Rewriting the story I've told myself about ableism and dating
Exactly three years after the dating agency broke my heart, I'm taking a leap and working with a queer matchmaker
Hello,
Anniversaries are funny things, aren’t they? Which dates and events lodge into our minds and which don’t seems completely arbitrary, and then there’s the arbitrary nature of why we even care that x-many years have passed. But somehow we’re wired to notice these things, and doing so can stir up any number of emotions.
On Saturday, it will be three whole trips around the sun since a dating agency turned me away for being a wheelchair user.
And honestly, I can’t stop thinking about it.
It will not be lost on astute readers that I have clearly been thinking about it for a while now, because I wrote about it at the beginning of January - when I confessed that for all the good ways the Thing changed me, it also changed me in ways that are darker and harder to look at - and more obliquely a few weeks ago, in my piece about resilience.
So it’s been rolling around in my head, even more than the first and second time the 10 February came around. At least in part, this is because I have fewer things to distract me - the first year, I was enjoying the heady excitement of a new career; the second, I was racing to finish my book. This year, I have things going on, but nothing all-consuming in the way those things were. And that’s ok, because maybe it is time to sit with it for a little while.
I’ve piled the pressure on even further as I have, in classic Lucy fashion, not really given myself a choice to think about it or not, because I have decided to do something… mad.
I’ve signed up to work with a queer matchmaker, my friend Kim from A Whole Orange.
I know.
I know I know I know.
Let me just reassure you that she is lovely and it has been a truly wonderful experience so far. I only signed up because I had met her before and we get on really well. I couldn’t feel more comfortable or listened to, and she has been so kind and reassuring. Doing this is undoubtedly a good, brilliant thing.
But bloody hell, it’s hard.
My sessions with her have been genuinely heartwarming and healing. But sometimes the pain of what happened to me three years ago is still sharp enough to take my breath away. I feel my voice crack and suddenly the tears are falling and it is like no time has passed at all.
There are many things that are hard about this matchmaking/dating process, and most of them I don’t want to share here. But something I’ve been thinking about as a writer and advocate and just human person existing in an ableist world is what it means to rewrite stories, especially the ones we tell ourselves to make sense of things or, sometimes, to survive them. And, specifically, what it is to look at those stories and admit that maybe we don’t know how they end.
One of the ways I survived what happened was by making it end. By saying enough was enough, that I was going to give my life to other things that didn’t make me feel so broken and hurt. Even in the dating chapter of my book, which I finished less than a year ago, I was adamant that I would never date again. So adamant, in fact, that somewhere along the way I convinced myself (and precisely no one else) that not only was I not going to try to meet someone, I didn’t even want to meet someone. And I clung to that story like the absolute life raft that it was, and made the very best of life atop of it.
The life raft was a balm against the pain of the dating agency situation. But it was also a way of handling how ableism can leave you feeling like you don’t have control of your own life. If you don’t care about something, the ableism it engenders can’t hurt you, and you’re safe from being battered by the waves.
Why exactly I have chosen to let go of said life raft is, well, a good question. I think it’s something to do with how far I am from where I was three years ago, in my career, my friendships, my mental health, and, obviously, my sexuality. So much has changed for the better. I feel like I can be braver.
Actually, correction: I am braver. In many ways, the simplest reason that I have taken this step and started the matchmaking process is because, for the first time in three years, I feel like I can.
I feel like I can look at the story of all the ableism I have experienced in dating and cross out where I had confidently written “The End”. Instead, with a shaking hand, I have pencilled in a “To Be Continued…” - with all the trepidation and hope it brings.
It’s three years later. My heart is still broken but everything is different. I could never have envisaged, that day when ableism so rudely knocked me off course, how happy I could make myself by finding a new path. I think maybe there could be more happiness out there. So I’m taking a leap, letting go of the old, comforting narrative.
It’s three years later. It might just be time to write a new story.
Wish me luck.
Lucy
Read the whole, crackers dating agency story in my book…
Women's lives are shaped by sexism and expectations. Disabled people's lives are shaped by ableism and a complete lack of expectations. But what happens when you're subjected to both sets of rules?
This powerful, honest, hilarious and furious memoir from journalist and advocate Lucy Webster looks at life at the intersection; the struggles, the joys and the unseen realities of being a disabled woman. From navigating the worlds of education and work, dating and friendship; to managing care; contemplating motherhood; and learning to accept your body against a pervasive narrative that it is somehow broken and in need of fixing, The View From Down Here shines a light on what it really means to move through the world as a disabled woman.