All right, y’all, here’s the scoop!
Mr. D came to my place and picked me up this evening. I was actually a little nervous to see him, since I hadn’t heard from him since his little confession. We hung out at my place for a bit and just chatted before leaving for dinner. It actually felt really comfortable to talk to him, not awkward like I had assumed it would be.
He drove my van to dinner, which he seemed totally cool with. Once we arrived, I opened up the topic I assumed was on both of our minds pretty quickly. If it was going to get weird, I wanted it to happen before we ordered and I didn’t want him feeding me if I discerned he was a freak and was going to go in his pants over it or something. (I wasn’t worried about my physical safety or anything–this is a guy who has worked with my brother and been friends with him for some time now…and my brother knew I was out with him).
Right away, he told me he felt really bad dropping that info on me while he was buzzed. He spent the last few days feeling like a tool and assumed I thought he was one, too. I told him I wouldn’t be out with him if I thought he was a tool, but I was really curious about what he had told me. He told me I could ask him anything, so I did.
The first thing I asked him was how he felt about us ordering and him helping me eat. I’ve always given dates a heads-up before we’re actually out that they’re going to have to help me eat, just in case they didn’t think it through and assumed I’d have a robot along with us to lend a hand or something. In his case, I was pretty sure he’d already gone there in his head. He said that would be fine, and he didn’t get all hot and sweaty about it, so I figured this was a step in the right direction.
Then I asked him what, precisely, attracted him about my disability. He didn’t have a concrete answer right away, but I let him have room to stammer around and eventually we landed on this: He’s always really liked the idea of taking care of someone who can’t take care of herself. Hm. Interesting.
Fact is, he’s always been interested in people with disabilities, though it didn’t became a romantic/sexual attraction to specifically high quadriplegic women until he was in high school. As he told me before, he’s only briefly met a few girls in chairs in his whole life and has never dated any of them. So of course I asked him why he considers himself a devotee if he doesn’t date or even interact with girls in chairs, ever.
And here’s the strange/hilarious thing he told me: When he’s with an AB girl, sexually, he has a hard time getting in the mood *unless he imagines her paralyzed.*Whaaa?? To be clear, he has no demented intention of harming her and he doesn’t necessarily want that particular girl to have a tragic accident or anything. It just turns him on to think about whatever woman he’s having sex with being paralyzed. Which I find hysterical, because I’m pretty sure most men I’ve slept with have been fantasizing that I wasn’t paralyzed.
Naturally, I pushed the issue further and wanted to know why the idea of a paralyzed woman was so hottt to him. Did he get off on the power dynamic? Did he want to dominate her? Did he have fantasies of humiliating or hurting her, and her not being able to fight back? At this, he was truly horrified. Really, he looked like he was going to vomit. NO, he said. If anything, the thing that turned him on was the thought of being the person she depended on most for help, comfort, safety. He gets off on the idea of being a guardian. What a freak, right? And yeah, he admitted there’s a major sexual aspect to the thrill. But he doesn’t know why, or how to describe it any better than that.
So I asked him if it was sexually thrilling to have “helped” me with my dinner. Um, yeah, he shyly admitted. Okay. I don’t think I get it, but I gotta say–it didn’t really bother me. It bothered me before, when I imagined a fat, hairy, socially inept devotee, living in his mother’s basement, trolling the internet for pretty little disabled girls to use as human masturbatory aids. But, when I sat across the table from this cute banker who blushed when he told me he got a sexual thrill from helping people, I dunno–it just didn’t disgust me.
So, I needed to know, was there anything besides the fact that I’m paralyzed that he was attracted to? Or was one girl in a chair pretty much the same as the next to him? He actually laughed at this and told me, of course there were other things he was attracted to. Like my looks. 
He told me that initially, maybe over a year ago, when my brother randomly mentioned that his sister used a wheelchair, he was interested but not insanely so. Then, I guess my brother put a family picture up on his FB (I didn’t know–I’m one of those weirdos who isn’t on FB for many reasons, like not wanting to deal with the kind of weirdos Ambivalid has met on there), and he saw it and freaked out. He said he couldn’t concentrate for a couple days, because I was basically his exact physical type AND in a wheelchair. And it made him feel all weird.
Classic devotee, he has had a lot of guilt over the years about preferring women be in wheelchairs, when that’s almost certainly not what they’d prefer. Plus, he is an attractive guy and he wasn’t attracted to just any girl in a wheelchair. So he’d pretty much abandoned the idea of ever even being in the same room with a woman who fit both his criteria, physically. And he thought that might be a good thing, a healthy thing, for him. And then my brother brought me to a March Madness party at Mr. D’s house and he decided to hell with the healthy thing. 
So where did we end up at night’s end? I told him I was no prude, and I do like him, but I needed time to process this stuff, so I wanted to take it slowly. He was totally cool with that. No kiss, but a really nice hug, the promise of another date on Friday night, and a wisp of sexy cologne that’s still lingering in my hair…
Last thing: I do have to say, it was really nice to spend the evening with someone who sees my chair as a positive. Even if I still think that’s bizarre, it was nice to be able to just be myself instead of trying to be the-awesome-girl-you-don’t-want-to-miss-out-on-just-because-of-a-little-thing-like-total-body-paralysis. You know?
And hey–thanks for reading this. I can’t even imagine who in my RL I’d be able to share this with, so it’s nice to be able to process it so thoroughly with such savvy people. 
[FTR, no, my carer didn’t help me write this–it feels a little too personal. Which is why it has taken me 2.5 hours to get it all out and edit it. Yeesh.].
