Love is Paralyzing

Last week's vows column tells the story of the wedding of an adventurer and the leader of his nature adventure trip. This time, however, the adventurer is paralyzed from the waist down. This column, besides being your standard charming fare, also got me thinking about how the Times portrays the less than able-bodied. This week's Modern Love column featured the story of a man in a wheelchair who learns to let his wife love him, and the twenty year marriage that follows. The greatest thing about these tales, I thought, was how small a player the wheelchair actually was. Could it be that we've finally gotten past portrayals of the sick, homeless, and paralyzed that verge, at best, on stereotypical, and, at worst, one-dimensional and sensationalized (I'm certainly not picking on the Times here; the media has only recently been a reasonable place to look for reflections on life from those perspectives)? In these columns, the Times lets the romance speak for itself, and leaves the chair where it should be: the accessory to a romance that outshines a tragedy that doesn't have to define it's occupant.