February was a month full of in-your-face reminders about love, sex, and what relationships should look like, but rarely representative of the disabled experience.
In some respects, relationships that include disability aren’t necessarily that different than those that don’t – all romantic and sexual relationships should include some sort of communication, understanding of needs and boundaries, and hopefully the people in the relationships like each other!
But in other ways, disabled relationships are different. Your romantic partner may be your primary caregiver, or you may communicate entirely non-verbally, or perhaps you are just exploring new ways of experiencing your sexualities.
Unfortunately, these experiences aren’t as in-your-face in February, let alone any other time of year. It takes a lot of searching to find information about the specific ways you experience sexual and romantic relationships. While I can’t speak to your specific experience, there are things I have learned in my work and my own relationships that I can share with you.
Communication
In my own relationship, I notice that communication is the key to having my needs me, but also making sure my partner feels their needs are being met. An issue that I find people run into is that when you experience disability and your partner ends up taking on a major supportive role, we can start to fall into certain expectations of our partners without actually checking in about them. For example, my partner had to take on a lot more cleaning duties when I became disabled and could no longer do them. But I accidentally fell into the normalcy of it just being done and sort of forgetting that a real person with feelings is doing it and taking their ability to scrub the bathtub for granted. It’s important we acknowledge when our partners are doing things to take care of us and offer thanks and appreciation in some way from time to time.
It’s also important we find ways to meet our partner’s needs! Regardless of the limitations we might experience, there are so many ways we can show love and gratitude and offer things to our partners.
Communication also comes up in a really specific way during sex. As I have mentioned in past posts, disabled sex doesn’t necessarily look like the sex we were (maybe) taught about in school. But to get to a place of partnered exploration and pleasure, we sort of have to talk about it. If we can’t fall back on the non-creative definitions of sex, we actually have to be communicative throughout the whole process to make the sexy time even happen in the first place.
That being said, communication doesn’t just mean talking about it verbally. People of all abilities communicate in a variety of ways. We might make noises like sighing or gasping, we might look away or make very direct eye contact, we might tense or relax our bodies, the list goes on. It’s just as important to figure out how you and your partner communicate non-verbally and check in about those signals every so often if verbal communication works for you. But for folks who are non-verbal, or perhaps cannot communicate verbally during sex, it’s just about ensuring your partners know what you mean.
Caregiving
My partner is not my primary caregiver, so I can’t speak to this from a personal lens. However, I have worked with many clients who do experience this, so I’ll be pulling from the professional lens here.
The main issue that has come up for folks I work with is difficulty with changing relationship dynamics and crossovers between them. How do we go from the caregiver dynamic into something more sexual or romantically intimate? Especially if our partners are assisting us with personal care, it can be tricky to go from someone helping you in the bathroom to getting naked for a sexy reason.
One thing I offer to clients is strategies on how to mark the change in dynamic. What signal can we create to indicate to our brains and bodies that we are going from caregiver to romantic partner in “vibes”. Perhaps we ask our partner to wear medical gloves when doing more personal care tasks, and then when it comes to something more romantic, we have something to distinguish that touch. Or maybe we have a ritual we create to “get in the mood”, like setting up different lighting, or having some cuddling time. It can be kind of fun to explore what is going to work for you to essentially change the scenery, without completely separating the two roles.
The other piece to this comes from unpacking some of our own assumptions and judgements. For a lot of us with acquired disabilities, we may have had this idea that because personal care isn’t necessarily sexy, it therefore cannot be combined in any way with our sexualities. But we can all be more than one thing! We can be caregivers and lovers. We can help people with personal care needs and offer them intimacy and pleasure. We can be someone who needs help with daily tasks and sexy as hell. Being disabled does not make you unworthy of pleasure and intimacy, so someone being your caregiver does not negate them from being someone who can participate in that pleasure and intimacy.
Or perhaps the issue is the feeling of being burdensome we’ve internalised from society telling us that we are burdens. It’s hard to initiate sexy time when we already feel like “too much”.
But having needs is completely normal and not inherently burdensome. Every person has needs, some of which can be fulfilled on one’s own, and some that require another person to fulfill. Anyone who makes you feel like a burden for having needs is really not worth your time and energy.
Intimacy
There tends to be a lot of pressure around sex in romantic relationships. Sometimes this comes from partners, and sometimes this comes from societal assumptions of what relationships should look like. I believe one of the contributing factors to this pressure is the idea that only sex can bring closeness in a relationship, but there are lots of other ways to create connection and nourish a relationship through non-sexual intimacy.
I can’t tell you exactly how your relationship should explore intimacy, because it will be based on what you find important to create connection, but I can offer some prompting questions you might want to ask yourself and your partners:
- How do you like to feel loved or cherished?
- What kinds of touch (if any) do you enjoy that aren’t necessarily sexual?
- What is something you and your partners enjoy doing together?
- Are there any external factors that contribute to connecting with a partner?
- What values do you have that you can connect on through conversation or activity?
These questions are pretty open ended, but I like that they start a conversation that can lead to a lot of learning and growth. And that conversation and learning can also be intimate!
The other component to figuring out what time together might look like, is to make sure that time happens. I am a huge advocate for scheduling quality time and sexy time. It ensures that time is a priority and also gives me time to prepare. When it comes to scheduling sex, the caveat is that there is never any pressure to go through with it, and that time can always be switched to non-sexual intimacy and quality time instead, without a need for an explanation.
Dating
The most common question I get asked about dating is “when should I disclose my disability?”, and the answer is complicated. Some people have the choice to self-disclose or not until they feel comfortable with the other person, while others don’t really have that choice because their disability is more visible.
Personally, I choose to self-disclose as soon as possible, sometimes I’ll even write it in my dating profile. One reason is that I want to be visibly disabled on apps the same way I am in real life, and it will impact my ability to experience sex and dating depending on the date activities, so it feels like profile-relevant information. The other reason that I share my disability in my profile is I don’t want people who are ableist or going to be negative about my disability to even bother, almost like a vetting process. Some apps make it harder for people to see that part of your profile at first glance, but many apps allow for that information to be right up front. That being said, I don’t share anything about my diagnosis per say, that feels too personal when I am getting to know someone. I just say I’m disabled and what sort of access needs and limitations I might have.
Something you might encounter on your “dating with a disability” journey is disability fetishization. This is essentially when people over-sexualize disability to the point that the actual disabled person isn’t really important to them anymore. It’s a strange form of ableism because on the surface it sounds positive, but in the end you still get dehumanized.
Ultimately you get to decide how you want to deal with fetishization, and it can be on a case-by-case basis. Some people I’ve spoken to are okay with a bit of misplaced admiration and feel those people can be given the opportunity to learn, but many people I know delete and block them immediately. You get to decide what you’re comfortable with, and what feels worth your time.
It’s hard to cover the entire dating, romance and partnered experience in one post, but I hope this can at least offer some quick advice and new ideas and knowledge. As always, if you have questions or want more information on a specific topic, please reach out through the contact form on the Real Talk homepage.
Next month, we’ll be talking about one of my favourite topics – masturbation and sex toys! We’ll look at why masturbation and solo sex is important, tips for engaging in solo sex, and a couple of toy recommendations to make things easier and more fun.
