Learning a Shared Love Language — One That Includes Signing

Jerald Jerard Creer and Kent Michael Williams chalk up the almost 15-year delay in becoming a couple to a struggle to communicate — one that had nothing to do with Mr. Creer’s Deafness.

Since June 2009, when the two met on a Carnival cruise ship, Mr. Williams had been texting Mr. Creer every few weeks asking for dates. Mr. Creer routinely turned him down. For years, Mr. Williams assumed it was because of his age. “Jerald told me when we met I was too young for him,” Mr. Williams said. (Mr. Creer is seven years older.)

The truth was more complicated.

The friendship that Mr. Williams, now 42, and Mr. Creer, 49, struck up while sailing from Miami to the Bahamas had obstacles from the start. Mr. Williams, an engineer at Cox Communications then living in Baltimore, was traveling alone. Mr. Creer, a social worker, teacher for deaf people and actor then living in Suitland, Md., was vacationing with his boyfriend. Both were part of a group of L.G.B.T.Q. people of color vacationing together.

Mr. Williams remembered seeing Mr. Creer outside the ship’s nightclub a day or two into the trip and feeling drawn to him. “He’s fine,” he recalled thinking.

But he didn’t know Mr. Creer was deaf, which resulted in a stilted conversation. Mr. Creer, who considers American Sign Language his first language, can read lips and make out sounds when wearing his hearing aids. But he struggles to decipher spoken words in dim lighting and loud environments.

“From time to time, I don’t know if my hearing counterparts are adjusting to being in conversation with me,” he said of the stiltedness. That was the case with Mr. Williams. Then, there was the matter of Mr. Williams’s social anxiety. “I’m shy and introverted,” he said. “I’m still trying to figure out why I would have gone up to Jerald in the first place.”