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It is said that hindsight is always 20/20, and looking back on my
life, I see many things that I wish I had done differently.
Dating is one of them. I allowed my insecurities to get in the
way of my common sense, and on many occasions simply blew what could
have been very rewarding friendships.
I was a junior in high school when I had a big
crush on a girl named Cindy Jackson. I had noticed her around
campus and at the time thought that she was one of the best-looking
girls I had ever seen. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined
that Cindy might be interested in me. Never, that is, until the
day I went to the cafeteria early, only to have her come in about five
minutes later.
“Can I sit here?” she asked, pulling out a chair
on the other side of the table.
“Sure,” I replied, not knowing what else to say.
Cindy sat down, and we were both so shy that
neither of us said more than five words to each other during the
entire meal.
To my surprise, Cindy came back again the next
day. In fact, she came back every day for the next two months.
Most guys would have caught on sooner or later to the fact that Cindy
wasn’t just looking for a place to eat her lunch. She liked me!
She liked me, and I didn’t have a clue! Instead of asking her
out on a date, as I should have done, I did nothing. Every day
it was the same story. We met in the cafeteria, found a table,
ate lunch, and just looked at each other. Pathetic, isn’t it?
It’s no wonder that Cindy found another lunch table after the semester
break. It’s not that she had stopped liking me. She had
just given up on trying to get my attention—and who could blame her
for that?
I blew it again during my senior year when I
asked Pam McLaughlin to go to church with me one Sunday night. I
can’t remember what prompted me to ask her, except that she was
pretty and kind of quiet. I was such a sucker for the quiet type
back then. To my surprise, she accepted my invitation. For
the next few months, we drove into Beloit once a week to attend the
Sunday evening service at the First Church of the Open Bible. I
liked Pam and did a little better with her than I had with Cindy.
However, during all of the months that I took Pam to church, I never
once asked her out on an actual date. That would have been too
risky. If she had decided not to go to church with me, in my
mind she would have been rejecting the church, not me. I had
asked Pam out without the possibility of rejection. Looking
back, I guess there’s not much difference between asking a girl to
church on a Sunday night and asking her to a movie and a pizza.
I liked Pam, and she liked me. I was just too dense to see it.
I didn’t see Pam again after I left for college.
Taylor University was 300 miles away in Indiana, and I became too
involved in other things to try to develop a long-distance
relationship that wasn’t going anywhere. We wrote back and forth
to each other for a few months, and that was the end of it.
You may wonder why dating was so important to me.
After all, the vast majority of teenagers didn’t date when I was
growing up. And of those who did, most dated very little.
But for me, dating meant more than just going out with a girl on a
Friday night or holding hands with her between classes. It was a
sign of normalcy, a validation of who I was as a person. It was
a goal that, when achieved, would mean that I was accepted as an equal
in society.
By the same token, not dating, especially if it
was somehow connected with my cerebral palsy, only reinforced the
image I had of myself as being undatable. And in that area I did
not need a lot of reinforcement. After all, who in her right
mind would date someone with cerebral palsy when she could date any
number of other guys who weren’t disabled?
I was defeated before I even started.
Everyone fears rejection when he first starts to date, but I was
petrified. I was so scared of being turned down that I sabotaged
my friendships. I made absolutely sure that I was never, ever
rejected. It’s not that I lacked friends. On the contrary,
I had many friends—girlfriends, that is. Or, to be more
accurate, I was friends with many, and I do mean many, girls. My
problem was that I would never allow myself to go beyond the point of
a platonic friendship with a girl whom I would much rather be dating.
That’s what I really wanted—to date. But trying to date would
have allowed for the possibility of rejection, and that was something
that, at that time, I felt I had to avoid at all cost.
My fears didn’t vanish just because I went to
college. I continued searching for acceptance and usually went
about it in the wrong way. My first real date was with Sue
Nelson, a pre-med student who was a year ahead of me in school.
We went to a concert on campus during my first semester at Taylor,
and I was once again hopelessly infatuated with the idea of falling in
love. Sue’s busy schedule didn’t allow much time to socialize,
but we did find time to eat some meals together and go for walks on
campus. I had my trusty three-wheel bike with me, and from time
to time Sue climbed into the rear basket and we’d go for a ride.
We made quite a sight, Sue sitting in the basket and me pedaling my
heart out.
I liked Sue. She was easy to talk with and
a lot of fun to be around. We spent so much time together that
the guys in the dorm began to wonder what was going on between the two
of us. That was a good question, and I wasn’t sure of the
answer. That didn’t matter to my floor mates, though. They
made it clear that if there was any possibility of my wanting to date
Sue, that I had to talk with her and let her know how I felt.
And that’s exactly what I did. I went over to her dorm and told
her that I wanted to talk.
“What’s up?” she asked, sensing my uneasiness.
“I want to ask you something, but I don’t know
how to start.”
“I don’t know what you’re so nervous about.
Just tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I like you, Sue. And, I think I want us to
be more than just friends,” I managed, fumbling for just the right
words.
“I’m flattered, Steve,” she said, becoming a
little embarrassed. “I really do want to be good friends with
you. But,” she added, “I’m afraid that anything more than that
is simply out of the question.”
Good friends, huh? If that’s not the story
of my life, I don’t know what is. I got turned down once and
vowed to never let it happen again. There was just too much at
stake. At the time, I didn’t have the maturity to realize that
someone might not want to go out with me for reasons other than
discomfort with my cerebral palsy. I was stuck. Everything
seemed connected to the cerebral palsy, but that was the one thing
that I couldn’t do anything about.
Things didn’t change much during the next four
years. I busied myself by spending time with guys in the dorms,
occasionally looking at a book or two, and even going out on a few
dates. Yet, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of college
life, I was lost. I was doing everything possible to prove to
myself—and to others—that I was just as capable as the next person of
succeeding in the world. Yet in the one area that seemed to mean
the most to me, dating, I felt utterly worthless. No matter what
I did or how much I tried, I simply could never measure up to what I
felt were other people’s expectations of what it means to be a man.
After all, I reasoned, how could I ever be accepted as potential
dating material when I couldn’t even hold a glass of water without
spilling it all over the place?
Most people do not realize how much those of us
with disabilities crave being in romantic relationships. Just
because a person is in a wheelchair or has cerebral palsy does not
mean that he or she lacks the desire for the same level of intimacy
enjoyed by most of the rest of the world. Unfortunately, people
see you differently if you’re disabled. To most, the disabled
person seems somehow asexual and is assumed to have either no desire
or no capacity to enter into a meaningful relationship with someone of
the opposite sex. Let me tell you, that is simply not true.
I am very much interested in romance, and so are most other disabled
people I know. However, the tension between wanting to be
involved in a relationship and getting lost in society’s perceptions
of disabled persons can be excruciatingly painful.
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