How my disability became a secret weapon on the dating scene

From Women's Agenda by Lisa Cox

I’ve been happily married for over 11 years but back when I was dating with a disability, I unexpectedly found it to be a way to weed out the w*nkers.

Dating with a disability was a whole new experience for me after acquiring my visible and invisible disabilities in my early twenties. It was several years before I cautiously ventured out onto the dating scene in my wheelchair with horror stories that I’d read on the internet running through my head.

Given some comments from strangers, it was clear that now that I had disabilities, I was expected to lower my standards and ‘take whatever I could get’. In conversations I’ve since had with others in the disability community, I’m not alone in this observation. That was certainly something I wasn’t prepared to do.

While I never felt I needed a relationship for validation or to amplify my self-worth, I ached for that friendship that was unlike any other. Not just because we’d be lovers too but there were things that only that special someone would understand about me and only I would understand about them.

My friend Rose introduced me to online dating, and I Googled “How to write a dating profile when you have a disability.” The responses terrified and depressed me as I read about some of the cruel and nasty comments sent to people with disabilities.

People often think of a disability and something like a wheelchair as a hindrance when it comes to dating but in a strange way, I sometimes saw it as my secret weapon. Take for example the multiple encounters I would have with a certain type of cretin when I was out.

Let me set the scene for you. I’d make playful eye contact with someone from across the bar where I stood with my wheelchair and other disabilities completely hidden from view (I can stand up if I have something to hold onto). Thinking I was interested, they’d come sauntering around the bar, charisma dripping like an oily olive. I tried my best not to throw up as I lowered myself into my wheelchair.

Like clockwork, they would spot the wheelchair, and their attention would suddenly be diverted to an urgent phone call, an urge to visit the bathroom, or an invisible mate on the other side of the room.

Once again, my life, aside from being one big medical experiment, was also one big social experiment in how comfortable or uncomfortable society is with disability. I totally get that people have types, but when I thought about the men who had disappeared upon discovering I had a disability, I didn’t feel sorry for myself. Instead, I felt like I had dodged a bullet and felt sad for their future partners.

What if their future partner became unexpectedly ill, disabled or occupied a body that was a different size or shape? Taking a sharp left to check your phone or go to the bathroom wouldn’t be as easy then would it.

According to the World Health Organisation, we’ll all become permanently or temporarily disabled at some point in our lives. And given that almost one fifth of Australian’s already identify as having a disability, it’s something society needs to become a lot more comfortable with.

And it’s not just the dating world where people with disabilities face social bias. Unfortunately, the problem is systemic and leeches deep down into all sorts of social outcomes like education, healthcare, housing, and employment. Here’s just one example.

Let’s assume for a moment that those individuals from the bar were in fact recruiters, employers, government policy makers, or someone making decisions about the future of people with a disability.

Obviously, the situations – dating and employment – are very different, but what is constant is a poor social attitude about people with a disability – a lowered expectation, an assumed lower worth. If they couldn’t even be bothered speaking to a person with disabilities on a night out, then I doubt they’d be prepared to invest money and hire us.

People with disability are the world’s largest minority, according to the United Nations. In Australia, people with disabilities are employed at approximately half that of people without disabilities. There are many reasons people with disabilities don’t work and while employment may not be a goal for all of us, for many it is. One of the biggest barriers to employment is not the stairs at the front door, it’s the attitudinal barriers and bias from recruiters. Numerous global studies have also supported this unfortunate reality – disability discrimination in the workplace is happening at staggering rates