Online dating has a lot of ethical questions that can come up when it comes to disclosing important life details. When you have a spinal cord injury, divulging this very big truth about yourself can be incredibly conflicting. You know it will shock people and turn people away upon hearing it. And when you tell them later, it can seem like a dishonest withholding of information. What’s a person to do?
There are essentially two camps of individuals:
- You have those who think you should tell the world right in your profile that you have a spinal cord injury,
- and then there are those who think you shouldn’t include it at all.
The latter group instead thinks telling people in private messages upon the first conversation that they have a disability is the better idea. Below I will discuss the pros and cons of both of these decisions, and you can decide for yourself which is the best option for you.
Method #1: Including Your SCI In Your Profile
A method that is largely recommended by therapists is the theory that including your spinal cord injury in your profile, preferably at the beginning, is a great way to filter out many of the possibly bad people right away, directing the good ones to you.
Pros: Only truly open-minded people will be sending you a message, as they know everything about you and still are willing to get to know more about you. It does work to a certain extent, and this is a great aspect.
On the other hand, it can also scare people away, not giving you a fair shot. We can bet many people have skipped by a profile at the first mention of a wheelchair or spinal cord injury. It is just a topic many people are not comfortable talking about. And we all know if they would simply message us and start a conversation, we might be able to change their minds. It simply puts us in a more vulnerable position to be judged badly for our disability.
Especially as people who've acquired the disabilities, meaning we know what it's like to be able-bodied, we know what goes through an average able-bodied person's mind when they meet someone with a disability. We know the gut reaction of shock that first hits them. It’s hard to recover from that.
Method #2: Not Including Your SCI In Your Profile
This very fact of nature, the struggle to recover from a bad first impression, is what leads so many to decide to withhold including their disability in their profile. Instead, they tell interested people about their disability in the first message. You simply do not want this detail about you to be blasted all over the dating websites, and that is an understandable thing.
The pros and the cons of this decision are rather straightforward. The pros include not being judged for your disability, which many of us find highly attractive. Nobody wants to be judged like a book with the bad cover, and that is what it can sometimes feel like when you put your disability in your profile.
The cons of this decision are mainly putting yourself at risk of looking untrustworthy. By not including your spinal cord injury directly in your profile, you are, in a way, not presenting yourself truthfully on the dating site. While this is up for argument, try putting yourself in the shoes of the other individual, and you can understand why the second con also commonly occurs - people will stop talking to you.
The last thing you want is to stop the conversation dead in its tracks because you’ve told someone something so shocking. The best way to avoid this is to tell them right away in the first private back and forth message and explain why you didn’t put it in your profile to begin with. Hopefully, they will still give you a fair shot. If not, you tried your best.
What do you typically do, or would do if you were single? Please share your experiences in the comments below.
