Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down While Chronically Ill and Disabled

A much-needed guide for disabled and chronically ill people to dating - from apps to hooking up, sex, 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.

Jessica Slice is a disabled author and essayist who has published essays The New York Times’s Modern Love column, in Alice Wong’s bestselling Disability Visibility, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hippocampus, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and HuffPost. Her upcoming book about parenting with a disability, UNFIT PARENT, will be published by Beacon Press. She has been featured on Longreads, Suleika Jaoud’s newsletter, on Judy Heumann’s podcast, on iHeart Radio’s Lovestruck, and is a regular participant on disability panels and podcasts. Thousands of monthly readers engage with her disability-related newsletter. She is a graduate of Davidson College and Columbia University and lives in Ontario with her husband and child.

Caroline Cupp is an author, bioethicist, and progressive faith leader. Born with cerebral palsy, she is one of the only disabled clergy to have led a large religious congregation in the United States. Caroline’s work has been featured in Reflections (the journal of the Yale Divinity School) and Presbyterian Outlook, and she has contributed to several podcasts on the subjects of faith and disability. A graduate of Davidson College, Yale Divinity School, and the University of Pennsylvania, Caroline focuses on the intersections of health, justice, and meaning-making. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and son.
Together, Jessica and Caroline have written three forthcoming picture books, all celebrating disability and published by Dial (Penguin Random House).