Loving Someone With Physical Disability
This is one of the various questions confronting people with disabilities–is love possible? Cheap escorts in London believe that it is possible for love to thrive.
How do you know if he loves you when he walks past without stopping to say hi? When his friends tease him about your wheelchair or your limitations? What if he rejects baby steps and takes baby leaps instead?
The topic of disability is the focus of “Why Couples are Saying No to Non-Disabled Partners” by Jessica Valenti. With Valentine’s Day approaching, this article provides insight on the effect that partnering with a disabled person has on relationships. The article also touches upon other topics including how society perceives those who are disabled and why certain disabilities make people uncomfortable.
The author, Jessica Valenti, is the deputy editor at “The Nation” magazine. Her writing style is conversational and she writes with a journalistic style that allows readers to have a wide view of the topic without being condescending or preachy. Though she does not bring in statistics pertaining to the topic, rather she uses her personal experiences as reasoning for her conclusion.
A summary of Valenti’s article contains the following inquiry:
Will he love me when i am in a wheelchair? If not, can I live happily without him? Is it even possible to feel desire for somebody who cannot feel it back? The answer to this question is an elusive one that has never been fully explored. Valenti asks these questions of her audience, but she offers no easy answer.
Valenti explores the ups and downs of dating a man with a disability. Her first experience with a disabled man wasn’t a bad one, but it didn’t have the happy ending that Valenti had hoped for either. While being dragged along to a rehabilitation clinic Valenti noticed other women who where at the same place as she was-— trying to date men who had been disabled by war. In fact, one of those women had even “married her therapist when in love.” Valenti then comments on how that woman’s situation is both sad and understandable as she came from an Afghan family that placed no value on women’s happiness. Valenti states, “I feel far more pity for her than I ever could for the men she married. It’s not that I think her marriages were so awful-— more that if your people don’t value women or see their potential, it doesn’t matter whether you’re disabled or not.” Valenti then realizes that she doesn’t need to pity the woman because she is fortunate enough to grow up in a family where acceptance and love were unconditional.
Valenti’s second experience with a man who was disabled was also sad. She met the man on Craigslist and after meeting at his house for coffee she learns his true intentions of their meeting:”You’re the first girl who ever emailed me back I thought you’d want to see my medals.” Valenti says that she would have stayed with him but her mother’s instinct told her that he was not who he said he was. Her mother was right, as it turned out that the man had several convictions for fraud. Though Valenti admits she does miss this one man, she also admits “romantic love is always fraught.”
For Valenti’s third experience with a disabled man, things go well for a while, but eventually Valenti discovers the man is only with her because of her wheelchair
The author then asks readers to imagine what being in a wheelchair is like. Valenti describes the experience as “strange and not-at-all sexual to begin with. You can’t even feel any of your own sexuality for me, there’s no way I could ever be attractive.” Valenti also says, “There’s also electrical stimulation, but I had to turn it off because I am not comfortable with all of my nerves still intact.” She continues by saying “And of course there are no straps or buckles on a wheelchair. When you are disabled, it means that you are more of a victim than one who can demand respect.”
The author then provides some things that may surprise readers who have never known someone with a disability.