Chapter 11: Flirting with Lady Luck
3.2k words
Here's a fun experiment. Go on any dating app. Swipe around for a while. Notice how everyone's got a picture on a mountain, or holding a fish, or at a wedding looking like they peaked that one night. Now imagine you're doing the same thing, except your profile photo includes a wheelchair, and suddenly the whole game changes.
Not because you've changed. You're still you—same humor, same charm, same questionable taste in music. But the chair is in the frame, and the chair has this magical ability to make people either swipe left immediately or swipe right with this weird savior energy that's somehow worse.
Welcome to dating post-injury. Pull up a chair. I already have one.
I want to be clear about something before I get into this: I'm not bitter. I'm not some angry guy shaking his fist at the dating gods. I've had relationships. Real ones. Women who cared about me, who tried, who showed up. And I've also had the other kind—the ones that teach you more about yourself than you wanted to know.
But here's what nobody prepares you for when you break your neck at twenty-four: the dating world doesn't just change for you. It changes around you. The rules shift. The dynamics shift. And the thing you used to take for granted—that a woman might just see you and think, Yeah, him—becomes this complicated calculation that involves logistics, assumptions, pity, curiosity, and occasionally genuine connection.
I used to be the guy at the bar. The one buying rounds. The one with the quick line and the easy smile. I wasn't Clooney, but I had my thing. Southern, confident, just enough swagger to be interesting without being a dick about it. I could walk up to a woman and start a conversation without thinking about it. It was instinct.
Now the instinct is still there. The confidence is still there—most days. But the approach is different because I'm approaching from three feet lower than everyone else, and that changes the physics of attraction in ways that nobody writes about in Cosmo.
Before we get to dating, I need to tell you about the summer before everything changed. Because the whole arc of my relationship with luck starts there.
June 2009. I went on a rugby trip to Cancun. Because that's what you do when you're twenty-four and physically indestructible—you travel in packs with other young men who believe wholeheartedly that nothing bad is ever going to happen to them.
We were a bunch of guys who hit each other for sport, drank aggressively, and treated our bodies like they were leased vehicles we planned to return dented. The trip was everything you'd expect. Sun, salt water, games, nights that started at sunset and ended at sunrise. Lady Luck was riding shotgun the whole trip. Every bad decision came out fine. Every sketchy situation resolved itself. Nobody got hurt.
I came home thinking: that's just how it goes. You push the edge and the edge holds. You test the limits and the limits have give. You live like you're bulletproof because you've never been shot.
Three weeks later. July 4th, 2009. Oxford, Mississippi. Pool party.
You know how the rest goes.
The rugby trip was the last time I took luck for granted. Everything after has been a negotiation.
Let me tell you about a woman I dated.
Our first date felt disarming. That's the word I keep coming back to. Disarming. This woman had a way of making me drop every wall I'd spent years constructing.
We were at a restaurant. A family restaurant. The kind of place with booths and kids running around and someone's grandmother three tables over working on a chicken fried steak. Normal place. Safe place. The kind of place where you have a polite first date and maybe hold hands across the table if things go well.
She decided we were going to make out.
Not a quick kiss. Not a peck. Full-on, middle-of-the-restaurant, families-are-staring, someone-please-call-the-manager making out. She was aggressive about it. And I'm sitting there thinking, This is not me. I don't do this. I respect people's space. There are children here.
But she had this energy—this force field—that made me feel like it was okay. Like she was helping me experience something I'd been too careful to let myself have. Like she was liberating me from my own self-consciousness.
I thought she was being genuine. I thought this was a woman who saw past the chair and liked the man in it so much that she couldn't keep her hands off him. And man, that felt good. After years of wondering if anyone would ever look at me like that again, here was this woman practically climbing across a table at Applebee's or wherever the hell we were.
Come to find out—a month later, because the truth always takes its sweet time—she told me she just wanted to see me squirm. She didn't care about the environment because she didn't personally have to live around those people.
Read that again. She wanted to watch me be uncomfortable. For her entertainment.
And just like that, the thing I thought was liberation turned out to be a performance. My vulnerability was her amusement. The walls I'd dropped? She'd taken notes on every brick.
I opened my heart to that woman. My home. My parents' home. All of it.
The falling out happened the night before we were supposed to drive to St. Louis to meet her parents. Now, here's the context you need: her own mother had requested that we not meet. I had told her I wasn't comfortable forcing that to happen either. Two separate people—her mother and me—both said the same thing: let's not do this yet.
But she needed it. She needed to force the meeting because she was keeping score. She'd endured being uncomfortable at my parents' house during Hurricane Ida—which, by the way, was a hurricane, not a social obligation, but sure—and in her mind, the ledger wasn't balanced until I'd been equally uncomfortable around hers.
She said we were just going to spend the weekend in her hometown. No parents. Just us. I reluctantly agreed because I thought it would make her happy, and I was still operating under the delusion that making her happy was my job.
Then, the night before the trip, the real bomb dropped.
She found out I was unvaccinated.
Now, I'm not turning this into a political chapter. I'm not here to debate anybody's medical choices. But what she said next is the part that crushed me:
"I regret the last two months of our relationship."
Because of a shot. Two months of dates and conversations and vulnerability and opening up—all retroactively erased because of a medical decision I'd never hidden from her. I hadn't withheld a damn thing. She just hadn't asked.
Even after that, she still tried to force the road trip. Not because she'd gotten over it. Because she was jealous. Because the scoreboard still wasn't even. She'd been uncomfortable around my family, and by God, I was going to be uncomfortable around hers—whether her own mother wanted us there or not.
I suppose she always needed to find validation for her misery. Some people are like that. They can't just be unhappy—they need to make sure you're unhappy too, so the math works out.
Here's what dating after a spinal cord injury teaches you that no amount of therapy or self-help books ever will:
People will weaponize your vulnerability.
Not all of them. Not even most of them. But enough. Enough to make you think twice before dropping the walls again. Enough to make you question every single time someone says, "I don't even see the chair."
Because here's the thing: I want you to see the chair. The chair is part of me. It's been part of me since 2009. I don't need you to pretend it's not there. I need you to see it and still want to sit down across from me. Not because you're brave. Not because you're charitable. Because you actually like the guy in it.
I always give my full and loving attention in my relationships. Always. I show up with everything I've got—which, granted, looks different than it used to, but the intention hasn't changed. I still open doors, metaphorically. I still plan things. I still listen. I still try to make whoever I'm with feel like the center of the world, because that's who I am. That's who I was before the chair and who I'll be until they put me in the ground.
And I always feel like I'm taken for granted within the first three months. That timeframe keeps shrinking. Like there's a clock running from the moment someone decides to give this a shot, and somewhere around week twelve, the novelty wears off and they realize that dating a quadriplegic isn't a Hallmark movie. It's catheters and spasms and modified positions and logistics that would give a military strategist a headache.
There's a part of me—and this is the part I'm not proud of, but this book doesn't work if I'm not honest—that thinks I should never respond negatively. Ever. To anything. Because I can't imagine how difficult it must be to be with somebody with a disability. I'm still not over my accident. It's gotten the best of me. I know that.
So when a woman makes an emotional jab, I absorb it. When she says something cutting, I file it away. When she weaponizes my mere presence—and yes, that happens, when the chair itself becomes the argument—I sit there and take it. Literally. Because what am I going to do? Get up and leave?
The pressure builds. Trust me, it builds. I trust these women with my feelings, and in turn they piss all over them and weaponize the one thing I can't change about myself. And I sit there. Because I've convinced myself that my patience will somehow make them realize I've been respectful. That they'll see what I'm doing. That they'll appreciate it.
They never do.
People don't see my pain. And I don't think it's my place to make them see it.
I live in pain. Every day. Not the dramatic, movie-of-the-week kind. The grinding, constant, low-grade kind that sits behind your eyes and in your shoulders and in the parts of your body that technically can't feel anything but somehow hurt anyway. The kind that makes you not want to smile, not because you're unhappy but because smiling takes energy you've already spent just getting through breakfast.
I live in pain and I am embarrassed by it.
Read that again. I'm embarrassed. Not angry. Not sad. Embarrassed. Because pain, in our culture, is weakness. And weakness, in dating, is death. Nobody swipes right on "lives in chronic pain and needs help with basic daily tasks." Nobody's fantasy involves a guy who sometimes can't lift a fork.
So I hide it. I crack a joke instead. I make you laugh so you don't notice the wince. I redirect the conversation so smoothly you don't even realize I just had a spasm under the table that felt like my body was trying to reset itself.
And then I go home. And I sit in the quiet. And I wonder why I keep putting myself out there when putting myself out there requires performing a version of myself that isn't quite real.
But here's the thing—and I need you to hear this, because this is the part where the chapter turns:
I still believe.
I know. After everything I just told you, I still believe in love. Not the fairy-tale kind. Not the "you complete me" kind. The real kind. The kind where two people see each other clearly—chair, pain, baggage, all of it—and choose each other anyway. Not as a project. Not as a cause. As a partner.
I've always been a romantic. The injury didn't break that. None of them broke that. They dented it. They scratched the paint. But the engine still runs.
My ideal woman? A breathtakingly cute, light-eyed brunette with a sentimental and slightly quirky demeanor. Someone who understands that my best feelings in the world are skiing down a mountain to hard rock music, staring at the cosmos, and letting smooth jazz wash over me. Someone who gets that my worst feeling is lonely nostalgia—the empty mall with background music playing to nobody.
Someone who knows that disability is my canvas, experience is my medium, and my brain is the brush. And who asks me: Why do you keep painting that damn smiley face?
And someone who sticks around long enough to help me paint something different.
I'm not naive. I know the odds. I know what the dating landscape looks like from down here. I know that for every woman who sees the man, there are ten who see the chair. And I know that even the ones who see the man sometimes get tired of the logistics.
But I also know this: every time I put myself out there—every awkward first date, every profile that leads with honesty instead of hiding behind it, every time I let someone close enough to hurt me—I'm proving something.
Not to them. To myself.
That the dive didn't take this from me. That the shallow end of a pool in Oxford, Mississippi, broke my neck but didn't break my ability to love. That I'm still the guy who offered Eli Manning a shot. Still the guy who leads with generosity, even when generosity gets thrown back in his face.
There's another version of flirting with Lady Luck. One that doesn't involve restaurants or dating apps or women who want to watch you squirm.
It involves a Nissan GT-R doing 100 mph around a racetrack in Dawsonville, Georgia.
November 24, 2012. Three years after the accident — three years of hospitals and rehab and learning to live in a body I hadn't asked for — somebody handed me the keys to one of the fastest production cars on the planet at Road Atlanta. Hand controls. Full track. No guardrails on my ambitions.
Think about that timing. I was still figuring out how to get dressed in the morning. Still negotiating with a nervous system that had its own agenda. And here I was, strapping into something that did zero to sixty in under three seconds, pointing it at a hairpin and flooring it.
The first lap, I was careful. The second lap, I wasn't. By the fourth lap, I was pushing the car the way I used to push myself — all the way to the edge, just to see if the edge would hold.
It held.
When I pulled back into the pit lane I told anyone who would listen: that was the most thrilling day of my life. I meant it. Still mean it. Because that day wasn't about proving I could drive. It was about proving I was still alive in the ways that actually count. Still had the nerve. Still had the reflex. Still wanted the risk.
Lady Luck let me have that one. She was probably watching from the infield, shaking her head, but she let me have it.
That hunger didn't go away. It got bigger.
June 2013. BullRun. If you don't know BullRun, it's basically what happens when you let a bunch of people with too many horsepower and not enough supervision plan a road trip. Coast to coast. Exotic cars. Speed that is technically illegal everywhere but happens anyway. I drove from Atlanta to the finish. That's the sanitized version. The unsanitized version involves speeds that would've made my mother cry and grins that wouldn't quit for three days straight.
The next year, June 2014, we went cross-country. I did the whole thing.
Let me sit with that for a second: cross-country. Me. Wheelchair. BullRun. Because somewhere in me lives a person who decided that a broken neck was not, in fact, a good enough reason to stay home.
Then July 2014 — drone footage over Kentwood. Just me, floating a camera over the town where I grew up, watching my whole origin story from two hundred feet above it. Quiet up there. Wide. The kind of perspective that either breaks you open or puts everything back in order. For me, it did both.
Before all of that, before Road Atlanta, before BullRun — there was the rugby trip to Cancun. June 2009. The last time I was bulletproof. The last time luck was something I assumed rather than something I earned.
I think about that trip sometimes. How close together those two versions of me were in time. June 2009: invincible, twenty-four, no concept of consequence. July 4th, 2009: twenty-four, pool party, C6-C7, the rest of my life rewritten in a single second.
One month. One dive. The whole thing pivoted.
That's what flirting with Lady Luck actually looks like. Not just the romance version. The whole thing — the speed, the road, the sky, the dare. The Cancun trip and the Oxford pool and the Road Atlanta racetrack and the cross-country BullRun and the drone over Kentwood. The constant, low-grade negotiation with a universe that tried to cash you out and didn't quite pull it off.
Lady Luck and I have a complicated relationship. She's fickle. She's cruel sometimes. She let me dive into the shallow end and she let me fall in love with people who didn't deserve it.
But she also let me survive. She let me feel. She let me keep wanting, which is its own kind of miracle when wanting has cost you as much as it's cost me.
So yeah. I'm still flirting with her. Still buying her drinks. Still hoping she'll look my way one more time.
Because the alternative—giving up, shutting down, deciding that love is for people with working legs—isn't an option. It never was.
Here's what I know about luck, after fifteen years of studying it closely: it doesn't respond to merit. It doesn't compensate for effort or reward patience. The unlucky die young and the careless survive and the universe doesn't explain itself.
And yet.
I'm here. By any strict accounting, I shouldn't be. The pool alone. The voice, three times a day, for fifteen years. A hundred things should have broken me that didn't. That's either luck, or something I built, or some combination of the two that I can't fully separate.
What I know is this: I kept showing up. I kept playing the game even when the hands were bad. I kept flirting with the woman even when she wasn't flirting back. And one day — a February day, a Thursday night, an April morning that turned out not to be the end — she looked over.
I looked back.
You stay at the table. You keep your head up and your sense of humor functioning.
Lady Luck doesn't owe you a thing. But she shows up for the ones who keep showing up.
I love you, Lady Luck. But damn, you make it hard sometimes.