Chris, 38

What do you do for a living? 
I get a pension from the government auto-insurance agency here, from a car accident I had ten years ago. I was a bike messenger. 

Is that how you — 
Yeah, I got hit by a taxi driver and broke my neck in the accident. From there, I was a quadriplegic pretty much instantly. 

Clearly, you must have had to make a lot of huge adjustments to your lifestyle. 
Yeah, the rehabilitation took about two years of being in readaptation centers. Depending on what your situation is, whether they adapt your house or you find an accessible apartment, you have to learn to live by yourself or with whatever support network you can scrounge up. It's a long process. 

How has being a quadriplegic changed sex for you? 
Oh, it's changed things enormously. [laughs] I'm paralyzed. I mean, I don't feel my penis. So, you know, it works — but in terms of ejaculation, or just like the standard male-female physical sex act, it's completely... it's different. It's not that you can't still be romantic with somebody, it's just, like, the whole core thing of a man and a woman, with the erect penis — ejaculating, boom, finished, done — it doesn't happen that way anymore, so you have to find other ways to satisfy your partner. 

Have you been reasonably successful at finding ways to be sexual? 
Well, I mean, I'm still learning. I've ejaculated twice in ten years, and that was under research experiments, so it's not an easy task. But in terms of the romantic side, you just kind of focus less on the sexuality and more on the sensuality. I've found that women don't really have much of a problem with that. [laughs] Yeah, it's not a perfect situation, but it is what it is. 

Have you derived any unexpected benefits from the situation? 
Yeah, in terms of being a more sensual person when it comes to being in a relationship with somebody. Girls are usually quite pleasantly surprised. It's good. It still makes me feel like a man, just in a different way. 

How do you generally meet women? 
Through all sorts of ways. I've met women through my friends. I met my girlfriend through the internet. I was doing a project last year, an accessibility project in Montreal, and she had just come across that randomly on the internet and sent me a message, and we started Skyping, one thing led to another, and now we're in a relationship. This is the second time she's come to visit me from Germany, and we Skype every day, and we have a good relationship. We're working on being together, slowly. At the same time — it's not that I haven't had any relationships in the past few years, but I... you just have problems letting your walls down, and opening up. But I mean, everybody has those kind of problems, just mine are more — well, I wouldn't say more exaggerated or more pronounced, because everybody's got their own hang-ups to live with through relationships. Now, it's going quite well. I'm learning how to lower those barriers and evolve into a healthy relationship. It's nice.

What qualities are most important to you in a woman? 
You know, just somebody I can be comfortable with. I mean, I have two children from a previous relationship before my accident, and we were in a typical, comfortable relationship with two little kids, and after a few years, it sort of gets a little bit boring in the bedroom, but that's the way things go when you have babies. Sex is kind of the last thing on the list. And then suddenly I had my accident, which basically turned me upside down, and it also turned her life upside down. And she just found it really hard to deal with, and I wasn't going to force her to be miserable through this whole thing, you know, when it's just my burden to live with. I mean, if I'm just learning how to accept it myself, how am I going to put that on somebody else? And it's also, too, one the reasons why I've kept people at a distance over the past years. Like I said, it's a process of learning how to bring those barriers down. 

So the accident caused the dissolution of the relationship that you were in at the time? 
Yeah, pretty much. Because she was left with two young children at home, and me in the hospital, and a full-time job and everything. It's tough. It's not easy to do.

 

Audra, 35

Are you from Montreal? 
No, I live in Ottawa right now. I'm the e-communications officer for Oxfam Canada. 

Has that ever gotten you any dates? 
No, not at all. No one really knows what Oxfam is. 

So if you whip that out at a party, it doesn't get you anywhere? 
No, people think that it means I run Twitter or something. They say, "Is that, like, Twitter?" And I just say yes. 

So what do you do to impress potential dates?
I think... I pick fights. I like arguing as flirting. I wrote speeches for Jack Layton during the 2008 federal election, and people like to hear about that. 

That is interesting. Did you ever date anyone you met through that job? 
No, but I had a lot of crushes. You work fifteen hours a day for thirty-seven days in a row, and basically you have to have a crush on somebody to brighten up your job. 

What do you find attractive in a potential partner? 
I like beards, and I like people who are funny, and sincere, and skeptical, in equal measure.

Do you have any dating dealbreakers?
I will never sleep with someone who's anti-choice, or votes conservative. I sleep with people who don't vote at all, but I find that... not ideal. 

Have you ever been offended in the bedroom?
One time I was making out with this guy, and I said, "So what do you think about when you think about doing it?" And he said, "Oh, do you mean with you?" And I said, "Sure. Let's start there." That was a little bit offensive. 

Did he understand that it was offensive?
Yeah, he looked like he wanted to die.

So did that kill the mood? 
No, there was enough flattering, backpedalling and explaining that we managed to push through it. 

Have you ever offended anyone in a similar way? 
I've definitely said the wrong name. I think that's the worst that I've done. 

How did you recover from that?
Um... I married that guy, mostly to reassure him. But it didn't go very well, as a marriage. I don't recommend that approach — I think that's an extreme thing to do. 

How long did that marriage last?
About a year. 

How did your upbringing influence your views on sexuality? 
I think that my boundaries weren't really respected when I was a kid, and I think that made me pretty diligent about making sure that everybody was always on board with everything that was happening, all the time. I think that people often think that they're being really clear, but they're not. So I don't leave anything unsaid, even if it's not super-hot. I think that most quality people will have a pretty frank discussion beforehand about, "Here are my triggers, here's a word I don't want to hear, here's a thing that will make me uncomfortable if you do… but here's a bunch of amazing stuff we can do. Let's do that.

There are too many people who are afraid to say unsexy things in the bedroom. 
I mean, it's way less sexy to burst into tears than it is to be like, "Okay, before we do this, here's what I'm comfortable and not comfortable with." 

Better to make things awkward for a minute or two than to have to call the whole thing off. 
Exactly! 

 

Jesse, 37

Tell me, what do you do for a living? 
I work for a theater company as a scenic carpenter. 

Does that ever get you dates? 
No, considering that I generally work with a bunch of other guys — no. And thankfully so. 

But do girls ever find it hot that you're a carpenter?
Uh… yeah, some of them do. My girlfriend thinks it's kind of attractive. We've managed to work out the relationship so that she's the brains and I'm the brawn. So she has great ideas, and I execute them. 

Are you happy with that arrangement? 
Yes.

What else do you do to maintain a happy and equitable relationship? 
I just try to be myself. I act as natural as I can around the person I'm with, because if that person doesn't like who I am and what I do, and how I enjoy being happy, then she's probably not somebody I want to spend a lot of time with. 

What do you do to make her feel good? 
Constant attention. Lots of back rubs and foot rubs. I'm her sounding board, and I'm the one that she can tell anything to, and I'll listen. I basically treat her as the center of my universe, and that seems to work well. 

How long have you two been dating? 
Ten years. 

Can you tell me a story about one of your previous relationships?
I have a story about a girl that I saw for about four years. We lived together for a year in Nova Scotia, and decided that it would be a great idea to move out West. So we packed up everything we owned and put it in storage, and then basically took the equivalent of a suitcase from one end of the country to the other. And when we got out there, for various reasons, we ended up parting ways. It was one of those on-again, off-again breakups, because we knew only each other, and we were in a new place. So we would be separate, and then we'd end up getting back together, and kind of starting the very negative, destructive relationship up again, and separating, and going through that whole vicious cycle. There were awful things involved — you know, drugs, homelessness, fights in the middle of the street at three a.m., screaming at each other. We were both going through a very self-destructive time, and we took it out on each other.

Were you homeless, or was she? Or was it both of you? 
We ended up both being at a loss for a place to live — me more than her. I kind of made sure that she was set up with a place to live, and then I left, because I didn't want to be in that situation any more. I didn't know where to go, and I ended up sleeping on the beach in Vancouver a lot, and crashing on kitchen floors, you know, when somebody would give me a place... yeah. So it was a very, extremely negative time, and when I came back to the East, I suddenly ran into this person who was, like, one of the most radiant people I've ever met — never mind the fact that she was a gorgeous, intelligent woman. It was kind of amazing to go from an abysmal, bad place to being happier than I ever thought I could be. 

What do you think made it possible to go from being in the worst relationship of your life to the best relationship of your life? 
I knew exactly what not to do. I knew exactly where I didn't want to go. Somebody said to me once, "Every time you fall in love with somebody, it's better." That has some truth to it, because as you go through relationship after relationship, you learn things. I'd just been schooled. By that, I mean I'd gone through the absolute worst relationship of my life, and knew exactly what kind of person I wanted to be with, and what I wanted to be like around that person. And I knew what I needed to do in order to make that person happy, and to make me happy. 

Do you think that there's one person out there for everyone?
I mean, this girl that I was in this horrible relationship with, it started off being absolutely great, you know? And she was a really cool person, and I thought she was the one, but that turned out to not be the case. In a lot of ways, you make your own reality. The world is a totally flexible place, and you can make it into whatever you want it to be. You can make it a bad place, or you can make it a beautiful place. I think there's something similar with people. I don't think there's any one person who's the perfect "one" for every person. I think that you find somebody who makes you happy, and who's good, and there's a bit of give and take, where as long as it's somebody who's willing to build a certain reality with you, then things will be all right.

Interviews and photography by Jana van Geest. Want to talk to strangers in your town? Email submissions@nerve.com.