I was rejected on dating apps because of my disabilities, so I founded my own. People like me want to date and have casual sex, too.

• Jacqueline Child, 29, had bad experiences on dating apps for years because of her disabilities.

• In 2021, she and her sister Alexa, 33, cofounded a dating app for people with disabilities.

• She says the app has given her purpose and helped her feel more confident in herself. 

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Jacqueline Child, a cofounder of Dateability, a dating app for disabled people. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I've been disabled since I was 14, when I developed a chronic illness. At 29, I've had over 40 surgeries to treat more than six medical conditions that affect every part of my body, including lupus and dysautonomia. I live with severe chronic pain and eat through a feeding tube, but my disability is largely invisible.

It was a big adjustment going from being healthy to chronically ill, but over time, as I learned to focus on the other things in my life and manage my symptoms very well, it got easier. One thing that remained a challenge, though, was dating with a disability.

We need to get more comfortable talking about the disabled experience as a whole, but particularly when it comes to dating and romance.

People with disabilities want to date and have casual sex, and they deserve access to those needs like everyone else.

A stranger told me it would be selfish of me to have kids

For five years, I had bad experiences on dating apps. I experienced a lot of rejection and discrimination for being disabled, and because my disability is invisible, it was hard to know when to disclose it.

Telling a non-disabled person I was dating about my disability was the worst because they often got freaked out and ran away. There were so many times when I would just bite my tongue and make up this whole other scenario in the conversation just so that I could avoid telling them I was disabled.

I preferred hiding my disability from people because I felt embarrassed, but sometimes that wasn't possible. One guy once asked me to go on a walk for a first date, but I was just recovering from surgery, so I suggested a picnic instead. He asked me what I did to injure myself, and I told him that I had a connective tissue disorder. He told me it would be selfish for me to have biological children without even knowing if my illness was genetic. And those kinds of comments were common.

When things like that happened, I would delete the app for six months. I always searched online for a disabled dating app or chronic-illness dating app, but the few results were either full of bots, spammers, or people who fetishized disability.

I thought, "How is there not an app for people like me?" but always ended up redownloading a mainstream dating app and starting the vicious cycle again.

Through therapy, I realized my beliefs were rooted in internalized ableism

In the past, I wasn't open to dating someone else with a chronic illness. I was ashamed of my disability because I was being told I was unworthy, which I believed, and then I put that bias on other people with disabilities. Through therapy, I was able to unpack that and realize it was rooted in internalized ableism.

Now, I think that having shared experiences is really important, and I can find that in someone who has a chronic illness and similar life values. I'm not dating at the moment, but I am hopeful and believe that I'll find my person.

My sister and I decided to make an app to help me find love

In 2021, I decided to have a procedure that I had been putting off for a year because I was afraid of how it would change my social life. I got a feeding tube in my abdomen, which means I can no longer eat orally.

At the time, I just thought there was no way these people I saw on Bumble were going to accept me now if they hadn't accepted me already.

I told my older sister Alexa, who I live with, that I just wanted a place to meet people like me. Although she's not disabled, she's experienced secondhand discrimination on dates and had people make offensive comments about her genetics because both our dad and I are disabled.

She suggested that we make that place ourselves. It was an impulsive decision, and we got cracking right away.

We cofounded Dateability, which is the only free dating app for the disabled and chronically ill community, and launched it on October 1, 2022. Currently, there are almost 11,000 users.

It makes dating a lot less fun when you're constantly worrying about when and how to disclose your disability, so I wanted to take that pressure off of users.

So we created a section called Dateability Deets where you can check off a list of broad terms like "immunocompromised" and "wheelchair user," which makes it neutral and normal to disclose.

Users have told us that we're fostering a safe and inclusive platform where people with similar perspectives can meet, and we're honored to do that.

One couple who met on Dateability a year ago and live 900 miles apart are moving in together after the holidays. Another user told us that he went on a first date from the app and said that while he had pre-date jitters, he noticed the anxiety he typically felt about his disability wasn't there.

Seeing that there are people out there who I could potentially date is really comforting and something that's new for me. Dateability has made me feel like I have such a purpose, which I had lacked in my life before. It's helped me feel more confident in myself and secure.

Read the original article on Business Insider