My journey in love started in the middle of the Grand Canyon on a river trip down the Colorado River. I had just finished a Therapeutic Recreation internship at the National Ability Center (NAC) and was offered the opportunity to volunteer on an amazing trip. It was an incredible opportunity and an experience that truly changed my life forever. 

Fast-forward a bit to when I was offered a full-time job at the NAC after my internship. Prior to starting work, Director Meeche White offered me that opportunity to volunteer on a trip down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. The same question about whether I would be considered a good or bad volunteer for fraternizing with a client came up once again. This time I was a 28-year-old certified therapeutic recreation specialist and the girl was a beautiful 26-year-old accomplished athlete with paralysis.

“Normalizing” People with Disabilities
At this point in my life, I had spent three years constantly surrounded by individuals with disabilities, and I was beginning to change culturally. Many of the individuals that I taught sports to as clients became friends.

Mechanical devices for mobility were starting to vanish from my recognition. I only looked at the mobility devices to give me clues on how I was going to teach the individual to participate in sport. For the first time in my life, I realized that there is no real difference between me and the individuals I work with who have a myriad of disabilities. What kind of transformation had I gone though during college?

Dating Someone with a Disability?
Upon returning to Park City from the river trip, I had created quite a bond with the young lady and I was considering dating her—not just going out on the town, but seriously dating her. We had flirted a lot on the river and we were both living in the same ski town.  I actually had to think about the reality of dating or even marrying an individual with a disability.

Would I be considered a deviant and possibly lose my license to practice recreational therapy?  Nonsense, I told myself, if I wanted to date someone in my community, even though we met in a professional capacity, it was perfectly natural. But the question was: could I love someone with a disability? Had my professional training separated me from those that I want to work with so far as to dictate who I could or could not date or love?

The Girl: Muffy Davis
When I decided to date this young lady and my co-workers found out about it, they were actually ecstatic. The marketing director, Shelly, was exceptionally enthusiastic about the benefits of getting her involved in NAC programming.

Shelly’s husband Pete was on the river trip and, at our first social meeting just prior to rafting the river, I started wondering if I was set up again? It turns out that dating Muffy Davis, a Paralympic athlete, was a very positive thing not only for me personally, but for my career as a therapeutic specialist having a focus on teaching adaptive sport.

It is not as though I, Jeff Burley—who started at Community College and then slowly found his calling at the tender age of 25 while attending Sacramento State University—could dupe an accomplished Paralympian. She was not only an athlete but, I would soon discover, also a scholar.  Muffy was president of her student body, finishing at the top of her class in Sun Valley, Idaho, and then she went on to graduate from Stanford University in four years. Why did I even consider that it would be an ethical problem?

Bringing Home a Paraplegic
As things progressed, it was time to meet the family. With the Christmas season approaching, my father offered to meet halfway between Dixon, Calif., and Park City, Utah, to hang out and exchange Christmas presents before the holiday (poor new ski instructors work the Christmas season for tips). 

I asked him, in my newfound comical and very politically incorrect way, if it was all right if I brought my new “para” girlfriend with me. “Of course,” he replied, “but a pair of what?” I laughed and explained that I had been dating a girl with paraplegia. He understood my off humor instantly and wanted more details about the girl, not the disability.

First Comes Love. . .
I have discovered slowly, as I do with most things, that it is okay to fall in love with a person with a disability. Many people fall in love with a person before they acquire a disability and some then fall out of love, but I found the opposite to be true for me. It has vexed me that people are constantly shocked that I fell in love with my Muffy long after her injury.

I remember the exact moment when I knew she was the right girl for me. I was running a water skiing clinic. Muffy jumped in the water, slid into her ski, and told the driver to do a powerful start and run the boat at 24 miles-per-hour at 32 off.  I didn’t even know exactly how I liked to be towed, often doing the “thumb up and down” thing for several minutes, but this girl knew exactly what she needed to have a good run. 

Beautiful, strong, intelligent: how could a recreational soul like me go wrong with a woman like this?

I was ecstatic when, three years from the summer we met, Muffy accepted my proposal and our lives went full circle. We were married on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and Muffy has literally taken me around the world with her ambition to live a full life. Along the way, I have learned many wonderful lessons, the most important being: don’t let disability stand in the way of finding your soulmate.