this wasn’t the bridal experience I dreamed of

Today is March 31st, which means it’s me and my husband’s 2nd wedding anniversary (and 8 years together total) — which feels wild! As cliché as it sounds, it really has flown by.

And while this is a happy milestone, I’d be lying if I said the whole wedding experience didn’t come with some complicated emotions. Because being a disabled bride? It’s different. And it’s time we talked about that.

If you saw my latest Instagram post, you already know that I bought my wedding dress online. Why? Because a lifetime of being stared at, bullied, and being told my body was “wrong” made me scared of how my body would be judged in a bridal shop.

And I know — at the end of the day, the dress is the least significant part of my marriage.

But it’s about what the dress represents. It’s a symptom of something bigger — of how society treats disabled women, especially when it comes to life’s milestones like marriage and weddings.

the subtle ways disabled women are infantilized and ignored

I’ve spent most of my life noticing how people react to my disability. It’s a sixth sense that most of us with apparent disabilities have developed over time.

The awkwardness. The stares. The polite-but-weird energy that forms when we enter the room.

And when I got engaged, I felt it again.

When my husband and I started talking about the wedding (which ended up being a beach elopement, just the two of us, our officiant, and some of our close family), I couldn’t ignore how different the experience felt compared to other brides I knew. No one offered to throw me a shower. No one was begging to hear about my dress.

At first I brushed it off. We were having a micro-wedding. We weren’t being traditional. Maybe that’s why.

But I’ve seen other women in my life have small weddings and they were celebrated in a way I wasn’t. And I can’t help but feel like it’s because I didn’t quite fit into what people imagine when they think of a bride.

It’s part of a larger pattern — one I’ve experienced in so many of those “big life moments.” Growing up, I watched the people around me assume I wouldn’t follow the same path. Not because I said I wouldn’t — but because I was disabled.

I grew up in a part of Canada where a lot of people still hold conservative, traditional beliefs —get married young, have kids, buy a house with a white picket fence in the suburbs — you get the idea. And yet, I was rarely ever questioned about whether I would have kids. Which, to be clear, is something we should never assume of anyone, disabled or not. But for me, it felt different. It wasn’t like people were respecting my boundaries — it felt like they already decided I wouldn’t be a mother.

I never wanted kids, but I wasn’t really open about that until my mid 20s. Still, the assumption was already there.

And marriage? It was the same. My husband and I were together for five years before getting engaged, and not once did we get the usual questions. There were no "when’s he going to pop the question?" or “when are you getting married?" And while those kinds of questions are absolutely intrusive and annoying, the absence of them is also pretty telling.

It felt like people didn’t expect a couple like us — an interabled one — to ever get married.

Disabled women are so often treated like we don’t quite count. We’re infantilized.

There are so many reasons why this happens, and most of them are rooted in ableism and the way society imagines womanhood.

There’s this belief that disabled women aren’t fully grown-up — like we’re perpetually stuck as girls who need caretaking, not women with autonomy. So when we do fall in love, or get married, or have children, people often don’t know how to process it. It doesn’t fit the narrative they’ve subconsciously built.

Not to mention the way disability is desexualized in media, the lack of representation in anything wedding related, and the fact that most wedding traditions weren’t built with disabled people in mind.

From inaccessible venues and bachelorette parties, to the expectation that brides have to wear heels and long, heavy, hard-to-move-in dresses just to be seen as “bridal.”

Each of these reinforce a message we’ve heard our whole lives: that we’re not the ones these big moments were made for.

Sometimes I wonder if other people even realized it. That they weren’t celebrating me the same way. That their excitement felt lacklustre, or awkward, or just...absent.

If you’ve felt this too, please remember — your disability is not the problem. It’s the world that hasn’t learned how to celebrate disabled women properly.

And you’re just as worthy as life’s big moments as anyone else.