Sunday April 1, 2012 8:04 AM
My daughter told me a few months ago that she was talking to guys via texting, guys she'd never met. My heart clenched with the panic that only a parent can know. She's 23 going on 16 — immature, in other words, not to mention trusting, naïve and protected by the imagined invincibility of youth.
You have to be careful, I told her. Don't meet any of them before having long voice conversations, I told her. If you meet any of them, do it in a public place where you've driven on your own and tell at least your sister, your best friend and me where you're going.
Ten years ago, I was a short-lived guru of online dating — and online dating with a specialty: How to do it when you have a disability.
I read a piece by a guy in London recently who uses a wheelchair. As he so aptly puts it, people with disabilities are often "sexually invisible." Women see his wheelchair first, and him maybe not at all, he says, and so he gave online dating a shot. The question he has wrestled with most, he says, is whether or not to disclose the disability. His conclusion was to do so, up front but without details, while my own experience bore completely opposite conclusions.
That experience, mind you, was an eight-month experiment about 10 years ago. I succumbed, pressured by a friend, to posting on a popular online dating site.
I developed a method: exchange emails to see if a person was interesting enough to warrant further conversation; talk on the phone several times to use my finely tuned investigative intuitive skills and then, and only then, consider meeting. If steps 1 and 2 led to 3, I would then reveal my disability.
The first two steps, not surprisingly, included covering all the usual topics — books, movies, music, my then passions of skiing and cycling, careers, personal histories. Many were weeded out early. They couldn't spell, for example (yeah, we all have our prejudices), or indicated a strong tendency toward bigotry of one form or another, or, if we reached the phone step, I just found them boring conversationalists.
If we were approaching Step 3, I might say, "There's one more thing you need to know about me before we meet," and then introduce the topic with some quasi clever line like, "If we go out to dinner, you'll have to read the menu to me."
Reactions were sufficiently varied to fill a book. There was the guy who, even after our first and second dates, really never seemed to notice. There was the guy (physician, by the way) who screamed obscenities at me over the phone when I told him, declaring that I had no "right" to be participating in an online dating site.
Overall, it was fun. I made some new friends, had some pleasant experiences and felt that my "method" was the right approach.
In conversations with others who have disabilities and have dipped a toe in the online-dating waters, however, I've learned that there doesn't seem to be a pattern. One man I know posted his picture along with his guide dog. He soon met the love of his life and has been happily married for several years. Another woman has tried repeatedly on various sites, with and without revealing her disability, and has thrown up her hands in dismay that the whole system just doesn't work.
Logic and my intuition about human nature tell me that waiting to disclose one's disability — whether online dating or in a job interview — makes most sense. The four out of five of all humans who haven't yet acquired a disability often have misconceptions about what any given disability might entail. And since no human among us is perfect anyway, it makes further sense to put the best (and perhaps most homogenous) characteristics forward first.
Maybe Londoners are sufficiently more sophisticated so that the guy who uses a wheelchair will find that his "up front" approach works well. The jury's still out, in other words, and I'm still gathering data.
Deborah Kendrick is a Cincinnati writer and advocate for people with disabilities.
dkkendrick@earthlink.net
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