What We Think About When We Think About Love — The Disability Version
This week on What We Think about Love, I’m thinking about love and disability. There’s a whole love of love that is connected with this broad, general, nonspecific thing we call ‘disability’. For instance, I love pillows. I could not live without pillows because, my unique brand of disability means that everything I sit and lay on needs to be augmented in some way for me to not hurt myself. Even with pillows this sometimes happens, but I love pillows and if you get on Disability Twitter or you read an essay by a person with disabilities you will inevitably find this love of particular things pop up all the time.
Self-love as a person with disabilities is often perceived as somehow harder than it is for an able person. (Not that they are any less able than an ‘able’ person, but that’s the terminology right now, so we’ll go with that.) This is one of those societal norms I was talking about last week, things that are constructed by powerful people, by our media, and by us accepting those ideas even if we’re not aware of them. The ideas that say, ‘this is how things work.’
Yes, obviously loving a body that often feels like its betraying its own better nature is hard. But all of us have struggles loving ourselves. If we were honest as a society, we would say that most people struggle with self-love sometimes. We all wish to have different bodies, or beam into invincible cyborgs.
This idea that living with a disability, or loving a disabled body is harder, comes from able people looking at the lives of disabled people saying, ‘I can’t imagine living that way’ that creates this idea that disabled people can’t love themselves. It also creates the idea that disabled people are harder to love than abled people. This gap in expectations creates the stereotypes that disabled people are also pitiable, or inspirational because they somehow ‘overcome’ great obstacles to live their ordinary lives. All of this creates the idea that disabled people have a different value of lovable than able people.
I have been married for almost ten years, but my relationship with my spouse changes, we develop it, move it around, consider it in terms of other people in our lives. We have a ‘normal’ relationship — we are both white and straight, and not interested in an open marriage or expanding our relationship to include other people, but because I have various disabilities, our love looks different from others. There isn’t a good positive example of marriage like ours in mainstream TV or movies. There are, however, lots of bad ones.
When I see what on the surface looks like our kind of marriage in movies, the character playing me is pathetic, needy, and sapping the energy of the spouse if it’s a woman. Eventually, the man leaves her in an act of self-preservation that the audience is trained to sympathize with. And if it’s a man who is disabled, they are most likely a troubled genius. Most likely, the movie is a biopic where the woman gives everything she to support that troubled disabled genius man. The audience will never forgive her if she leaves. Every example I can think of save one involves straight couples. All of them have been white couples.
I am not a needy energy sapping black hole. Nor am I a white male genius. I am not inspirational. The routine of my daily life is just that routine. One disabled person living their life movie that I love (but I do not think of when I think of the stuff mentioned in the above paragraph because she’s not a main character) is Gina McKee’s character, Bella, in Notting Hill, who uses a wheelchair and there are several short scenes that show her getting ready for work and having dinner with friends. She is in a loving committed relationship with a man who does not think she’s a burden. Notice that I did not say ‘Gina McKee’s character, Bella, who is ‘wheelchair bound’. To most of us this sounds the same as ‘uses a wheelchair’ but it is indeed not the same. Because wheelchairs are not prisons. They are tools, companions, assistants. Imagine if Notting Hill had Bella and her husband as main characters instead of Julia and Hugh.
What these movies miss is nuance. Hollywood likes drama. People with big unachievable problems make for good drama, but they also move us away from true life understanding of the lives of disabled people and the idea that they are as equally capable of being loved.
Mainstream narratives about disabled people are rarely about romantic love. Probably because Hollywood and its affiliates has a terrible track record hiring diverse people. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there in the real world. And that doesn’t mean their struggles are any more difficult than the struggles of people who do not consider themselves disabled. Narratives about disability and love don’t have to be about disability first, as in the characters and their story arcs are defined by their disability. They can be about love first and disability is just part of who they are, like the color of their eyes, or their career.
At some point or another the vast majority of us are going to have things that don’t work the way society tells us they should. And we’ll have things that we for our own lives don’t work like we’d like them to work. That does not mean we’re worse off than anyone else. It just means we’re part of the possibilities when we’re talking about love.
