Thank you for joining us for another blog post from Marco Orlando.
“LOVE ABILITY”
Marco Orlando
Historically, I’ve gotten along with women and understood women a lot better than I’ve ever gotten along with and understood men. I attribute this to my background in social and human services and spending most of my adult life working in similar female-dominated workplaces. I get the sense that so many guys feel an inherent need to prove to the world how big and bad and tough and strong they all are, how much of an alpha male they are, and that just isn’t me.
I respect women. I pride myself on making the women in my life feel special. I go out of my way to make the women in my life feel wanted and appreciated. I want to be the best friend a girl could ever have. I make it a point to look for little things in every woman I meet, such as jewelry or painted nails. I find that a simple comment on what I notice about them might just be enough to make a difference in their day.
I have plenty of lady friends where I’m from. Many of them think favorably of me. None of them are interested in me romantically at the moment as far as I know, and I’ve learned to be okay with that. It’s good for me to be reminded that I can appreciate women from a distance. It does me no good to try to force something in a direction it isn’t meant to go, or to wish for something I know I can’t have.
I have an idea in my head of what love ought to look like. But I’ve never really known for sure what love should look like. I’ve never really known what to look for. In recent times, I’ve begun to realize that nothing I’ve seen on TV or in movies has really come close to accurately depicting how love is in the real world, except for maybe old reruns of Roseanne. It’s made me wonder if people truly believe in a traditional storybook romance anymore, or if such a concept even exists in the real world. For all I know, love could be another one of those “abstract concepts” that I can never seem to wrap my head around.
Love and romance and dating and relationships are all hard enough as it is for any one person. Having a disability exacerbates the issue and throws a whole other monkey wrench into things entirely. I often wonder if I will ever find someone I could reasonably see myself sharing my life with, someone who truly loves me for me and all I have to offer, and not just because they think they can get something out of me without them having to work for it. Or if I’m just perpetually doomed to be disappointed by all the pitfalls that love and relationships can bring. I often wish that there were more that could be done to help people with disabilities find the true love that they deserve, to show the world that people with disabilities are all fundamentally decent human beings worth knowing and loving, and conveying that message to them in a way that doesn’t sound overly desperate.
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