Back in 2014, while co-running a group for individuals with disabilities, I remember a moment that stayed with me long after the session ended. A young man with Down Syndrome asked, \u201cWill I ever have a girlfriend?\u201d That question wasn\u2019t just about a girlfriend; it was a question about whether he was allowed to exist in the world as an adult who could have romantic feelings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
2015 was the year I attended the Indian Inclusion Summit, a platform for individuals with disabilities to showcase their work and be recognised for the difference they had made in society. While achievements were being applauded, somewhere in the corner, there was a whisper about \u2018Inclov<\/a>\u2019, an offline dating\/matchmaking platform created by Kalyani Khona, for people with disabilities. It was the first time that I had ever heard about something like this, and it sounded hopeful. Something that really changed the existing narrative that people with disabilities don\u2019t look for love, and that they are only recipients of care. This was before the surge of dating apps as we now know them.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fast forward to 2026. It is truly the era of the dating revolution, where terms like \u2018red flags\u2019 and \u2018ghosting\u2019 are thrown around, but we rarely ever understand how navigating dating apps still seems like a ghost town for people with disabilities in India. For this community of my friends and clients with disabilities, there is a constant negotiation with a society that has already decided that they are post-romantic and, for them, a swipe isn\u2019t really a choice. While we have more \u2018tech\u2019, we haven\u2019t necessarily gained more empathy or imagination regarding who is allowed to love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we think of romance, whether on an app, in a film, or in our own daydreams, we don\u2019t really picture a wheelchair, a hearing aid, or a body that moves differently. It is as if people with disabilities have been written out of the collective fantasy of desire itself. And when you are not part of the fantasy, it becomes very hard to be seen as part of the reality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On their own, dating apps are centred on the philosophy of ideal\/able-bodied logic, filled with travel shots and high-definition photos. I have heard from friends about the exhaustion that accompanies navigating a digital space that is in no way inclusive, making the swipe feel more like a barrier than a bridge. While discussing this with a friend once, he said that he was told it was brave of him to be on a dating app; to him this felt dehumanising, like he might be \u2018inspiration porn\u2019 or an object of charity while he just wanted to be treated the same as anybody else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For a really long time, as a society, we have followed the existing cultural script that has conditioned us to view people with disabilities as individuals to be constantly cared for, rather than being desired romantically. I remember a particular instance when I was interacting with a parent of a teenager with cerebral palsy who came often to tell me that even though her daughter kept talking about a certain boy in her class, she knew for sure that her daughter never had \u2018bad and wrong feelings\u2019 for the boy. That made me think: why did she feel the need to justify this or bring it up with me, this absolutely natural phenomenon for a teenager to feel attracted to someone? It was as if having a disability meant that her daughter wasn\u2019t allowed to have those feelings, and they somehow became \u2018wrong\u2019 or \u2018bad\u2019 feelings. What stayed with me most was that those were only feelings. This incident shook me \u2013 it felt like her daughter was being reduced to a \u2018protected\u2019 object rather than being a person with agency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Fantasy is more or less supposed to be the one space that belongs to us, where we can imagine and want without anyone watching. For most teenagers, a crush on someone in class is like a small private world to escape into. But for this girl, even that inner world was being checked and corrected. If a young person is told that her daydreams are wrong, what is she left with? I often wonder what she might have allowed herself to imagine, about love, about her own body, about her future, if no one had called those feelings \u2018bad\u2019 in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also made me reflect on how this is portrayed in popular media. There is a lot of depiction in the West about dating between individuals with disabilities, and also dating between people with disabilities and those without disabilities. But in the Indian scenario, this is depicted very sparingly; it\u2019s almost like our society has very little room to understand this, and we don\u2019t want to look beyond; we don\u2019t feel the need to question, being still trapped in our ancient beliefs and perceptions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On another occasion, a friend was speaking about how revealing their disability on a dating app felt like such a dilemma, because if it was on their bio, they got filtered immediately, and if it wasn\u2019t disclosed on their profile, it would be viewed as a betrayal of sorts. This made me think about what a just dating world would look like. In all these years of my practice as a psychotherapist and as a friend, I have understood that loneliness is caused not by being disabled, but by living in a society that fails to view it as a part of the natural human experience. The dating app being a ghost town reflects our collective discomfort with bodies that don\u2019t fit a specific script.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the last decade, even though so much has progressed in technology, including AI, technology still has not been an equaliser. Even though the so-called dating revolution has occurred, we must ask ourselves if the dating scene has been revolutionised, since it still acts like a gatekeeper of desire. The whole idea of \u2018Inspiration Porn\u2019 needs to be questioned. We don\u2019t need brave people on dating apps; we need to create a culture that feels that it is okay to look past its own superficial definitions of physical beauty. Sometimes I let myself imagine what that world would look like. Apps where a person does not have to choose between hiding their disability and being filtered out. Films and serials in India where a disabled character falls in love and the story is about love, not the disability. Parents who hear their child talk about a crush and simply smile. Maybe that is what fantasy can do for us. It lets us picture a world before we build it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Cover image by Tim Mossholder<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you are not part of the fantasy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":617,"featured_media":29836,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5823,8],"tags":[5771,5767,5772,5763,1754,5524,5764,376,5766,5765,4808,5770,5768,5769],"class_list":{"0":"post-29835","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fantasy-and-sexuality-2","8":"category-voices","9":"tag-ableism-and-dating","10":"tag-accessible-dating-apps","11":"tag-dating-apps-and-accessibility","12":"tag-disability-and-dating-in-india","13":"tag-disability-and-sexuality","14":"tag-disability-inclusion","15":"tag-disability-representation-in-indian-media","16":"tag-disability-rights","17":"tag-disabled-people-and-desire","18":"tag-disabled-people-and-relationships","19":"tag-inclusive-technology","20":"tag-inspiration-porn","21":"tag-romance-and-disability","22":"tag-romantic-agency"},"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/617"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29835"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29837,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29835\/revisions\/29837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}