Dear John:

You shared that months ago, you met a woman on a dating website. The two of you “shared information of a personal nature in trust and confidence, also respect and caution for respectful boundaries”. You shared with her that you were born premature and that you suffer from a very mild form of Cerebral Palsy. She then told you that “despite this, the connection we shared.. the depth of our visions, dreams and a hopeful beginning of what can truly be meaningful is what mattered most of all”.

You then set a date to meet in person, and you looked forward to the date, “the flames of my soul touched parts of me that I always felt reserved for the deepest, most understanding woman”. The two of you arranged for an overnight date. From the start of the date, she barely said much, but you interacted nicely and talk across the table while sharing a meal. You could see that the connection you had with her online wasn’t happening in-person, and you figured that your “disability threw her”. Later the two of you held hands a bit and you gently pecked her shoulder. In the morning, “when she was no longer looking at me, she dropped the major bomb on me, claiming that I was casual about relaying my disability to her.. then she completely cheapened our meeting by saying that it was online and that somehow subtracts from meeting a genuine human being… She did say she needed space and time to process things, but it’s been weeks”.

You asked: “why someone can open the door so wide and deep, and turn completely away, as if you are just simply expendable? I will never understand”-

My input: before she met you in person, she imagined you looked a certain way, based on a photo  of you online, perhaps the same as the one you posted here. She saw your photo and liked it. She then added to the image of you in the photo attractive details, and overall, in her mind, she saw an image of you, face and body, that looked attractive to her. As she communicated with you online, the whole time, she imagined that she was communicating with that visual image of you that she had in her mind. She liked you so much, visual image and otherwise, that she planned with you an overnight date.

When she first saw you in person, she realized that the image she had in her mind was too different from the real life image in front of her. The attractive details that she added to your photo- she found out that she imagined them wrong, and that the real- life image in front of her was not attractive.  At this point and on, she was not able (if she tried), to think something like: maybe I can still like him as much as before, even though he doesn’t look like I thought he did.

For her, the visual image she had of you before meeting you, and the quality of the online communication, were inseparable. This kind of experience often happens in online dating that progresses to the first in-person, physical date: it happens when one of the people on the date, or both,  imagined the other in a different way than how they look in real life.

This experience is not particular to having a disability. People are turned off by dates for a variety of reasons: the other being shorter than imagined, heavier than imagined, etc., etc., could be hundreds of reasons.

Online communication is a mental activity that does not involve the five senses: vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste (other than seeing a photo of the person, which is a limited visual information). A rea-life date is a physical activity with full exposure to how the person looks, sounds like, how he/ she smells (if being close enough), and how their skin/ body feels (if touching).

Online she liked you mentally. In person, she didn’t like you physically.

Again, what happened in your case, is what often happens when online dating proceeds to in-person, physical dating. As painful as it is, everyone who does online dating is at risk of feeling hurt when this happens. What I suggest in the future, is that you consider perhaps posting more photos of yourself on your profile or send such photos to a particular woman before the first physical date.

Also, be aware of the mental dating factor of online dating, and don’t view the relationship as good before the first physical date. Consider that the first physical date is somewhat stressful for both parties, both worry about the other’s approval or disapproval.

What do you think of my input?

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by .

Dear John:

You are welcome. I understand; she had plenty of photos and even video chats, plenty of opportunities to put together an accurate visual image of you before the first physical date. You think that “she didn’t really mean” what she communicated to you online, before the first date. That’s a possibility, but what do you think was her motivation to say the things to you that she didn’t mean?

anita

Dear John:

“In a world that is clamoring for tolerance and acceptance”- often I find answers in the definitions of words. I looked up the definition of clamoring, the verb you used, and found the definition of clamor as a noun: ” a loud persistent outcry, as from a large number of people”. Indeed in these times of civil unrest and demonstrations, there is a loud persistent outcry for equality of all people, and disabled people are included in all people being equal.

But there is a whole lot more to changing than words and an outcry: it takes each individual person looking into himself or herself and think: am I treating some people as less worthy than others? Am I perceiving some people as less deserving of the good things in life than others.. It takes looking in, evaluating, choosing to see things differently and then following up on the new perception with different action.

The woman you dated online, and once physically, she may not have done the work. Maybe all she did was an outcry, in the form of strong words that she communicated to you online. But her words were not from her core.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by .