Dating My Attendant

My name is Mike (not my real name) and I use AAC. I’d like to tell you a story from my life. Not everyone will like it, people may think it is right or wrong but I am a person and I am learning all the time.

In most attendant service agencies, it is forbidden for attendants to date a consumer that they work with. I understand that these policies are there to protect both residents and attendants from abuse. I have been abused before, in many different ways, so I understand. But I don’t know what I think about those policies because they don’t change how people feel. People can still fall in love. In the places I’ve lived, I have seen good relationships between attendants and consumers, and I have also seen abuse.

I’d like to tell you about an experience I had once with dating my attendant. I am an assertive person and I like to try things for myself. We had been working together for 3 months and had been communicating more and more every day. We started to open-up to each other and became friends and then things got more intimate. After we had known each other for a little while, I asked her out to dinner just to see what would happen… I wasn’t sure where it was going. Because of the type of place I was living, the staff couldn’t know about it so we would go to her car to kiss because there was no privacy in my home. Attendants would just walk into my room when they felt like it. One other attendant knew about it and helped us by letting us go to his house nearby and spend time together. The other staff thought we were just friends. We went out for about 5 months but it ended because we both made some mistakes and I was thinking with something else instead of my brain (if you know what I mean). We still worked together after we broke up but it was very uncomfortable and sad so we eventually stopped. But I learned a lot from the experience and I don’t regret it. I was in love with her. People with disabilities can love just like everyone else.

There are good and bad things that could come from this.

Some negative things could be:

• The situation could become abusive.
• It can affect your working relationship… if they’re angry with you, your quality of service might go down.
• They could take advantage of the relationship by showing up late or not at all and think that you won’t report them.
• They might be a different person than you thought… you might get to know a side of them that you don’t like.
• And also, there might be a power imbalance if you are on direct funding then you are their boss… and if you live in a group home it can sometimes feel like they have more power.

But… some positive things about it could be:

• You might really like each other, might fall in love, get married… I know two people who did that.
• The relationship might be a source of love, friendship, sex, mutual respect.
• An attendant might already be familiar with disability and comfortable with helping you eat and undress and have less fears about bodies and differences.

I think it’s OK to date your attendant but you need to communicate beforehand. You need to communicate about working together because it can become uncomfortable. Nothing unsafe happened with her but I think it could become unsafe if you went to their home or even in your own home. They could verbally or physically abuse you, steal, or even abuse you sexually. You might agree to do one thing and then they might not respect you or listen to you if you said no to other things. It can also be unsafe if it is a secret situation because then if something goes wrong (if it becomes abusive) there is no one to tell. You might feel like you’ll get in trouble if you tell because you weren’t supposed to be doing that to begin with. But if someone is being abused they need to get help and not keep it a secret. No matter what you think, all people have all kinds of feelings. I’ve known many people who have dated their attendants. People need to be more open and communicate about it.

Note from Speak Up: While Speak Up does not condone relationships between staff and consumers, we recognize that such relationships do occur and we support the development of guidelines relating to romantic/sexual relationships.