Living with Disabilities: Dating

 Hey everyone! Happy Friday! I hope you all had a good week and are ready for the weekend. Today I have another Living with Disabilities post for you all. This time I'm going to be talking about dating. I was originally going to do this on Valentine's Day, but that didn't happen for obvious reasons. And I decided earlier this week that it had been way too long since I'd done a Living with Disabilities post, that I would do one today since I wouldn't be watching Home Alone 3 (the movie I'm reviewing this week) until tonight, and I wanted to do something besides my Disney VHS review and my Loki review. So here we are, finally talking about dating as someone with disabilities. So let's get right into it.

Dating is probably the most difficult thing that anyone can do. Whether you're disabled or not. I mean we've all done it at one time or another, and we've all had our challenges to face concerning it. Man, woman, boy, girl, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, pansexual, you name it. Whatever you are, you've all faced some sort of challenges when it comes to dating right? Well, when you're physically disabled AND autistic those throw in a ton more challenges in additions to the ones that everybody has.

I started being interested in girls when I was in grade six, so when I was 11 or 12 (I turned 12 in December, 1998, midway through grade six) and my very first crush was on a girl I was friends with at the time. Her name was Meagan, though, being I was 11 or 12 years old, I didn't tell her or ask her out, or anything like that. Which worked out for the best because a little over a year later, she moved away and aside from a brief time a few years ago when we were friends on Facebook, I haven't talked to her or seen her since she moved a little over 21 years ago. I won't go into too much more detail, but I had crushes on other girls throughout middle school and high school. Here's the thing, none of them reciprocated. Well okay, two did. 

One was Claire and we dated when I was in grade nine for all of five minutes before she changed her mind because she didn't want to put me in a position where she had to eat in front of me when I couldn't eat (I was still being tube fed at that point). Yeah, having no esophagus and being fed through a tube meant I couldn't exactly take a girl out for dinner and participate in the activity of eating said meal. So even though we stayed friends, and she still thought I was cute, dating wasn't a thing we tried again for the remaining three years of our friendship.

The second girl to reciprocate was Keira, but of course I didn't actually know until we were adults that she liked me as more than a friend. I mean, I saw some signs, like her sitting in the guidance counselor's office with me on our first day of grade ten because I needed to get my schedule changed, us spending way too much time together, to the point where everyone at school thought we WERE dating even though we weren't, and my sixteenth birthday party where we sang "Hero" by Enrique Iglesias to each other while we waited for her dad to come pick her up after the party. So what happened? My immaturity, impatience, and most likely my autism did, and so we ended up not dating at all.

I could probably give you all sorts of examples of me getting in my own way when it comes to dating, but I won't. And then of course there were the cases of Alex and Amy having a crush on me when I was in grade seven. I've already talked about those times, so I won't talk about them again. We'll move on though.

When I was in middle school and high school I simply thought that girls didn't like me in that way because of how young we were and me being in my wheelchair almost full time, plus things like being hooked up to a feeding pump 24/7/365 didn't help things. And they were, though many people tried to tell me it was because I liked Star Trek, comic books, Power Rangers, Star Wars, and other "childish" things and if I gave those up I would be dateable. Nice try folks, because even the people who are into those things weren't interested in dating me and it's because I was in a wheelchair (I didn't know about the autism thing when I was in high school). 

When I finally got out of high school, and away from OTHS, I thought dating would get easier, because people were growing up and no longer under the pressures of socializing in high school. I was gonna be going to college, meeting lots of new people, and maybe make friends who would know someone who was single, and might be interested in meeting me. Yeah, I gave up that notion pretty quickly because college just ended up being an extension of high school when it came to social interactions. 

Now, 11 years after I left college, dating is just as difficult as it was when I was in my teens and my twenties. Maybe even more so. Especially now that I know that I'm autistic, and it explains certain behaviours of mine when I was in middle school and high school. Dating is weird though now that I'm 34 years old, almost 35. I mean women are usually able to handle my disabilities at the beginning of our relationship. I've had two girlfriends in the last 11 years, and I went on a few dates with one woman, who actually ended up being a girl I went to school with when I was in kindergarten at OCTC, so that was bizarre. It's just things never really progressed beyond those early stages where we're just becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. 

The thing about dating as an adult is that you have to take certain things into consideration. One of those things is money/finances. Our society runs on money. Especially here in North America, but also pretty much everywhere else in the world. Which means, as a person seeking to be in a romantic relationship with another person that could potentially lead to marriage, or at the very least a situation where you're living together. And so the other person isn't just looking at you to see if you're physically attractive, or if you're a sexually viable partner, because you know that that's going to be a factor that gets brought up eventually, but they're seeing if you're going to be able to contribute financially to the relationship. Especially when it comes time to live together, get married, have children (or pets), and anything else that is part of the domestic experience of human beings. 

As you all know, I'm a physically disabled man, who is autistic, and so I'm on Disability because I can't work a job like other people can. Which means I make very little money. So far me being on Disability has not been good when it comes to being in a romantic relationship. Because it's expensive to live. Groceries are expensive, rent/mortgage is expensive, maintaining a vehicle (something else I can't do is drive), and it doesn't matter if my partner has a good paying job, living is expensive enough that both of us would have to work and be making decent money in order for us to survive together. And I can't do that. My body can't handle working. It barely managed going to school when I was in college.

I'll be honest with you, dating absolutely terrifies me. Even if I find someone who doesn't care that I don't make very much money, live in my parents's house, don't drive, and don't have a job. I'm terrified because social interactions are difficult for me due to me being autistic. I miss social cues, I don't always know how to act around other people, especially if I'm meeting them for the first time, and forming those simple bonds that other people take for granted is nearly impossible. It's why making friends is really hard for me at first. Especially when that friendship ends up not lasting because I inadvertently said something to cause the other person to stop being my friend. Which is why I'm so lucky to have the friends that I have. They put up with me and some of them have put up with me for almost 20 years. Plus I've watched almost every single one of them go through their own relationships over the years and at times it makes me wonder why I would want to deal with that stuff. 

And yes, I know, you're all about to ask me why I don't do online dating right? Well, I have just one reason to not do that. Online dating is not geared towards people like me. In fact it makes all the problems real life dating has about ten times worse than they already are. Swiping left and right, messaging someone, in the hopes that she'll see my message amongst the hundreds of other messages she gets every day, actually reads it, decides she wants to get to know me and messages me back, and that will lead to us meeting in person and end up living happily ever after. And because this hypothetical woman does get messages every day, chances of her not just trashing my message without reading it first is very slim. Also, c'mon guys, it's the internet, which has so much stupidity on it.

One day I would like to have a girlfriend, who loves me regardless of the challenges we will face as an interabled couple, who is maybe okay with taking things slowly, or maybe doesn't mind if we don't live together or don't get married. But, in the meantime, or if it doesn't happen at all, I have friends to hang out with (virtually for the time being) and I couldn't be happier.

Alrighty, I think that's gonna be it for this edition of Living with Disabilities. Like I said, I had originally planned on doing this post back in February for Valentine's Day but I ended up not doing it. But I had promised I'd do it way back when I was doing posts on making friends and on my group of friends near the end of last year. I'll be back tomorrow for my review of Home Alone 3. Until then have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.