Peer Relationships: Friendship and Love

At the heart of the negative portrayal of disability’s impact on interpersonal relationships is the presumed inequality imposed on the relationship when one participant has a disability but others do not. The type of inequality and its explanation are not always made explicit. Does it result from the (perceived) inability of people with disabilities to participate in activities that are important to some, most, or all friendships? Or does it arise from the (perceived) need on the part of the person with a disability for technological or human assistance to manage typical life tasks? Does it stem from a belief that the person with a disability does not possess the social or psychological resources to prove a stimulating and rewarding friend?
The influence of a dichotomous conception of disability, that is, of a conception of disability as a personal attribute one either has or lacks, is evident even in the way questions about disability and personal relationships are framed. In asking questions like “Are relationships between disabled and nondisabled people necessarily unequal?” we tend to assume that disability is a categorical characteristic: that there is a distinct subset of the population that is disabled and everyone else is nondisabled. If, instead, we adopted the human variation model of disability (see SEP entry on disability: definitions, models, experience), we could reframe such questions. That model conceives of an impairment as an arbitrary range on the continuum of variation for a human attribute. Moreover, the model sees disability as an interaction between atypical functioning or embodiment and an unaccommodating environment. Consequently, it emphasizes that most people are “disabled” in some particular physical or social context, insofar as they have some atypical characteristic which fits poorly in that context. The model also suggests that a disability, like an impairment, ought to be considered as a graduated characteristic: just as there are degrees of functioning, there are degrees of fit between functioning-embodiment and social environment.
On this view, the question “Are relationships between disabled and nondisabled people problematically unequal?” would be better reformulated as
Is there a positive correlation between the degree to which the parties to a relationship differ in overall level of disability, on the one hand, and the degree of problematic interpersonal inequality, on the other?
Although this is largely an empirical question and cannot be answered by philosophical reflection alone, philosophy can clarify the concepts that figure in the question: what is it to have a disability, what sorts of equality matter in valuable interpersonal relationships, and is there a reason, given what disability is and what sorts of equality matter, to think ex ante that such a correlation would exist?
One reason having or acquiring a physical, intellectual, or emotional disability lessens the chances that relationships will move beyond acquaintanceship is that the disability looms so large in the minds of the nondisabled person (and perhaps the disabled person as well) that it obscures or eclipses other features on which an intimate relationship can be solidly grounded. Most people do not yet see disability as one among many characteristics with respect to which humans can vary. In this way, one aspect of a person comes to dominate the whole, an aspect of stigmatization that elsewhere we have described as “synecdoche” (Asch and Wasserman 2005).

3.3 Romantic Love and Sexual Intimacy

These points apply as well to the relationship between disability and romantic and sexual intimacy. This aspect of romantic leave can amplify the concerns of people already skeptical about the ability of persons with disabilities to contribute to thriving friendships. Many nondisabled people may doubt that people with disabilities can be fulfilling partners in any loving adult relationship. Prominent explanations of love, again based in Aristotle, hold that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge, insofar as one’s beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting back one’s character (see SEP entries on love and friendship). Many nondisabled people may find it hard to imagine seeing their reflection in a disabled partner. According to LaFollette (1996), love, at least ideally, brings out the best in the participants. For nondisabled people, it may be hard to see past the impairment to imagine that a partner with a disability can bring out their best, be similar enough to understand them, enhance their self-worth, or meet their deepest needs.
Disability creates a number of challenges to forging intimate physical and emotional relationships. People with sensory-motor impairments who were disabled beginning in early life often report that they were socially segregated from other children, either directly because they were tracked into different classes or different schools, or indirectly because other students avoided them. Consequently, many disabled children have not been socialized about sex in the way other children have been: even playground misinformation can play a role in developing and affirming a sense of nascent sexual identity in able-bodied children, yet disabled children are often excluded from this process. To make matters worse, many disabled children do not receive sex education until a much later age than their able-bodied peers (if at all), a reflection of the pervasive stereotype that disabled people are infantile and asexual (Shakespeare 1996).
These challenges persist into adulthood. When disabled people form intimate relationships with other adults, cultural stereotypes and prejudices continue to exact a high cost. Disabled people are often expected to be “with their own kind”, and if they do form intimate relationships with unimpaired people, they must confront patronizing assumptions about the “real” reasons for the relationship: dependency, pity, etc.. When disabled people form intimate relationships with one another, they must overcome psychological barriers to intimacy that result from society’s views about what an appropriate partner would be or what acceptable sexual activity is. Or they must battle family opposition to being with a partner whose similar or different disability prevents that partner from assuming the role of “caregiver” or personal assistant. Emens (2009) shows how institutional practices, along with physical and communication barriers, perpetuate and reinforce prevailing views that people with disabilities will be incapable of participating in sexual and partner relationships.
For various reasons, people with intellectual disabilities have been thought incapable of understanding and appreciating the value of romantic, sexual, or partner relationships. But as first-person narratives attest, disabled people have grown quite adept at navigating and even overcoming these challenges (Shakespeare 1996). Narratives and research demonstrate that even people with developmental disabilities or dementia can and often do consent to mutual, sustained sexual relations (Kaeser 1992). This is not to deny, obviously, that some disabled people lack the cognitive abilities necessary to genuinely consent to sex.

3.4 Parenting and Disability

The assumption that people with disabilities will not be able to enter into intimate relationships, or will impose onerous burdens on their intimates, may play a significant role in the routinization of prenatal testing and abortion for disability. The reluctance of many parents to have a disabled child often rests on an exaggerated view of the physical and emotional demands of raising such children, or on a failure to appreciate the capacities of such children to form rewarding parent-child relationships. The latter is likely to play a major role in the strength of the desire to avoid having a child with a serious cognitive impairment. Indeed, surveys show that prospective parents are far more reluctant to have a child with a cognitive or affective impairment than a sensory or motor impairment (Wertz 1998).
This reluctance may also rest to a great extent on the overwhelming salience of the impairment in a setting where little else can be known about the future child. That salience reinforces the already-powerful tendency to see only the stigmatized trait. Botkin may express the dominant view among prospective parents in arguing that the burden of raising a child with a disability should be treated as equivalent to the burden of raising an unwanted child (Botkin 1995: 32–39). Ferguson argues that the findings from research and from parent narratives in the past thirty years contradict such assertions and demonstrate that families with a child who has a disability look much like other families in terms of satisfaction, stress, and system functioning (Ferguson 2001: 373–95). Other research suggests that raising children with severe cognitive and other disabilities has greater stresses but similar rewards (Aschbrenner, et al. 2010; Blacher and Baker 2007; Gerstein et al. 2009).
Prospective parents with disabilities are less likely to be encumbered by these stereotypes about disabled children, but they may believe that their disabilities have been sufficiently difficult for them that they do not want to pass them on to their children. Moreover, even if their impairment is not genetic and they are likely to become the biological parent of a child without a disability, they must struggle with deeply-rooted skepticism about their own ability to parent disabled or nondisabled children. If one of the most pervasive assumptions about disability is its association with a need for help or “care” from others, the person with a disability may think herself incapable of doing so for others.
The prospect of parenting by people with disabilities provides an opportunity to consider the question of which components of customary parent-child relationships are essential to good parenting (Blustein 1982; Ruddick 1998; O’Neill 2002). Parents with disabilities, particularly cognitive disabilities, are often regarded as unfit to meet the “special needs” of disabled children, and incapable of serving as mentors and role models for nondisabled children. Although some judicial decisions, empirical reports, and personal narratives recognize that many people with physical, sensory, affective, and cognitive impairments can effectively raise children alone or with some assistance, daily life, social service agencies, and attitudes of professionals and the public still thwart people with disabilities in their parenting goals (Collins and Llewellyn 2012; Picciuto 2015). However, social attitudes are gradually changing as examples of successful parenting by people with disabilities proliferate (Mutcherson 2008).

Peer Relationships: Friendship and Love

3.3 Romantic Love and Sexual Intimacy

3.4 Parenting and Disability

Peer Relationships: Friendship and Love :: تعاليق

Peer Relationships: Friendship and Love