Back in the day, I remember talking with Dr. P. about disclosure. I was recently out of the hospital, (barely walking with a cane, propping my arm on a table to see if I could hold my violin), my dear grandmother had just died, and D. had just broken up with me. Dr. P. reassured me that I would meet someone else in time. In his typical low-key way (disguising a humor so dry he should be from Maine), Dr. P. discussed the fine art of notifying a guy that I have MS: "not on the first date."
For several years I didn't date, so it wasn't an issue, but given my recent foray into the world of online dating, it's been in my mind a lot. So far I've abided by the "not on the first date" rule, (though I just realized that C. knows where my blog is, so he probably found out from my blog, which was incredibly tacky on my part. Hi, C.! Sorry!)
What I realized was: I do a lot of things differently in my life, from diet and exercise to the way I plan my activities, in order to manage my health. I've taken my experience with MS and used it to improve so many areas of my life that not talking about it is pretty tough. When B. (a pianist) said on our second date, "at some age, there are just some technical things I'll never be able to do, you know?" I guess I had some look on my face because he said, "no, you don't know..." :-) I didn't take the opening. But I thought I'd better 'fess up to this guy pretty soon.
After 5 hours sailing on Casco Bay with this Bastion of Wonderfulness (in his 2-man racing boat--SO MUCH FUN!), and then another several hours disassembling the boat, changing, eating dinner, etc., I took my opening when he asked whether I'd ever changed my violin technique. (How do you nonchalantly say, "yes, actually I did change my technique rather a lot because I had to teach myself to play the violin from scratch after I was paralyzed 4 years ago"??) I did my best. He took it well. If he didn't already have way too many points in my book, I would have given him bonus points for that one. I then told him about the "not on the first date" rule. We decided that we were probably already on our 3rd date since by that time we had been hanging out for something like 10 hours.
Whew.