Would You Stay With This Person If They Were Disabled?

“A disability is not inability.” Unknown

It is hard when you are young to imagine what it is like to grow old. When we envision the future, it is not us trying to get around with a walker or needing care to meet our bodily functions. We may vow to grow old together with visions of being the active seniors featured in ads for senior living facilities and not for extended care homes that have round-the-clock nursing care.

We marry a young healthy partner with the knowledge we will both age, but may not have the commitment to handle whatever the world throws at us. I have been witness to marriages where one partner suffers a medical incident that challenges the commitment to through sickness and health. In my youth, I met a man in his thirties that was in an extended care facility. He had come there after suffering brain damage in a fight. He was always very calm and polite, but mainly just sat and smoked cigarette after cigarette, never participating in any activity. His wife had divorced him following his injury. I can’t speak to if they had a good relationship prior to this incident, but it saddened me that it seemed he was just dumped in this place. But what would I have done in her place?

Medical science has increased our lifespan and, as such, we are far more likely to have one or both partners suffering from something that leaves us with less than our full capacity. Given this, at some point in their lives, many couples will face this question. In most situations where this comes up, the couples are elderly and have been together for many years. In these cases, the marriages often survive, though it may look very different – perhaps with one partner at home and the other in a care facility. Studies confirm that if an injury or chronic illness happens when the couple is young, the marriage is more likely to fail.

The word disability covers a wide span of circumstances. Steven Hawking is wheelchair-bound, but a genius that contributes much to the world. Some disabled people have no more than deafness. Some are just missing one limb. Others are in a persistent vegetative state. What disabilities would too much for you to handle? Could you attend to bodily care like wiping your partner after toilet use?

While it may seem gruesome to delve into disease and death, it is this very person you are committing to that will likely have to make important decisions should anything happen. You might even want to put your wishes on paper. Terri Schiavo certainly didn’t marry thinking about the vegetative state she would be in six years later at age twenty-six. Terri’s husband and parents spent the next fifteen years in a legal battle to determine her fate.

The chances of something awful happening when you are young are small. Often, when something happens, it is more treatable and temporary. Marriages survive all manner of crises with the right mindset and commitment. “Some people said their partners were instrumental in their recovery, which they acknowledged could be difficult. People often depended on partners for emotional support and sometimes for physical care, and some needed them to be supportive and to give them hope throughout their recovery,” says Healthtalk.org. We continually grow and change in our relationships and they often don’t look like what we once dreamed. They say you need to fall in love over and over again with the same person. Healthtalk.org went on to report, “People sometimes felt their partners needed to grieve for the person they’d lost and accept that things were different now.”

No one knows until they find themselves in this place and even then, might be tortured over the choice. The statistics tell us that should someone develop a disease or severe injury happens during their marriage, the likelihood of divorce increases. Economists postulate it is due to the loss of future income, but I feel it can go so much deeper than that. Pondering this question might have you looking hard at the reasons you want to marry in the first place. Depending on the disability, it isn’t just income you are losing. It can be someone to help with household chores, it can be someone costing you money in terms of medical supplies and nursing costs, it could be a loss of a sex life. Would having a partner that needs extra care and attention cause you to not get out of marriage what you are after?

We can’t know for sure what the future holds, we could get hit by a drunk driver walking into work tomorrow and be paralyzed. What we can do is look at the family to see if there are illnesses like Alzheimer’s or Huntington Chorea that have a genetic component. When you are finding out your partner’s medical history, you are also looking out for your children and future generations.

Let’s be honest... Our vows say: for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, but most people aren’t interested in the worse or the sickness. That is why the divorce rate is so high.