Well since this is a topic that's come up before some people have likely heard my take on it, but for any newbies and for the sake of a fresh discussion I don't mind repeating myself, no I don't mind repeating myself, not at all, repeating myself is fine because I do not mind it. There are things I mind and repeating myself is not one of them, absolutely not, if I had to repeat myself some how it would not be something I would mind since I absolutely do not mind repeating myself .
Okay to get back on track my lady and I actually did! meet online in 2014 on a mailing list about books and music. However, neither of us was actually looking for anything romantic at all, we were just chatting about books etc. When it transpired she was a classical soprano and I was a classical tenor, I suggested the international music school I go to, since its one of the few places a blind performer can be treated equally at audition, and since she was living in Germany at the time, though she's American by birth, getting there wasn't too much of an issue. By the time we met, we had already exchanged a lot of emails and a couple of phone calls and new we were friends.
Then after we met we both started to believe there could be something else going on. Things got a little more complicated after that since she got involved with someone else, but in the end things worked out and we've now been very happily married for two years.
The important thing from the perspective of this topic, is we were friends first. I was myself suffering really severe genophobia (that is fear of sex), which made all of the usual dating business even crappier than it usually is for blind people. I however just treated my lady as I would any other friend, and things went from there.
the plane fact is, if you want a relationship that actually involves more than just what goes on in the bedroom, you will be spending a lot of time with your significant other, so if you can't get on as things aren't going to work out well.
Unless your going to have a horribly unequal relationship, you will be doing a lot of things like washing the pots, doing housework, going shopping together etc, it also pays to be able to do things like read books, play games, go out, talk together and so on.
I can quite legitimately describe my lady as "my best friend" and she feels the same way, and part of that is simply that we started, and continue to be friends.
I'll also delicately point out that the more the two of you are on the same wavelength the better the physical side of a relationship gets, from cuddling onwards.
The same is true for friends of mine who have had successful relationships, they always started as friends with their respective partners first rather than going through the conventional dating game, asking out process.
indeed, the dating process seems inherently biased towards giving women a lot of power to accept or reject, and seems more than ever intended to go against any men who don't fall into a fairly narrow box of cultural expectations of male success, which unfortunately pretty much includes anyone with a disability.
So, my personal advice would be to forget any sort of conventional dating or attempts to find a romantic partner, and just look around for female friends, online or off it, ---- for example, one friend of mine once described tabletop roleplaying as "the thinking person's dating service!", and since I used to play a tabletop game every week with three married couples, two of whom had met whilst rping, that is not really surprising .
Actually most of my female friends I met as a student at university, just hanging around after lectures or doing social events and so on, this is also where several friends of mine met their respective partners too and it is possible if I hadn't been genophobic at the time I would've as well, though I will say post university finding anyone to be even normal friends with is pretty difficult, so anything else, goodness knows.
Lastly, I would personally advise people to stay faaaaaaar away from online dating sites. Not only potential predators, but also women looking to take financial advantage of men to essentially get meals out, or services that ask for exhaubitant fees and then offer no guarantees, plus of course, with no possibility to interact on a social level, your blindness will pretty much knock you straight out of the running with anyone bar some really decent women, since as I said, the conventional dating process is basically just meant to reinforce stereotypes, indeed in an era when all men are increasingly being labeled as dangerous predators as that's likely getting even worse.
I suspect actually that "dating" is one of these hold overs from previous centuries and societies when men and women didn't interact much socially so needed some formulae and signals in order to do it, indeed I would guess that the more formalised and rigidly defined gender rolls in a society, the more formulaic the dating rituals and expectations are, expectations which give a lot of power to women, and very little to anyone who falls outside society's idea of masculine success, disabled people included, indeed I recall one study I read which noted in marriages with one disabled and one none disabled partner, in five out of six cases the disabled person was the woman.
So, my advice about dating is like my advice about online dating sites, stay far far away. On the other hand, female friends are definitely worth having and likely are your best way of finding a real lasting relationship.
Hth.
With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)