Love Is Blind

It never fails. Whenever I start writing, the phone rings. A friend from high school just called from Texas. Now if I had a disability, Texas would not be tops on my list of places to live. But whatever. He’s involved with a sweet woman who is going through a messy divorce. I think the husband is making an issue of my friend’s disability for purposes of gaining custody of the children. Yuck. I remember when I was dating my previous girlfriend, she had friends and family giving her variations on the whole “Are you sure you want to get involved with someone so sick?” theme. She handled it pretty well, but it still annoyed me that it even came up. I’ve often thought that a relationship between an able-bodied person and a person with a disability has some of the same social stigma that once confronted interracial couples. The two situations have completely different contextual dynamics, but they both force re-evaluations of the dominant culture’s notions of love and the bonds that shape it.