Q: My disability has really affected the way my body looks. I have a long scar from a surgery, my legs are very thin, my belly a little thick. I’m very self-conscious about my body and wonder, who could find me attractive?
A: This is one of many questions that are evoked by a disability that inevitably come down to the same answer: people who love you will accept you. Be it a weak bladder, reduced orgasmic response, being easily fatigued during sex, the need for transfer assistance, or skinny legs. When you have a quality relationship with an authentic partner, these things are accommodated at the least, and are completely irrelevant at best.
A partner who loves you will want to understand your body. They’ll be intrigued with your scars, not repelled by them. They’ll want to understand what they mean to you, what they represent in your personal experience. They are a chapter of your story, and exploring your scars or your thin legs is a way for your lover to explore you and your life. These features of your body are openings to intimacy with someone you love.
What are you measuring yourself against? Stop looking at those fashion advertisements featuring presumably hip young models! They are the vast minority. The human family is made up of an amazing array of body types, just look around the next time you’re out in public. Many of those supermodels are as self-conscious as you are about their body, afraid of being judged anything less than beautiful. Why else would they work so hard to look the way they do?!
But I won’t minimize the self-consciousness you are experiencing, or take lightly how scary it is to reveal your body to a new partner—especially if you have a recent disability and are facing that moment for the first time. It’s a very emotional moment, very potent, but its potency is exactly what makes it such a deep act of trust. A partner who is open and caring and feeling will recognize and value that you are choosing to trust them in this particularly deep way.
It’s for you to choose who you reveal yourself to. It’s for you to protect yourself from rejection by someone who has the wrong motives in being with you, an experience which could harm you emotionally.
Besides, when you’re with a lover, are you spending your time looking at each other’s bodies, or are you touching and feeling? When we’re making love, don’t we focus on certain parts of our own or our lover’s body at a given time, rather than looking at the whole? Don’t you close your eyes when you kiss? In other words, the appearance of your body is not constantly involved in the process of actual lovemaking. The quality of sensuality and connection you bring into your loving matters more than how your body looks.
This is one of those core, essential tests that disability presents us. For someone to fully love you, you have to love yourself. That means loving your body, whatever it’s form or condition. Cliché as it is, your body is your temple. This question challenges us to consider where our true value lies. Is it on the surface, or somewhere deeper inside? Isn’t that the part we want someone we love to value in us first and foremost?
Try to operate on faith that someone will love you on your own terms. There are plenty of loving couples in the world with less than perfect bodies who more than prove this point. Most of all, don’t let self-consciousness of your body keep you from revealing the full range of who you are as a person—your intelligence, your sense of humor, your compassion.
Responses are by noted author, speaker and recreational juggler Gary Karp, whose books include Disability and the Art of Kissing. Karp has been honored by induction into the Spinal Cord Hall of Fame as a disability educator. Find out more about Karp at Modern Disability.
