Minna – What about sex and dating?

Dating is a funny thing, you know. And especially for a woman who’ve had children before, and someone who was married happily for a long time to say, “Oh, how about dating?” Because in the front end of my injury, it was definitely not on my radar. I skipped the sexuality class because it’s like, “Oh, my God! That’s the last thing on my mind.” But, I think once you acclimate into living with the spinal cord injury and doing all the things that needed to be done first, you know, I did selfishly think about, you know, “where do I go from here as a woman?”  You know, because I was 37 by then, and I still had so much love to give and receive in my opinion, but, you know, I have a finite amount of time. If I sit around and wait for someone to ask me, it may take a lot of time and I might not like that person, and so on and so forth. And so, I decided to give myself worth, that I wasn’t going to put myself on the clearance rack, and that I am capable of speaking my mind. So, I actually did the asking so that I can pick and choose who I wanted to be with. Sexuality after injury was very scary for me. You know, I can count how many people I’ve been with, you know, in my entire life with one hand and have few fingers left over. So, you know, it’s a very personal thing for me and I’ve got to say the way I looked at my body was very different. You know, with an injury, it’s relatively low, and you know, I’ve had two C-sections. So, you know, my body has “life marks,” is what I say. So, I don’t think I went in to the physicality of sexuality until like much into my dating, because it felt so much more private to me. In order for me to let somebody in that privately, like, I have to “know you-know you” kind of thing. So, for me, it took a lot longer than probably other people, because I needed to be comfortable to be that vulnerable.