From Sex To Ghosting, These Are The Realities Of Dating With A Disability

Lucy_Scope

From Elle

When Frances Ryan began researching her new book Who Wants To Be Normal?, she discovered that there's one part of life that's stuck in the dark ages for disabled women.

‘Can you have sex?’ It is not exactly a charming come-on straight out of a Nora Ephron movie, but it is something I, and I’d bet many other disabled women, have been asked at some point in our dating lives.

Whether it’s the apps, bars, or a sweaty man on the bus at 4pm, disabled women in 2025 still navigate old fashioned and often toxic attitudes towards disability and relationships.

These range from the myth that disabled women don’t want romance or sex like other adults (or deserve the choice not to want it), or that a partner would be a ‘saint’ for ‘taking us on’, to the idea being visibly disabled means we’re not desirable in the first place. To some, a woman sat in a wheelchair snogging her boyfriend is akin to seeing a fish on land. It just ain’t natural.

When I wrote my book, Who Wants Normal? about life as a disabled woman in Britain today — and interviewed over fifty well-known women and non-binary people with mental and physical health conditions for it — I found huge progress in many areas compared to even a few decades ago. From being shut out of schools and jobs as recently as the 1990s, disabled women today have made waves in everything from the workplace to representation. But I was struck by how one part of life seems stuck in the dark ages: relationships.

Incredibly, just 5% of people in the UK who aren’t disabled have ever asked out, or been on a date with, a disabled person, according to research by Scope. We might hope younger generations are more progressive but even Gen Z is apparently struggling: a recent survey by Tinder into the dating attitudes of 18– 25- year-olds found that only half of users would consider dating someone disabled or neurodivergent.

The reply Coronation Street actor Cherylee Houston, who uses a wheelchair, received online when she disclosed her disability to a potential date sums this up starkly: ‘I got an email back saying, “I’m really sorry but my sister’s handicapped herself and that’s not something I’d want to do in life.

Such **** attitudes don’t just impact how we’re treated on dating apps — they also alter how we’re treated by wider society: from the fact less than 2% of refuge spaces in the U.K. can accommodate a woman with limited mobility to a GP assuming a wheelchair user doesn’t need a smear test. If disabled women don’t have romantic or sexual relationships like ‘normal women’, why should we have access to women’s services?

This inequality around dating and sex is only compounded by the fact we’re encouraged never to mention it. Even writing this article felt unusual or strangely exposing. As comedian Rosie Jones, who has cerebral palsy, put it to me: ‘Disabled people and sex . . . it feels like it’s still quite a taboo subject, doesn’t it?’

Growing up with a disability, I know this awkward silence mixed with negative stereotypes had an impact on how I imagined my future. Just like I rarely saw a disabled character on TV or film who was a lawyer or doctor, I hardly ever saw one who was a girlfriend or mum either. Even Love Island took until 2022 to have a female contestant with a disability (and that led to ableist trolling).

You don’t need to be a Charlotte York hopeless romantic for this messaging to get to you, marking your flesh and heart over the years in a thousand small secret ways. I have never wanted to get married and would prefer a Cocker Spaniel to a baby, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t shaped by the way the world spoke — or didn’t — about disabled people and relationships. Prejudice and exclusion is like a mirror at the fairground: it distorts and limits how disabled women see ourselves, and how others see us.

And yet despite it all, I feel something I think they call hope. Many of the women who generously shared their stories with me for my book were in loving long-term relationships (Houston ditched the internet and is now heading for her tenth anniversary). Others had made choices that were right for them, whether that was taking a break from the apps or going full Miley Cyrus and figuratively writing their own names in the sand. Yes, there were hurdles and heartbreak along the way to happiness, as there are for non-disabled women too, but their health conditions hadn’t stopped them from searching for it. If anything, their disabilities had helped them filter out the prospective partners not worth their time (actor and activist Jameela Jamil, who needs extra rest from sore joints, credits only dating men ‘who love bed as much as I do’.)

Perhaps it is time everyone else caught up. Perhaps it is time for every man hiding behind a screen to realise intrusive sexual questions are not flirting; for your local pub to install a ramp so that meeting a perfect stranger isn’t blocked by a couple of steps; for dating shows to have disabled contestants, not as a token but one in four of the population. Because disabled women don’t need to change in order to be worthy of love — society does. Or to put it another way: It’s not me, babe. It’s you.

Who Wants To Be Normal? The Disabled Girls' Guide To Life by Frances Ryan, published by Fig Tree, is out now.

Kimi87

Very keen to read, just checked Spotify and the audiobook is available with my subscription 👍🏻

Lucy_Scope

I want to read it @Kimi87 too- she is a brilliant speaker