Overcoming Insecurities
Disability and Sexuality
Having sex is weird for everyone but when you have a disability particularly a physical disability as I do it can be especially daunting. Now you’re probably thinking, ok so I have a disability or even if I don’t, should I put myself out there? What if I get rejected? The answer is yes you absolutely should put yourself out there and yes you probably will face rejection and a lot of it, I know I did but when you find the right person you realize that putting yourself out there was totally worth it.
I have always been a sexual person for as long as I can remember and I have always had the desire to not just have casual sex but be in a loving, committed long-term relationship with a woman. The trouble was that for many years women did not see me as sexually attractive or someone that they would want to hook up or be in a relationship with. Often I would get placed into the dreaded “friend zone” category which is very easy to get put into but almost impossible to get out of kind of like molasses or quicksand.
Dressing in sweatpants, ugly sweaters, and going without a haircut for months didn’t exactly help my quest of finding a woman either, and having someone come up to me on the street one time and ask if I was homeless didn’t help.
After years of no sexual attention and wanting to be sexually active I finally started listening to the advice that a couple of my friends had given me about style, posture, confidence, and how to in general carry myself. I then took dramatic steps to improve my chances because I wasn’t getting younger. Suddenly women who would have normally turned me down years before found me attractive.
Now just because I finally started to take steps to improve my chances did not mean that I made the best choices all the time, in fact, I was so focused on trying to have any intimate experiences that my common sense about what kind of person they were was dismissed in my brain. When it comes to disability and sexuality it’s not straightforward, it’s actually complicated because when you have a disability like mine which is called cerebral palsy your arms and legs move differently so you can’t just undo a bra or pick up your partner and dominate them and you are somewhat dependent on them to help you do things so the power dynamic is very different.
Those of us with disabled bodies are often afraid of what potential partners will think when they see us naked or when we say “I can’t do that because of how my body is.” As people and especially people with disabilities, we are constantly thinking will this person accept us, are they going to say “forget it” and walk away once they realize what is involved? Will that person that we are intimate with be ok with the drool that we can’t control or spastic movements or a wheelchair?
Although my confidence was getting better it was still in bad shape because I didn’t like how I looked and how I came off to people and I had a lot of fears. As a result of my state of mind, I ended up settling for not ideal experiences where some women would hook up with me to escape from a current bad relationship, push me to buy them things, try to blackmail me, and verbally abuse me calling me insulting names and other women would hook up with me just to fulfill a kink they had but rarely did they want to be seen in public being intimate with me or even open up the idea of being in a relationship with me and this hurt a lot. Why did I put up with it? I just thought that was the best I could do and I was just happy that they wanted to be intimate with me.
It’s really true that as soon as you stop looking for something that’s when you find it and that is exactly what happened to me. I was trying so hard to find a woman that it became my end goal and I completely lost track of who I was and the things that I liked to do. Once I started focusing on the things that I actually enjoyed doing and got the mental support from different friends, that’s when I met the right woman for me.
Part of the problem is that for many years people with disabilities have been kept in institutions away from society so there is this assumption that we can’t or don’t what to be sexually active which is totally not the case. If you are into someone with a disability, romantically or sexually take a risk and see what happens, you might find someone truly incredible that can make you go “damn” and for those with disabilities it might be scary to put yourself out there to people but you have to because when the right person comes they won’t be looking at all the things that might not work or might be challenging they will be looking at what makes you, you and distinctly attractive.
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