Dimly lit bars are great first-date venues for most people: the seductive ambience, the candles, the gentle clink of a martini shaker. But they couldn’t be worse for a visually impaired dater such as myself. I was born with ocular albinism and nystagmus, which renders me blind in one eye and severely partially sighted in the other. Yet, stubborn to the end, I have persevered with sepulchral bars for well over a decade now.
The results have been mixed. I’ve sat down next to the wrong woman when returning from the bathroom, got lost on the way to the very same bathroom and, on one occasion, spilt an entire Bloody Mary down the front of my date. Funnily enough, she didn’t want to see me again.
The clichéd assumption among many people I meet is that my lack of quality eyesight must mean my other senses have overcompensated and I have the hearing capacity of a dolphin on heat or a level of hyperosmia usually only present in sniffer dogs at Heathrow. Au contraire. My other senses are numbingly average. But I do excel in one area of sensory perception: I can tell pretty quickly if a woman is on a date with me out of genuine attraction or out of mawkish curiosity.
The online dating scene – a bloody, brutal gladiatorial arena for anyone – is doubly difficult for the visually impaired. I’ve been told ‘Rob, your eyesight is worse than I thought’. I’ve been told, in advance of a (swiftly cancelled) date, that ‘I really can’t feed you or help you up stairs’. I have been asked why I live in London as a ‘handicapped’ person when, presumably, a convalescent home in the Quantocks would be more suitable.
It’s incredible that these reactions existed in 1985, let alone 2025. Especially when all anyone ignorant about visual impairment needs to do is watch Chris McCausland tearing up the dancefloor on the recent series of Strictly Come Dancing.
Until I was a teenager, the only disadvantages my severe visual impairment had really thrown my way were an ineptness at playing football and a reliance on my friends to provide amateur commentary when watched live matches. Surging hormones revealed, however, that I would be missing out on something far more important than a contentious offside decision.
My friends and I spent our adolescent weekends on the streets of Chester and the Wirral, frequenting HMV, the Forum shopping arcade, Grosvenor Park and the steps of the Odeon cinema. Our aim was to run into similarly bored girls of roughly our own age. From our hangout spots on the streets and in the parks (and yes, I know how creepy this sounds 30 years on), my teenage friends would scout the horizon for groups of girls that met our clumsy definitions of ‘fit’.
The issue for me was that I had no idea if the girls my friends were lusting after looked like Pamela Anderson or Pam Ayres. Working out if I actually fancied a girl would mean having to get so physically close to them that it could be interpreted as intimidation. Not a good look at any age, least of all 15.
But the reactions the teenage girls of Chester had upon realising that I couldn’t see a damn thing were softer than what I’ve experienced in the threshing machine of contemporary online dating. In my youth, when it came to the attention of a girl I was chatting up that I had seriously shoddy vision, she would absolutely always show nothing but benign curiosity. Nobody ever fetishised my disability and said it was ‘cool’. Nobody ever said anything cruel. What I got were the usual polite enquiries as to whether glasses and contacts help (they don’t) and asking if I could see the colour of their hair or what they were wearing (I could, as long as we weren’t in the most cave-like of indie discos).
The online dating scene – a bloody, brutal gladiatorial arena for anyone – is doubly difficult for the visually impaired
Comparing this with my online dating experiences in London as an adult is akin to swapping a yoga retreat in Gozo for an open-topped Jeep ride across the war zones of Sudan. Are people in the north are just kinder? Maybe teenagers aren’t as accomplished with their put-downs as grown-ups? Or were the 1990s just a less emotionally brutal decade?
My preference is to make my disability no more than an aside. So I don’t mention it in bold font in the first line of my dating profile, but maybe I’ll type: ‘By the way, just wanted to let you know that I’m visually impaired so it might have to be you who spots me in the bar, rather than vice versa. If you’re in any doubt, then I’m the one who looks like a pre-tax avoidance Boris Becker.’
The next step should, in any civilised society, be a (hopefully) fantastic night of flirting and white wine-sipping. But there have been occasions where I’ve noticed a guilt complex slip in from my date. It’s usually when I’m asked ‘how bad’ my eyesight actually is, swiftly followed by some desperate backtracking about how physically able her previous partners have been. This is the point when I realise that my putative date instinctively doesn’t want to date a person with a disability.
The reasons for this are, I often feel, based on a variety of (mostly unsubstantiated) worries which conflict with her dreams of the perfect partnership. It’s true that if you choose to date me then I’m not going to be driving you anywhere. On the plus side, I’m a travel writer and very happy to take a plus-one with me on my next trip to Sweden, Istanbul or beyond. I don’t think that’s such a bad exchange.
Yet some women seem to believe dating a man with seriously impaired sight will relegate them to a lifetime of round-the-clock nursing care. Rather than simply ‘ghost’ me (which I think I’d prefer, despite its innate cowardice, as it does at least save some of my time), they prefer to assert themselves in a fashion which completely misses the ‘awesome strong woman’ narrative in favour of ‘just an outright horrible person’. Was the bizarre response of the woman who told me she would not be helping me up any stairs her way of making herself seem so unlovable that I would forfeit the date? If so then well done – it worked.
What’s often forgotten about dating as a disabled person is not what the able person might think, but whether the person with the disability is attracted to someone. This is frustrating, as if he or she should simply be flattered to be getting any attention at all.
I’m currently absent from the online dating scene, thanks to the attentions of a fantastic half-Irish, half-Swedish girl who I did meet on Hinge a year ago. One of the many reasons I like her so much is that, on our first date, I let her know about my visual disability around halfway through our second glass of wine. ‘Oh right,’ she said. ‘Well, things like that don’t bother me at all. Shall we get some tequila shots?’
It’s as easy as that. Having a successful date with a disabled man just means opening your mind about 1 per cent more than you ideally do already. Dating a man with a disability does not necessarily mean watching any of the Paralympics, helping someone to the bathroom or even having to pay for drinks. Remember, there are lot of able-bodied men who will fail on at least one of those things.
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