanity is not one of them. It just so happens that, thanks to modern technology, hearing aids today are virtually invisible. Of course, they are not as invisible as not wearing a hearing aid but, as I said, not wearing a hearing aid because you’re vain is something no responsible adult would ever do.

Unless ear wax runs in his family.

Today, nobody has to know you’re wearing a hearing aid except you. And, you will know. That’s because all of modern technology has been focused on reducing the size of the hearing aid until it takes up less room in your ear canal than your ear wax. Which, I believe I’ve mentioned, is the real problem.

So while hearing aids are a marvel of modern miniaturization, they still sound like a Philco T-50 portable transistor radio. The one with the tiny speaker that transformed Mick Jagger’s voice in Satisfaction into a fight to the death between two stoned crickets.

But the worst part of today’s hearing aids is that in a noisy room, all the sounds come out of the hearing aid at once. This is not my opinion. This is the result of extensive research during which I asked the following question over 100 times: What does the world sound like through a hearing aid?

The results, according to my mother-in-law, who finally heard me well enough to answer, was that everything sounds like the Today Show, with Al, Jenna, and Savannah simultaneously attempting to get a truthful answer from Kellyanne Conway.

Naturally, none of this was mentioned by the salesperson at the hearing aid store. He seemed more interested in practicing his sales technique, which consisted of a lot of mumbling. I’d have been more inclined to take him seriously if I could have heard what he was saying.

“Well,” I told my wife a week later, “the nice young man at the hearing aid store said I don’t need a hearing aid at all. Just a good ear washing.”

“Okay, hon. I know you wouldn’t make something like that up.”

No, I wouldn’t. Nor would I admit that when I say “What?” I mean “I heard every word.”