Sexual Relationships with Disabled People

This is a subject I've been pondering since a friend of mine tried to set me up with a disabled woman she knows. She described her as smart, beautiful, interesting, warm and loving, and like me, not very experienced in romantic/sexual relationships. She added that she has a non-progressive disability which affects her legs. From the waist up she looks "normal", but her legs are weak and twisted, and she uses canes or a wheelchair to get around (one result of which, apparently, is that her arms are wonderfully toned - a feature I really like on a woman, incidentally).

The biggest downside for me is not that she has a disability, but that she lives far away from me - I do not want to do another long-distance relationship if I can help it. At any rate, our correspondence did not go very well - her responses being short and infrequent - so I don't think we are very compatible, and given the distance involved this is just as well.

Nevertheless, this got me reflecting on how I feel about being in a relationship with a disabled person. As expected, not everything that came up for me was comfortable - all the more reason to examine it carefully.

My first question to my friend was, "Is her disability progressive?" If the answer that came back was something like "Yes", I would have been much more reluctant to initiate a romantic relationship, because I think that would be very painful. Still, I think I would have corresponded with her and met her if she'd been interested. I felt relieved when my friend said that it was not progressive. Still...we're all dying, and nobody knows how much time they've got. (If Six Feet Under has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that death walks beside us with each breath we take.)

I thought of times that I have seen disabled women I found attractive, and considered that one reason I wouldn't like being involved with such a person is that I really don't like having attention drawn to me, and I would therefore feel uncomfortable if I was walking down the street with someone in a wheelchair or walking slowly with canes. This is definitely in the category of "feelings I'm not proud of", and probably I'd get over that very quickly, at least I hope so.

Then I realized a deeper issue is a feeling that I would be taking advantage of such a person, or would think something like, "Well, at least she might want to get involved with me, since she probably has difficulty getting with anybody. I'm not too comfortable with that either. However, now that I've essentially been rejected by this woman, I reckon I'll have to discard that hypothesis (much to my self-referential amusement).

A flipside of the point above, which may perhaps cast me in a slightly better light is that I feel protective towards such a woman in the same way I would towards someone who feels much more feminine than myself in a given moment; therefore it might actually accentuate the masculine-feminine sexual polarity and therefore contribute in a positive way.

Another aspect of my feelings around this sort of thing is that I find that what makes someone different makes them fascinating. Someone may have an unusual accent or a strange way of thinking, they may have enormous tattoos or multiple body piercings - or they may have a noticeable disability. Whatever makes them unusual, outside the normal range, will to that extent make them more interesting in some way. So, if they are also someone that I would find attractive in some sexual way, this might count in their favor.

While all this rumination was going on, one day I was in the Art of Loving, perusing a book on cunnilingus ("boning up?" a woman I know asked me with a smirk) and came across (no pun intended) a passage about a woman who was in a wheelchair following a car accident. Her spine had to be replaced by a metal rod, and her legs were rendered useless, although she still had sensation in her genitals. Her boyfriend, who did not have a disability, loved putting her legs over his shoulders and going down on her for hours - an activity which she also greatly enjoyed. What I found most interesting was his observation that we are all only temporarily abled. That is an extremely important point, and highlights what is probably another deep shadow issue in such situations - one's own fear of sickness and death, which is undoubtably brought to the surface in such a relationship and may be an additional reason why someone might be reluctant to get involved with someone who has an obvious disability.

I am glad to have been given the opportunity to ponder these issues.