Love Don't Come Easy for Amputees | Relationships

When I needed some insights about what makes for a successful relationship, I reached out to the experts: other amputees.

by Diana Theobald

I got dumped just before my birthday last fall. It was savage. On Sunday, he said he loved me; come Monday, he was telling me he “can’t do this anymore.” Less than a month later, his new girlfriend debuted on his Instagram feed. He posted a bounty of pictures of them together at Dodger Stadium, attending games that looked suspiciously like the ones he told me he’d attended alone or with “friends.” (Cue Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend.”)

I’m not entirely the victim. I asked for more of a commitment than he was able to give. Instead of cutting him loose, I tried to suppress my needs. He seemed worth it. He made me feel beautiful in a way I still struggle to feel, even eight years after my amputation. Our breakup stirred up old anxieties about my disability, so I needed some love-gone-right stories to cheer me up—ideally, stories about people with limb differences finding true companionship.

Unfortunately, Hallmark falls short in the heart-
warming amputee romance category. But the real world provides plenty of material. I reached out to many happily partnered people in our community to see what they’ve learned about building and maintaining successful relationships. Here are the lessons I’m hanging on to as I muster up the courage to date again.

DON’T GIVE UP THE SINGLE LIFE FOR JUST ANYONE

Nichole Millage thrived as a single woman. She lost her leg below the knee after a boating accident when she was 21 years old. For many years afterward, the main love in her life was sitting volleyball, which she discovered six years after her amputation. Over the next two decades, Nichole traveled the world with the US national team, competing in four Paralympics and winning two gold and two silver medals. Her life was full, and she was happy. It was her friends and family who thought she needed a romantic partner.

Nichole’s perspective made me think of the proverb “better alone than in bad company.” She wanted to be around someone fun and easy who would add joy to her life; otherwise, she didn’t really need anybody around. A friend created a profile for her on Tinder, but the matches didn’t fit the bill, so she set the apps aside.

Meanwhile, she enjoyed talking to a coworker named Ryan, who had recently become single and quietly had a crush on her. When the pandemic sent everyone home, their conversations at work morphed into texting outside of work, which turned into dating—which, fortunately, was able to develop free from the scrutiny of the office gossips. Last May, Ryan proposed on a volleyball court in front of Nichole’s friends and family, bringing all her loves into one ecstatic room.

In her engagement post on Instagram, Nichole said she had never been the girl with the Pinterest wedding board. In fact, the idea of marriage used to scare her. But having found the right person in her mid-40s, she wasn’t scared of marriage anymore. She was excited.

As much as I would love to meet someone who fits into my life as naturally as Ryan fits into Nichole’s, it feels validating to know I’m not the only one who enjoys the single life. She reminded me that life is more fulfilling without a relationship than with one that brings anxiety or apprehension instead of joy.

LOVE YOURSELF FIRST

Nichole mentioned that she didn’t feel ready for a relationship until 2019, just before Ryan appeared. When Matthew Brewer met his future wife, he wasn’t ready either—but his problem was that he didn’t feel worthy of love.

In a sense, that fear of unworthiness precipitated Matthew’s limb loss. He’d been clean from opiate addiction for a year when an online date stood him up. Overwhelmed by the rejection, he called his ex-drug dealer instead of his sponsor. He was found unconscious 18 hours later with compartment syndrome, a condition that severely restricts blood flow to the legs. Bilateral above-the-knee amputation was the result.
This experience didn’t leave Matthew eager to try dating again.

He was still getting used to his new, artificial legs when he met a prosthetist named Wendy at Hanger Clinic’s EmpowerFest. She asked him what he missed most from his pre-limb-loss life. That was an easy one: snowboarding. Matthew used to be a competitive snowboarder and hadn’t even considered how to get back on snow. Wendy told him to visit her in Utah; she’d get him up on a snowboard. He was intrigued, but he didn’t feel brave enough yet.

Matthew and Wendy kept in touch through calls and texts for about a year, then ran into each other at the Angel City Games in Los Angeles. After dinner one night, she reached out to hold Matthew’s hand. As a bilateral above-knee amputee, Matthew uses both arms for balance, so the move ended up being more awkward than Wendy had planned. But it delivered the message: Wendy was interested. And now Matthew was nervous. He was interested, too, but he couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that someone had feelings for him. He had to learn to love himself before he could accept someone else’s love.

After two months of introspection and work with a therapist, Matthew felt ready to put himself out there. He took Wendy up on her offer to visit Utah. True to her word, Wendy got him snowboarding, and then had him try out a monoski. He realized he preferred skiing, so much so that he eventually moved to Utah to ski full-time. Matthew progressed quickly and began competing in alpine ski-racing.

His hard work and vulnerability were rewarded. Three years to the day of his first monoski lesson, he pushed out of the starting gates at the Beijing 2022 Paralympics. And after he spent a month practicing how to get down gracefully on one prosthetic knee, Matthew proposed to Wendy at EmpowerFest. The two married in October 202

LOOK FOR BEAUTY BELOW THE SURFACE

Sharie OwYoung helps people learn to love themselves as a motivational speaker for True Beauty Within. But that skill didn’t come to her naturally. She felt insecure growing up with a congenital upper-limb difference; halfway through college, she still didn’t think dating was for her. But during spring break one year in Salt Lake City, her friend ditched her to hang out with a boy. Sharie was bored, so she popped online to find people to talk to.

Using a now-defunct messaging app called ICQ, she connected with Jason. Unlike modern dating apps, ICQ didn’t feature photos, so Sharie felt free to be herself. She and Jason quickly progressed from long chats to long phone calls. Jason wanted to meet in person before spring break ended and Sharie returned to her college, two hours away.

Only then did it occur to her to look at Jason’s picture. She’d glanced at it when they’d first connected but was so absorbed in their conversations that she hadn’t looked at it since. He was cute, but not in the way she was ordinarily attracted to. If they had crossed paths on a modern dating app, she might have swiped right past him.

Still, Sharie was nervous about taking the connection offline. She’d already talked with him about her limb difference, so that wasn’t a concern, but she still feared rejection. They met on St. Patrick’s Day in the pouring rain, chaperoned by her mom. That was 24 years ago, and Sharie and Jason have been inseparable ever since.

GO THE DISTANCE

I’m not one to advocate for long-distance relationships, but I found it interesting that Matthew and Sharie both battled internal resistance and physical distance—and both found internal resistance to be the bigger obstacle. Once that was cleared, they overcame geographical distance relatively easily.

For David Harrell, physical distance was the bigger obstacle. Born with a congenital upper-limb difference, he was performing at a theater in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he hit it off with a lighting intern named Stephanie. At a rowdy closing night party, the two of them hung out until five in the morning. A few days later, Stephanie left for Europe. David assumed she would only be gone a short while, but it took three months before she finally returned. When she called and suggested they grab a drink, he was surprised. And elated.

David planned to move to New York City to level up his acting and playwriting career, so he warned Stephanie that he couldn’t get serious unless she was heading to New York. Unfortunately, she had no interest in the big city. Once in NYC, David couldn’t stop thinking about Stephanie. They stayed in touch and visited each other a few times, and when the theater where she worked abruptly closed, David pointed out that New York’s theater scene offered lots of job opportunities—and, as a bonus, it offered him. With Stephanie’s sister enrolling in college in Brooklyn that fall, the timing felt right at last. Both siblings moved in with David, in what I imagine was a sort of bizzarro reboot of Three’s Company. Stephanie and David eventually got married and spent many happy years in New York before moving to Savannah, Georgia, with their son during the pandemic.

It’s risky to pick up your life and move for a relationship, and I should note that plenty of those stories end badly—great risk can lead to great loss. But it can also lead to great reward. At a minimum, David and Stephanie’s story has inspired me to expand my dating app search radius outside of Los Angeles. It’s time to include the Valley!

DON’T FORCE IT

Nichole, Matthew, Sharie, and David weren’t actively shopping for partners when their relationships began. They were just making friends, and friendship grew into romance.

Dating apps are not conducive to this approach. For instance, Hinge asks you to specify your “Dating Intentions” and lists seven options, ranging from “life partner” to the infuriatingly vague “figuring out my dating goals.” Lately people have been writing in answers along the lines of, “Looking for the one, but don’t want to force it.” Who’s forcing it? Certainly not me, the girl cross-referencing three different systems of astrology to fully optimize every first date….
“Not forcing it” seemed to do the trick for Adrienne Damicis, a below-knee amputee who met her husband Faisal on Tinder.

Adrienne was born with tibial hemimelia. She also has an upper-limb difference so subtle that most people (myself included) miss it when they first meet her. Adrienne grew up as a regular attendee at Camp No Limits, where she met lots of happily partnered adults with limb differences, so she knew her nonconforming body wouldn’t completely prevent her from dating. That’s not to say she didn’t ever experience insecurity, but at least she avoided the dark pit of “What if my limbs make me unlovable?” that many others (myself included) have fallen into.

When Adrienne joined Tinder at the start of graduate school, she wasn’t really looking for dates. She was only about six months out from a brutal break-up, living in a new city where she didn’t know anyone. She just wanted to meet some friends, and Tinder seemed like a means to achieving that.

And then she met Faisal.

They arranged their first meeting at a cat cafe, which—for those who don’t know—is a cafe where cats roam free. There was a 45-minute wait to get in (lotta cat people in Columbus, Ohio), but their conversation flowed like cold-brewed coffee through the wait, the cats, and then dinner. Without meaning to, Adrienne had found someone with the potential to be way more than a friend

But after five dates, she was questioning Faisal’s intentions. He seemed too chill. Were they friends? Dating? In a relationship? She sent Faisal the dreaded “we need to talk” text and called him that night expecting a break-up. He answered the phone nonchalantly, and they talked for three hours—not about the relationship, but about everything else. After that, Adrienne didn’t question if they were in a relationship. They just were. It had emerged without either of them forcing anything. Faisal moved in a few months later, and they married in 2022.

PEOPLE CHANGE, SO RELATIONSHIPS WILL TOO

In all these stories, the limb difference predated the relationship. But I suspect it’s at least as common for limb loss to happen after the relationship is well established, since most amputations occur in older adults. That’s why I was eager to talk to Victoria (Torie) Mugo, 43, who Amplitude profiled last year during Sepsis Awareness Month.

Torie met Nelson in Colorado through mutual friends when she was 22 years old and nondisabled. He was visiting from New Jersey, but he kept calling her after he went back East. Three months later, Nelson took a chance and moved to Colorado, which offered more opportunities for his career—and for spending time with Torie. Their relationship blossomed, and they became partners both in love and business with the launch of their construction company. In 2015, they were joined by a son.

In January 2019, Torie caught a walking pneumonia that turned septic. Doctors induced a coma and gave her only a 2 percent chance of survival. Nelson was working in Kenya at that time, and he couldn’t get a visa to come home. The separation was agonizing for him.

Against the odds, Torie survived, but she lost parts of all four of her limbs. That made her reunion with Nelson more emotional than ever. They had supported each other through plenty of tough times, but this was an unprecedented amount of grief for both of them and for their son, who turned four that year. And their losses went beyond Torie’s limbs—while she was in a coma, their mortgage was foreclosed, and they lost their house. Their business had also lost clients, which significantly impacted their ability to recover their home.

Torie sought therapy and established a support group with other sepsis survivors, making sure to create space within that group for family members. But Nelson was resistant to therapy. It can be hard to recognize trauma when you’re in it, and Torie could see he was not processing his grief in a healthy way. She had her own grieving to do, so she couldn’t be the support he needed. Sometimes people need a push to finally get help. For Nelson, that push was time apart from Torie.

It was incredibly hard for Torie to set that boundary. They still talked on the phone, and Nelson saw their son every day, but he got the space he needed to focus on himself. Six months later, Nelson texted Torie and asked her out to dinner. He had gotten help and was working through his grief. They reunited, and their relationship is now stronger than ever.

THE BEST WAY TO FIX THINGS: DON’T

Torie credits open and honest communication for helping her and Nelson get through a difficult time. That theme—communication—emerged over and over as I asked people what made their relationships sturdy enough to withstand the inevitable changes, both in body and in spirit, that we all go through over time.

For Matthew and Wendy, good communication sometimes means putting solutions on the back burner. He has a shorthand for that called “LEG,” which stands for “Let Emotions Go.” When one partner has a problem, the other partner may instinctively try to help them fix it. But maybe the first partner’s not looking for a fix; maybe they just need to vent. When Matthew’s in that space, he warns Wendy that they’re in a LEG moment. She doesn’t need to solve anything; she just needs to listen.

Maybe I don’t need to solve anything, either. That’s one takeaway that helped boost my spirits after I talked to other people with limb differences about their relationships. Being single isn’t a problem to be fixed. Relationships are hard work, so the rewards had better be worth it. Remember: No company is better than bad company.

Anyway, being single doesn’t equal “no company.” We can find deep connection in our friendships, and sometimes that’s the best place for romance to take root. Maybe the more we try to force love to happen, the more we get in its way.

We all deserve love, and that starts with loving ourselves. So I’m going to focus on self-love and friendship. I’m going to celebrate all the people who make my life feel so full. I’m going to try to let romance happen, instead of trying to make it happen. And when the right person comes along who can grow with me and bring even more joy into my life, I’ll be ready.

Diana Theobald is a content diversity consultant. She has held roles in creative development and diversity & inclusion at Warner Bros. Discovery, Marvel, DreamWorks Animation, and NBCUniversal.