Disabled Persons Stay In The Dating Scene

Recently, at a Happy Hour, the man beside me stuck out his hand.

“Hello,” he said, and introduced himself. Then he added: “I have 20/400 vision.”

I babbled, “Yeah, my eyes are bad without my glasses, too.”

“Mine is 20/400 CORRECTED,” he said. In other words, he is legally blind.

A few days later, he called to invite me to lunch. Sure, I said. Then, it occurred to me that I’d never been asked out by a man who couldn’t see well enough to drive. In dating, first impressions carry the lion’s share of weight, and many people with disabilities fear they’ll be screened out before they can even say hello. Some figure they’ll not even try - and not trying can become a lifestyle.

One is “Lois,” a 40-year-old Broward, Fla., woman with cerebral palsy. Her first relationship, at nearly 30, was a long-distance romance with another man with a disability. That fizzled.

At 33, she married a man who “wasn’t” disabled. After two years, he left her for an able-bodied woman.

She has barely dated since.

“If I were completely able-bodied without any kind of restriction, my attitude would be very different,” says Lois.

At the other extreme is 26-yearold Steve Riley, who was accidentally shot in the neck when he was 13. He has been a quadriplegic since. After the accident “I thought, ‘How am I going to date now?’ But it works out,” says Riley, who lives in Miami.

As much as possible, he lives the way he would if he weren’t in a wheelchair. And he’s not above using his condition to get women’s attention. For starters, there’s the occasional opportune collision. Or the whoops-I-dropped-my-suntanoil ploy, coincidentally in a woman’s path. Once she stops, Riley strikes up conversation, relying on his personality to win friendship.

Disabilities can magnify the battles all of us wage with issues of practicality, sexual expression, selfesteem and society’s beauty images.

To combat hurtful societal attitudes, many well-meaning parents try to shelter their disabled children, says Robert Watson, director of a social organization called DateAble in Washington, D.C. But lack of interaction inhibits the dating skills that grow from trial and error.

“Without that learning, they just jump in, and usually they’re viewed as awkward. They’re viewed as being different,” Watson says.

DateAble is a social outlet for people with disabilities. And Watson also answers general questions about dating, including sex.

Watson, who has cerebral palsy and is married, says you have to try to meet a potential partner regardless.

“If you’re going to sit and wait in your wheelchair for that nondisabled person to come in your life, that might be a scary, long wait,” Watson says. “You just have to get out there and market yourself.”