Love or livelihood: Can I have a relationship as a disabled person?

I hope to fall in love one day. But as I get farther and farther away from 40, the prospect of being in a relationship feels more like a dream than reality.

My social life involving the opposite sex has been virtually non-existent over the past two decades. Sure, I've asked girls out. Yes, I have “gone out” with girls, but never on an actual date. For one reason or another, my wheels and feet eventually get firmly planted in the "friend zone."

Now, my lack of "rizz" notwithstanding, an article I recently came across has me thinking my soul-crushing shyness isn't the only problem I will need to overcome.

In this article on 19thnews.org,, Caregiving reporter Sara Luterman talks about how getting married could mean losing life-saving benefits for some people with disabilities. The piece features couples going through this situation and explains how a disabled person with a romantic partner could find themselves choosing between the love of their life or keeping services that essentially keep them alive.

It's a lot more complicated than what I can explain in a blog post, so I recommend you read the article when you have a moment. For now, I wanted to offer my perspective on the situation.

I think this is horrible. The fact that these issues come up is appalling. Our disabilities already take so much from our lives, to have the bureaucratic rules and regulations add more hindrances than help is ridiculous. The services we receive for the daily care that help us live should not be threatened because we choose to fall in love; an emotion that non-disabled people get to experience without penalty.

These rules were made decades ago. A time when people thought differently. A time when most people thought people with disabilities weren’t worthy enough to experience love, or too broken to have someone love them back. A lot has changed since then. Disability is becoming more accepted in mainstream society and we are becoming more open-minded. Maybe that will lead to good news.

This issue was brought to my attention soon after I became a quadriplegic and it has always been in the back of my mind. It's now made its way forward and becoming more prominent as the days go by. Hopefully, we will see changes in the marriage penalty in my lifetime.

For now, I will continue to be a hopeless romantic and believe that one day I will get to experience love. Happy endings and true love will continue to be notions mostly seen on the big screen and in the Hallmark movies I embarrassingly admit to watching. Right now, a girlfriend might not be in my immediate future but who knows, maybe I will find myself as a man, sitting in front of a woman, asking her to love him.