Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down While Chronically Ill and Disabled
Hachette Go, 2024
Agent: Jill Marr
A much-needed guide to dating--from apps to hooking up, sex, long-term relationships and more--from disabled essayist and author Jessica Slice and bioethicist Caroline Cupp.
Disabled people date, have casual sex, marry, and parent. Yet our romantic lives are conspicuously absent from the media and cultural conversation. Sexual education does not typically address the specific information needed by disabled students. Mainstream dating apps fail to include disability as an aspect of one’s identity alongside race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The few underutilized disability-focused apps are paternalistic and unappealing. Bestselling dating books do not address disability, and the few relationship books marketed to disabled people focus on the mechanics of sex rather than the complex interactions that create the conditions for it.
In Dateable, disabled authors Jessica Slice Caroline Cupp team up to address the serious gap in the dating space. Dateable is the first book on disabled dating and relationships; it’s a dating guide made especially for disabled and chronically ill people, that also calls in nondisabled readers. Jessica and Caroline take on everything from rom-com representation and dating apps to sex and breakups with a strong narrative underpinning and down-to-earth advice. The book is as much a practical tool as it is an empowering guide.
Reviews:
"With its mix of astute cultural analyses, quippy personal anecdotes, and deeper dives into sociopolitical and theoretical factors, this book does more than show disabled and chronically ill people that they belong. It also serves as a reminder that it matters how one shows up on dating apps and in relationships, in order to counteract the systems that try to render invisible the people whose bodies don’t conform to social norms." Library Journal (starred review)
"Essayist Slice and minister Cupp team up for a noteworthy relationship guide for disabled people. With plenty of useful tips, stories, and encouragement for readers to fashion their own approaches, this is a valuable resource." Publishers Weekly