Episode 24: Disabled And...Dating?

TRANSCRIPT OF “DISABLED AND…DATING?”

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MALE VO [00:03]
This is Bad Attitudes.

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LAURA [00:20]
Hello friends and strangers! Welcome to another episode of Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast About Disability! I’m your host, Laura.

In fact, welcome to a whole new season! To be honest, I don’t really understand how “seasons” work for podcasts. I mean, with TV we have “fall TV premiere season,” although I guess with the advent of streaming, there’s really no need for a premiere season, since a new TV show can drop whenever it wants. Whatever! New year, new season, new episode!

In this episode I’ll be talking about a new experiment I’m undertaking: online dating.

Thank you so much for your support last year as I figured out this podcasting gig. Thank you for listening and for sharing with your friends and families! Please continue doing that! Word of mouth is 100 percent the best way to grow this podcast and community.

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[02:53]
Over the holidays, I decided to do something I hadn’t considered in a while. I decided to dip a very tentative toe into the online dating pool. I can’t even tell you what made me decide to do it. There have been points in my life where I was adamantly searching for a partner and it made sense to see what was out there. This is not one of those times. The best that I can say is that it was a whim. I had been thinking about it off and on and I mentioned it to a friend who was all, “Yes! You should do it!” so I thought, “What the hell?”

My biggest obstacle was that I didn’t know which service to try. I have tried a few in the past, but always ended up disappointed. The same friend had had luck with and recommended OK Cupid. Now, if you’re like me, your first reaction was the same as mine. “OK Cupid is where all the Catfish swim!” I’ve watched enough episodes of the MTV show to know that saying you met on OK Cupid is an immediate and rather large red flag. However, my friend talked me off that ledge and was convincing enough that I decided to check it out.

Surprisingly, you can go quite deep with an OK Cupid profile. You’re going to meet a catfish if all you care about is pictures and aren’t overly concerned about filling out any profile information. But if you’re willing to put in some time and effort, you can hopefully avoid that drama.

Like every dating site, there is the self-summary section where you can write a little or a lot about yourself. OK Cupid gives you six or so questions to choose from in this section, so you can choose what allows you to express yourself best. I went with the basic self-summary and expressed what I felt was most important to know about me.

One, I’m a Ravenclaw. With that simple piece of information, any potential matches know a few important things about me. For instance, I’ve read all the Harry Potter books. I’m a nerd, and I value intelligence and creativity. Those are pretty important aspects of my personality.

I also revealed my status as a disabled person. Honestly, this is something I often go back and forth about. On the one hand, by not mentioning or showing my disability, people can focus on getting to know me as a person and make their decisions based on my personality. But, if I don’t reveal my disability up-front, then I have to worry about revealing it down the line, and it’s never easy to determine when the best time is to drop that kind of bomb. How will they react? Will they think that I was lying by omission? Will I get attached to someone only to find that by telling them about my disability, they turn tail and run?

By mentioning my disability up-front, I can hopefully weed out all the people who can’t handle the idea of dating a disabled woman. Conversely, I do worry that it also weeds out individuals who COULD handle it, but get weirded out by my being so up-front about it. Would things have been better if I eased them into that knowledge? Would I have had an opportunity to “win someone over” before they learned a potentially scary bit of information?

Ultimately, I decided to be up-front about my disability because I’m simply not interested in playing the games that come along with holding back a sensitive piece of information like this. If my disability weren’t immediately obvious, I might have made a different decision, but what is the point in hiding something that is going to be revealed the second they lay eyes on me? If someone is weirded out by the fact that I use a wheelchair, without knowing me or the entirety of my situation, then I don’t want to waste my time on them anyway.

There is a risk of attracting disability fetishists. You’re entitled to like what you like, but I’m not particularly keen on someone being interested in me JUST because I’m disabled, any more than I’m keen on someone who would reject me JUST because I’m disabled. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take at this point.

If you are disabled and interested in online dating, take a moment to really consider whether or not you want to reveal your disability up-front. The choice I made is probably not the best choice for everyone, but it works for me. It’s up to you what you reveal and what you keep to yourself when creating your dating profile. Don’t do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable. My advice is just to think through the possibilities of what could happen whether or not you reveal your disability status.

My disability was not the first or last thing I mentioned in my summary. I book-ended it with the fact that I’m a Ravenclaw and with other tidbits about my personality: My penchant for sarcasm. My love for books and television. I mentioned that I host a podcast about disability, which I would not have been able to do if I had kept my disability on the DL. I also mentioned that I am an Enneagram 4 and an INFJ because some people seemed interested in that.

Remember when the Myers-Briggs test was THE big thing on college campuses? For a while, our results to that test WERE our personalities.

OK Cupid also gives you some semi-generic questions to answer along with your self-summary. Just like with the summary, there are multiple options to choose from under broader categories like, “Aspirations” or “Traits.” 

Beyond that, you have the option to add “Topics” to your profile. You can choose from multiple topics including: Books, Movies, TV shows, Music, Art & Design, Performing Arts, Pets, Social Liberalism, Feminism, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, and Tattoos. Those are the ones I picked, but there are more options than that. Again, for each topic, you can choose from multiple questions which one to answer, so you can give potential matches an inside look into who you are and talk about that with which you are most comfortable.

I believe in giving (and getting) as much information as possible to (and from) potential matches. The whole “If you want to know just ask” mentality defeats the purpose of being on a dating site. Especially if you’re looking for more than just hook-ups. Which, admittedly, is all some people are interested in. But if you can’t give me more than a few words, then I just don’t have time for you. If you’re not going to put in the effort of actively looking for someone you’re compatible with, what would be the point?

This is also why I don’t respond to messages that only read, “Hey.” This is not exclusive to OK Cupid; it goes for all my social media, too. Give me an indication that you’ve read my profile and that you think we might have something in common. Give me a reason I should invest time in you. We aren’t in middle school. “Hey” doesn’t cut it.

Then we have Questions, which I think is the lynchpin of the whole OK Cupid system. These aren’t open-ended questions like we’ve been talking about where you write an answer out. These questions are yes or no or multiple choice, and are meant to give you quick insight on what potential matches find important or how they feel about certain issues. For me, they’re a real quick way to light up red flags.

The questions range from innocuous like, “Is pizza in your top 5 favorite foods?” to heavier like, “Do you have a problem with racist jokes?,” “Are you a feminist?”, or “Are you worried about climate change?” There are literally thousands of questions available to answer. I’ve answered well over 500 and sometimes they are a little repetitive, but they are an excellent litmus test.

For example, when I first signed up on the site, I was browsing through my potential matches and came across a guy who seemed great from his open-ended questions. He was funny, kind of nerdy, exactly the type of guy I would be interested in chatting with. To get more info, I checked out the questions he’d answered, starting with the questions where we disagreed. I always look at the disagreements first because that’s where the red flags are most likely to pop up.

The first question under our disagreements was, “Which would you rather give up? The right to vote or the right to bear arms.” And he said he would rather give up his right to vote.

As I told my friend, that flag was so red, I’m pretty sure a bull walked by. How can you give up your right to vote over your right to bear arms? If you give up your vote, you’re literally giving up your voice in our government.

Probably needless to say, but, yeah, I passed on him.

While I think the questions are the lynchpin of the system, I also think that we as users don’t get their full benefits. There are four components to each question: How YOU answer; what answers from matches are acceptable to you; how important the question is; and a box to explain your answers if you feel the need. 

I personally feel this need a lot because most of these questions just don’t give you enough details to make a fully-realized decision and I need to explain how I reached my conclusion. Ravenclaw.

I’m going to use the pizza question for an example of how the system essentially works. Question: Is pizza one of your top 5 favorite foods? My answer: YES. I now have the option to choose which answers I will accept from other people. Because pizza being in your top 5 favorite foods is not really something I view as foundationally important to a relationship, I accept either YES or NO. Although, if pizza ISN’T one of your top 5 favorite foods, I have to wonder who hurt you.

If I choose to only accept YES answers, I then have to give the question a level of importance: A little, somewhat, or very important. Here’s where I think the system breaks down. I see no evidence that questions I mark as “very important” are given more weight than those I mark as “a little important”. Which means that essentially, when it comes to the website measuring my compatibility with another person, the pizza question and the voting question are given the exact same consideration, even though for me, one is far more important than the other. I think at the very least the site should have not just a section for questions we disagree on, but specifically for questions we disagree on that I (or they) mark as important.

I don’t know how they choose the questions for their database. I suspect there’s a way for users to submit questions, but I haven’t discovered it yet. Maybe it’s a paid feature. I do know that in answering well over 500 questions, I have only encountered ONE about disability. Multiple questions about pubic hair preferences, but only ONE about disability. And it seems like literally no one has answered it but me.

I’m not currently paying for the service, but I also can’t determine what makes the paid service better other than the fact that you can see who “likes” your profile. You can still send and receive messages, but you can’t tell if you liked someone’s profile who also liked yours. Other than that, I don’t know what the main benefits of paying are. Still investigating.

I will say that there have been a handful of profiles that I “liked” but so far only one where I felt inclined to send a message. I have not received a message back, which is actually okay with me. Because even though this man’s profile made me want to contact him, he also has four children, which is incredibly intimidating to someone who has never envisioned herself as a mom. Except to dogs.

I’ve received no messages beyond those I got when I first set up my profile, when all that it contained was one photo. I got several “heys” and one guy who said he had never met a “goddess of beauty.” That one gave me a laugh. Who talks like that? 

Like I said earlier, there have been periods where I’ve felt a strong urge to find a romantic partner, but this is not one of those times. Maybe it’s the accumulation of all the true crime shows and Law & Order: SVU episodes I’ve watched. I cannot get out of my head a show I saw advertised with the tagline: The person you marry may become your murderer.

That makes staying single sound real good.

So, I’m keeping my expectations low. I don’t expect to find The One, or even A one. At best, what I’m looking for is to possibly strike up a few conversations and maybe make same new internet friends. Or maybe all I’ll get out of it is fodder for this podcast. That’s okay, too.

That being said, if you know a single man who is interested in sarcastic, nerdy women and bears a striking resemblance to Henry Cavill, I am more than happy to be introduced to him. Seriously. Please introduce me.

I’m curious if any of my disabled listeners have ventured into online dating and what your results were. What service did you use? There are literally so many to choose from. Did you go big-name, or did you try a site that’s a bit off the beaten path? There are sites dedicated to disabled people, but I didn’t want to limit myself.

So I guess that’s it for this first episode of the new year! I’ll keep you posted on how things progress — or don’t. Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you in the next one.

[16:41]
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