At the time, I had no idea that my drive to walk down the aisle was such an established trope. Paralyzed brides (and grooms) getting out of their wheelchairs and walking down aisles is an entire genre of YouTube videos. Do the people who make and watch these videos know how ubiquitous they are? Even more pressing to me, have they put any energy into questioning why these videos are so popular? Why viewers relish them? Why so many brides feel the need to push themselves so very hard just to avoid using a mobility aid during an exchange of vows? Why brides believe it’s infinitely better if they don’t have mobility aids with them when they commit to joining their lives with another person?
On the surface, these videos fulfill the requirements of our favorite triumph-over-adversity stories. Yay! It feels good when someone defies a prognosis, jumps over an obstacle, accomplishes a hard-earned goal. But other stories are being reinforced here, too. Brides and wheelchairs are among the most rigidly fixed symbols in our collective stories. Brides walking down aisles are symbols of purity and goodness and beauty; we see them as the promise of the beginning of life. Mobility aids are sad symbols of defeat and disease; we see them as the promise of old age, the end. The mixing of these two symbols unsettles.
Runaway Bride came out when I was thirteen. It was THE sleepover movie. We’d line up our sleeping bags, pull out our knitting (that’s right, we were the cool thirteen-year-olds in your class), and act out all of Julia Roberts’s lines with her (as we said it, “You wouldn’t know love if it bit you in the ARMPIT!”). During my adolescence, this movie was one of many favorites, as was My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), The Wedding Singer (1998), The Wedding Planner (2001), and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), all of which include brides who stand and walk and wear long puffy dresses that are put on prime display during the essential walking-down-the-aisle scene. Countless stories, endless scenes to reinforce two fixtures: (1) The most important story for a girl is getting married, and (2) getting married isn’t for disabled girls (or queer girls, or fat girls, or older girls, and, unless you’re JLo, it would seem it’s not for girls of color, either).
I didn’t know how to picture myself wheeling down the aisle without the scene making me cringe. I felt like an imposter, trying to fool people into believing that I, too, was a pretty girl someone would want to marry. I left my wheelchair outside the doors of the sanctuary and wouldn’t even allow the support of a walker or a crutch to tamper with this scene; instead, I held on to my mom and dad as they helped me walk down the aisle toward Sam. If you didn’t know any better, you might just have seen me as a regular bride, pretty and perfect and pure. The music was dramatic, and the pews were filled with six hundred faces watching me take one step after another. I knew it was an important moment. When I think about it now, though, I don’t remember the grip of my parents’ hands or Sam’s face at the end of the aisle. I don’t even remember the labor of lifting each foot. I just remember feeling detached from myself, out of my body, watching the scene from above. Just like a movie, I wasn’t actually there.
* * *
As you probably have guessed, the marriage didn’t go well. Turns out trying to partner up with your obnoxious little brother is not a sustainable gig. The brutality of being married to a person you’ve chosen out of fear and convenience was a fast lesson in realizing that being partnered with just anyone is not the end-all, be-all setup I’d always imagined. Being loved by a boy can actually be a real-life nightmare. In fact, being entirely alone could be exponentially better—more fulfilling and satisfying and exciting—than being partnered with the wrong person.
Out of desperation to get out, I found myself boldly unafraid of solitude, independence, or even being undesirable to potential love interests. What I found in this fearlessness was delicious: Nights alone drinking red wine and chomping down whole bowls of popcorn with Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote. Sleeping in late with purring orange cats circling the top of my head. Reading every Jane Austen novel with hot drinks clumsily concocted from my sputtering, thrifted espresso maker. I leaned heavily into this sacred solitude for years.
Once I realized I was happy alone, there was a comfort in keeping it that way. I didn’t go on dates much. I was more the type to develop a crush on a person I barely knew, read every social media post they’d ever made, and finally, after months of truly unattractive obsessing, send them a random, easy-breezy message with the secret hope that they would respond with a declaration of love. Because, after all of that silent pining, HOW COULD THEY NOT?
I finally started an online dating account because (1) my roommate got a serious boyfriend, and the pair of them seemed very invested in getting me a boyfriend of my own, and (2) I was curious. So much of my rationale on dating and relationships had developed entirely in my head. I had one shitshow of an experience, and the rest had played out on screens and in magazines and was twisted into something defeating and excruciating. At the empowering age of twenty-eight, I wanted to see: Would a wheelchair really be a giant obstacle for people? Would I put all this thought into my online profile and hear crickets in response? Or worse, would men be cruel? Would they laugh at me? Would they fetishize me? I was prepared for some uncomfortable dates that would make for great stories I could later recount for the entertainment of my best pals. I was even prepared for getting hurt. I wouldn’t let myself hope for much more than that.
I’m pretty sure I put more time and energy into curating my profile than any other online dating citizen. I agonized over which pictures to use, trying to find just the right number that included my disability, but to just the right proportion. What handful of images could convey that disability was a part of me without eclipsing all of me? How could I emphasize that I loved my nieces and nephews and eating take-out on porches and my own funky style without pretending that my paralyzed body wasn’t a part of all of it? How could I invite people to really see me without scaring them off?
In the box designated for additional information about me, I wrote: “The wheelchair thing gives me a unique perspective on life, and it doesn’t slow me down much—I drive a truck and love hanging out with my friends around the city. I value my independence, but also appreciate the relationships I have where I feel safe/close enough to accept help from time to time. It’s not awkward for me at all if you have any questions about this part of me. What else . . . ? I think the most beautiful things are found in improbable places and the most mundane moments can also be miraculous. I value authenticity and originality. I think it’s important to always strive to be a kinder, more compassionate, and generous person.” I pondered over every word, every tone and shade.
I realized very quickly that few men had put a quarter of the thought into their profiles. In fact, I’m not sure how many men who contacted me had even glanced at my carefully crafted page long enough to see the wheelchair in two of the eight images.
At first I was pretty bored with the whole dance. There was the older guy with kids who only ever sent me long, quippy messages about how ordinary his life was. I found myself wondering what it might be like to be someone’s stepmom, but the messages slowed, and I hardly noticed. There was the sweetie pie in the blue baseball cap who met me for ice cream on a Saturday afternoon and clearly didn’t know what to do with a first date who asked follow-up questions after every little life detail he shared:
“And then my parents got divorced, and I went to live with my mom . . .”
“What was that like?”
“Fine? Okay. I guess?”
“Really. It was ‘fine’?”
“Yeah. So anyways . . .”
That guy continued to send me dragon pun memes for weeks after our date, which still mystifies me. I liked the dragon pun memes. I didn’t like one-word answers to my prodding questions. We didn’t go on a second date.
Then there was the heavily cologned fellow who didn’t say a word about my wheelchair until I brought it up more than an hour into our dinner. When I asked him what it meant to him that I had a disability, he
deflected and minimized without missing a beat. “It’s not like it defines you,” he said. To be fair, what an awful question to pose to a person on a first date. Out of the blue, BAM. Go! Also, how interesting to have this guy across the table define for me the place that disability had in my own life. I don’t remember what I said, but in my fantasy life, it was heavy with sarcasm: Ooooh! That’s the role disability plays in my life! I’d been hoping someone would tell me.
My forever favorite interaction from online dating was with the scientist—a problem-solver, finding his great riddle in the disabled woman he’d met online! Really, I should have stopped messaging this guy as soon as he started educating me on my profession teaching English (a profession that he did not share. Not even close, Mr. Science Guy). I knew this was going nowhere fast. But I was also very curious. What else might this man have to teach me? Soon I discovered he had a plan for curing my paralysis. It turns out, he had transformed his experience of type 1 diabetes through a very specific diet (which might make some sense?—I wouldn’t know), and he was convinced that my ailments could also be solved, at least partially, through a similar regimen (which makes no sense, and I would know). We’d probably have to add some exercises to the routine, but, as he assured me, he’d figure it out.
After a month of these fun times, I was amused, but little more. I had not felt a single spark of connection—in fact, nothing that even approximated a sizzle. I felt like an odd duck. Not necessarily because of the wheelchair in my dating profile pictures, but because something about the way I saw the world didn’t match these people I’d met. Was it the wheelchair that had shaped that lens? Surely in part, right? Mixed with being the youngest of six in a family fueled by feelings and storytelling and the understanding that we had no money all with a backdrop of chemotherapy and surgeries and braces on my legs under the glow of the Midwest in the 1980s and 1990s. All of it, forces at work shaping me into the person who just couldn’t brush by life’s painful or complicated bits. My parents’ divorce was fine. Disability doesn’t define me. The paralysis can be fixed. None of it was traumatic. It just didn’t make my eyes dance.
This confirmed what I’d been thinking for a while, but this time, it didn’t feel as ominous. My story probably wouldn’t include romance. I wasn’t a good fit for partnering with another person. And truly, that was okay with me. I liked my story as it was. I liked who I was on my own. This was a hard-earned space I’d created for myself, and I was grateful to rest there.
And then, one measly month into the online dating, there was Micah. I found his face while scrolling through pages of profile pictures with my mom, giggling at all the shirtless, bathroom-mirror selfies. We both paused over his charming half grin. He wasn’t in a bathroom, no mirrors were in sight, and he was wearing a shirt!
“Send him a smiley face!” my mom demanded. She was giddy over his half smile.
“Hold on,” I said, grinning back at his photo. “Let’s just see about this Micah, 28.” As I scrolled through his profile, I felt tiny little lovebirds flapping around my head. First, he knew how to write a sentence, including the proper use of a comma between two independent clauses connected by a conjunction, which was pretty much a seduction dance in my book. The more I read, the more I marveled. Was this a real person? Had the internet created him out of a lifetime collection of my Google searches and online shopping? This guy valued storytelling, curiosity, and artistic expression. He liked one-on-one conversations and was looking for someone who would be easy to talk to (Ding! Ding! Ding!). And, the real clincher, he made a joke reference to Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Hello, you may have my heart right here and now, really, here it is, it’s yours. I sent him a smiley face.
By the time I’d gotten in my car for the drive home, Micah had sent one back. I learned only later that we almost missed that connection. He had three weeks left on his subscription to the dating site and hadn’t checked his account for messages in months. Fifteen minutes after I sent the little smiley face, he had gotten back on. He thought the smiley face had been waiting for weeks. For all he knew, it had been. I like this detail in the story. It’s the sprinkle of serendipitous in a digital romance constructed by algorithms. We sent messages back and forth into the night.
Actually, we sent messages back and forth through the month of September. Messages about birth order, both being the spoiled, angsty youngests, and how much we essentially idolized our older siblings. We each praised the other for pursuing an impractical, soul-nourishing degree in college, talked about our childhood connections to C. S. Lewis and Roald Dahl, and argued over the merits of Team Peeta versus Team Gale. (Team Peeta all the way, obviously.) As our messages expanded, they deepened. We talked about longing and grief, suffering and joy, deconstructing and reconstructing our personal beliefs about faith and church and religion. It wasn’t until two weeks in, on September 13, that Micah asked me about my wheelchair. Gracefully, with care and curiosity in the middle of a back-and-forth thread about pain and empathy, he wrote: “You mention in your profile that you’ve used a walker and a chair since you were young. Is that something that has taught you empathy? How has it shaped your life? Maybe it’s a ridiculous request, asking you to fit such a large matter into a typed message, and maybe there’s a more polite way to be curious about such a situation, but curious I am, and so I ask.” His question, his tone, his word choice delighted me. I treasured his genuine curiosity. Not a greedy grab for gory details, but humble interest. An acknowledgment that he didn’t know what it meant to me, and he wasn’t about to step in and try to fix anything. He simply extended an invitation for me to share my stories. I couldn’t have crafted the inquiry better myself.
We spent our first date eating giant cookies dipped in big mugs of coffee on a Wednesday night. When I coasted up the ramp to meet him, I don’t remember thinking about how he saw me—what the image of my paralyzed body sitting in a wheelchair might mean to him. Why is that? Maybe, in that moment when I saw him sitting alone on the patio of the coffee shop, I trusted that I was already so much more complicated to him than just one wheelchair or one turquoise dress with a lace collar (which is what I’d chosen to wear after three hours of deliberation). I rolled my hands into a pretend telescope (like I was a pirate sighting him across the ocean?) and said, “It’s you! You’re a real person!” We sat under a red umbrella, and I started talking too much, too fast, and he smiled and bobbed his head and chuckled sweetly. Hours passed, I calmed down, and we hadn’t even begun to run out of things to tell and ask each other. Even when it started pouring rain, we huddled closer under our red umbrella and giggled at just how wild the storm was getting—were those actual rivers of water rushing down the street behind us?
Our first date was sweet and perfect. Then we had some weird ones. Like the moment during the second date when he told me he’d been a real heartbreaker in high school, and I sort of gagged in my own mouth and decided that I probably couldn’t ever love him. Because who attracts endless love interest in high school of all times? People I can’t identify with. Or our third date, when he invited me over to hang out with his roommates to watch Hot Rod, and I glared at the TV the entire time. Because (1) I kind of hate movies where you’re supposed to laugh when the characters crash or get smashed by heavy moving objects, and (2) Micah’s roommates were great and all, but I didn’t really want to hang out with Micah’s roommates.
On one of those early dates, we went thrift store shopping, and Micah confessed he didn’t know how to walk with me. “Do I walk behind you? Do I rest my hand on your handlebar?” I didn’t know what to tell him, but I liked that he let me in on his uncertainty. “I don’t know, how does this feel?” I asked, grabbing his hand and dragging him up the aisle. At first he didn’t want to push me anywhere. To him, it felt aggressive, controlling—the opposite of his driving force. “To me, it sort of feels like we’re holding hands,” I said. He considered. He hadn’t thought of it that way before. And bit by bit, we created our own currency, our own intimac
ies, our personalized displays of affection. From scratch, we imagined our love to life. Micah pushed my chair by slipping his hands behind my back. He kissed the top of my head while we moved down the street. I rested the back of my head on his forearm. He lifted me out of my chair and into the car to avoid the puddle by the passenger door. I gave him rapid-fire kisses on his cheek and committed his smile wrinkles to memory.
I was sure Micah was worried about sex, but he didn’t bring it up. In my head, fears about sex was the #1 reason nondisabled people didn’t ask out disabled people. That was definitely on my radar, and I hadn’t even been on Reddit yet. I felt an urgency to soothe any fears he might be keeping close to his chest, so one afternoon, sitting on my orange couch under the frosty window, I asked. “Do you have any questions about sex?”
Micah was casual and calm. “I actually read a few blogs and a really helpful article about sex and paralysis.”
“Did you?” I asked, amused and delighted. How simple, how helpful, how smart!
“Yeah, I mean, I felt a little silly, because they all basically said, ‘Of course disabled people can have sex.’”
I beamed at this curious, intelligent person I’d picked to sit with me on my orange couch, to introduce to my cranky cats, to spend all of my Saturdays with. He made the unimaginable love story feel so ordinary.
A couple of years after Micah and I had been together, I went to his winter work party with him. Earlier that month I had passed the comprehensive exams for my PhD program, which felt like an enormous feat, and I had just buzzed my hair as a sort of empowering celebration. I was feeling in the prime of my radiance and strength. Micah and I were happy together, and I felt particularly beautiful with my recently shorn head. I entered that party feeling valuable. Two gin and tonics in and I was having a blast, meeting Micah’s co-workers, putting faces to stories. The hall was dimly lit, and a buzz of energy was running through the room.
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