Who Gets to Date Freely?
Asking as a Disabled Black Woman
in the Global South

When Myisha Battle asked whether dating can ever be economically fair, she meant well. She spoke to a truth many women know: power is entangled with money, and money has always had its hand in romance. But even her sharp essay missed a harder question I live with: Can dating ever be possible, or even joyful, for someone like me?

I’m a 31-year-old Black disabled woman living in South Africa—a country with deep economic fault lines and even deeper ableist attitudes. I’m not just disabled. I have a rare neuromuscular condition called Spinal Muscular Atrophy, which puts me in a wheelchair, in and out of private hospitals that don’t understand my diagnosis, and on the edge of financial ruin despite a full-time government job and award-winning career.

I am also a journalist—trained in a dying industry. A high earner by rural standards, yes. But dating is rarely about income alone. My experiences are shaped by where I’m from (a rural province), the field I chose (not Medicine, not Commerce, not Law), my condition (invisible to policy, visible to everyone else), and the sheer weight of living in a society that assumes disabled women are either undesiring or undesired.

And yet, I date.

Always in interabled relationships. Always with men who don’t share the fullness of my exclusions. Always aware that I come to the table with a rare body, rare stamina, rare obligations. It’s not that I envy my non-disabled friends who are married and raising toddlers. I do not. It’s that our timelines are read differently.

Because when you are disabled in the Global South, dating is not just personal. It’s political. It’s structural.

It’s not about who pays the bill—it’s about who gets to show up in the first place without first having to advocate for step-free access or explain why you’re tired or cancel when the transport subsidy doesn’t come through. It’s about whose family understands that love doesn’t always walk through the front door. It’s about who has time to text back between care shifts, funding proposals, state hospital queues, and therapy appointments that come once every six months—if you’re lucky.

I don’t want to be the concession in someone else’s story. I don’t want to make less money just to soothe an ego or make more money and carry the emotional costs too. I want someone whose ambition doesn’t shrink mine. Who doesn’t see my access needs as complications, but rather context. I want someone who’s not scared that my rare disease has no roadmap, but who also won’t reduce our relationship to inspiration porn.

I wonder sometimes: can I date well? Sustainably? Joyfully? Can I love someone without becoming their caregiver or coach or long-term therapist? Can I marry by 33 without compromising the reputation I’ve built or the voice I’ve honed in national debates?

And who, exactly, am I waiting for?

Is he already abroad, running a climate start-up in Canada or balancing policy memos in Geneva? Did he already leave this country, this continent, after watching the local economy regress and believing there was nothing left to build here? Is he in aisle 3 of Woolworths right now, buying Riesling to wind down from a week of invoices and late-night flights, unaware I’ve already dreamt about our coastal Sunday afternoons?

Or is he doom-scrolling on Instagram, pausing on my reel, where I look like I already have it all—two kids under five, a peaceful seaside life, a man already won? Will he miss me because he thinks I’m already gone?

Maybe he’s a rising politician, fielding votes and fending off enemies. Maybe he hasn’t answered my message because he’s calculating how to win his party’s nomination—and maybe he fears I’m a detour, not a destination. Maybe we’re both stuck in the churn of geopolitics, uncertain if Iran’s next move or the next election cycle will allow us even one season of stillness together.

Or maybe he’s just afraid—of how much I know, how much I’ve survived, how deeply I feel.

So yes, I ask myself: Can I be loved without shrinking? Can I be chosen without becoming the sacrifice?

I’ve tried to write this only in my journal. To keep these thoughts private. To not say too much. But what if he is out there—reading this? Not yet mine, not yet brave enough to name what’s between us?

Maybe I shouldn’t hit send. Maybe I should just call him. Ask if he landed safely. Ask if, with just the right amount of timing and courage, we could still meet at the courthouse by my 32nd birthday.

Because more than fairness, more than romance, I want truth. And maybe love, at least for some of us, must start there.