Chris Mitchell

Dating with a disability can be challenging to say the least. The fear of rejection, both perceived and actual, held me back from dating for nearly fifteen years. When I finally took the risk and put myself out there, my disability helped me find my soulmate.

It all started in high school for me. I was starting to discover girls and wanting to date the ones I found cute or attractive. I had the normal obstacle that stood between every guy and his ability to ask a girl out for a date, the fear of rejection. I had the usual causes for my fear: pimples, a voice that was changing and the belief that the girl I wanted to date was out of my league. Unlike my peers, I had another issue that added to my fear of rejection, a visual disability.

I am legally blind, a condition that was caused by cataracts in both of my eyes since birth. My vision, when tested, was measured at 20/200 in my left eye and 20/300 in my right eye. I never have been able to read out of my right eye and I have practically no depth perception or 3D vision in either eye. I strived all my life to hide my disability from the world. I was ashamed of my disability because of peer pressure. If you were slightly different from your peers, you were teased, made fun of for your differences, and were even a target for bullies.

I did everything I could to make sure my peers did not know I was disabled and to keep the fact that I was a disabled person my secret identity. I avoided using larger print material, especially around others, to help me read. I even went to the extreme of memorizing where things are to fool others into thinking I had normal vision.

For the most part I was able to keep my visual disability as an invisible disability. If you looked at me in high school, it might be hard to tell I was legally blind. I had done nearly everything my non-visually impaired peers had done by my age. I rode a bike, climbed trees, ran, played baseball with the neighborhood kids – I even played on a soccer team in a youth soccer league.

Although there were only three possible outward signs that I had a disability: I wore thick coke bottle style glasses, I held textbooks and other printed materials closer to my face to read, and I took adaptive physical education class while my peers were in their physical education class since middle school. I had convinced myself that probably no one had noticed any of these things, and my disability remained invisible to the world.

I knew that if I started dating, or even asked a girl out, my invisible disability would become visible, and my secret identity would be exposed to the world. I came up with four scenarios where I might be able to get away with protecting my secret identity after I convinced a girl to go out with me. They all started out the same – I would suggest meeting a girl at an agreed upon location for our dates. Since I did not have a car, not even a drivers license because of my disability, the four scenarios involved finding creative ways to get to and from the date without the girl knowing I was visually disabled. II could ask my parents to drop me off and pick me up. I could ride the city bus there and back. I could ride my bicycle there and back. I could bum a ride from a friend.

The four scenarios all seemed risky – I feared if someone spouted me, or even worse the girl found out what I was doing, it could put an end to my dating the girl, and worse everyone at the school would know my secret, and I feared that no girl would want to date someone who was disabled. I was not comfortable with that risk, more accurately I was not ready to reveal my secret identity to the world, so I spent all four years of my high school career and beyond without a girlfriend – or even looking for one. More than eight years after I graduated from high school, I had a revelation that started to change everything for me.

It was Christmas time. I was living in my nice one-bedroom apartment in a good part of town. In the corner of my living room, between the edge of the coach and the blinds for the patio, sat my decorated artificial Christmas tree. My artificial tree had been in my family since I was a toddler. Although the tree was more than twenty-five years old, it didn’t look bad. I had decorated it with several strings of brightly colored lights, ornaments from my childhood and an angel with lights that had been in my family since the second year we had the tree. Under the tree, carefully placed on the tree skirt my mom made when I was a child, were presents wrapped in colorful paper, with a ribbon around each box and a bow carefully attached to the top of each gift that I would give to friends and family during the holiday season.

The morning sun was starting to illuminate the living room through the blinds in front of my patio door. I was sitting on my coach, looking at the Christmas tree when I noticed there was something missing around the tree – a family. I had been living on my own since I moved out of my parents’ house nearly four years earlier. Sure, I had friends that I hung out with, but at the end of the day I always came back to my one-bedroom apartment where I was alone all the time.

I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life alone. I wanted to share my life with someone. I wanted a wife who I could share the ups and downs of life with. I wanted a family that I could take care of and who could take care of me.

That morning when I realized I wanted to share my life with someone, I was in my late twenties, and I still feared rejection from girls because of my disability.

The desire to find a life partner grew. I started dreaming of my family. I could see in my mind a beautiful wife. I started to envision us married and on a date night every Friday night. I also envisioned every Saturday morning, before our kids’ activities, we would have breakfast together. At first, the visions of my family were only in my dreams. Over time, I could see my family in my mind’s eye when I was in my living room, at the mall, or at fast food restaurants.

At this point my desire to start my search for a long-term relationship was stronger than my fear of rejection for my disability.
As I cautiously mentally prepared myself to enter the dating scene, I still wanted my visual disability to remain my secret identity. Sadly, I knew that it would be harder to keep my visual disability a secret than it was in high school as I had been forced to use a white cane to get around my community safely.

So, with my white cane in my hand, I started to move around my community looking for love while I did everyday things like run errands, attend college, and work.

One evening while I was shopping at Target, I saw this cute girl working in the electronic department. I must have walked by her a dozen times while I tried to get my nerve up to talk to her and ask her out. On my thirteenth trip through electronics, I walked up to her and asked her out without any small talk before my request. She turned me down. She may have rejected me because of my white cane, but I do not want to rule out other possibilities. I may have scared her by walking around twelve times, watching her work, and that may have appeared to her as me being a stalker.

A few months later, one early summer afternoon, I heard some noise outside of my apartment. People were going in and out of the vacant apartment across from mine. I peeked through the peephole of my front door and saw my new neighbors – two college aged girls and one of them caught my eye. The girl that caught my eye was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She was about my age and wore her hair in a ponytail. I wanted to get to know her better. The next evening, I managed to make it look “accidental” when I ran into my new neighbor. I introduced myself, learned her name was Chrissy and struck up a conversation with her.

For the next seven weeks, I found more reasons to run into Chrissy outside of our apartments. I even used my disability for a reason to talk with her. I would say things like “Hey Chrissy, I am having trouble reading this” and handed the item over to her and she read it to me.

During that time, I learned what type of car she drove, that she was a student at the same college I attended, and she worked at a Wal-Mart in a neighboring town. The most important things I learned were that she was a very nice person and I was head over heels in love with her.