WHEN Lerato* first met her husband on Facebook, disability was not part of the conversation she had imagined she would one day be having with him or the world.
It started the way many modern relationships do – with a simple conversation on social media. The two began chatting and, over time, promised to meet in person. At the time, Lerato was still in high school, while he was preparing to enrol at a tertiary institution.
Before they met physically, he told her he was blind. She did not take him seriously.
“I just said it was fine because I thought he was joking and testing me,” she recalls.
But when the day finally came for them to meet, reality caught up with her. She was shocked.
At that stage of her life, she knew very little about people living with disabilities. Before meeting him, she had even asked a friend at school how she would feel about dating a person with a disability. The neighbour’s answer was blunt – she could not do it.
But life had already begun taking Lerato in a different direction. Rather than walking away, she chose to take it one day at a time – a phrase that would come to define not just how she entered the relationship, but how she has carried herself through every hard season since.
“I started seeing him and learning a lot from him because, man, I knew nothing about people with disabilities,” she says.
What began as uncertainty slowly became a journey of understanding, companionship and love. She had to learn things many people take for granted, including how to walk alongside a blind person – how to be his eyes without ever making him feel like he needed to be carried.
For her, the hardest part has rarely been the disability itself. It has been society’s reaction to it.
Going out in public with her husband can still leave her anxious.
“Even today it still scares me to go around with him because one mistake and everyone is on to me, yelling at me, forgetting that he is also a person who deserves some fresh air and a normal life,” she says.
Her experience has taught her that people living with disabilities are too often treated as though they are fragile objects to be shielded from every possible danger.
“You know, being disabled, people look at you as if you are an egg; one mistake and you are dead but that is not the case,” she says.
The constant scrutiny affects her deeply, and she is honest about that cost.
“When we go out in public, I lose my confidence, my self-esteem. I become a complete fool,” she admits.
And yet, despite the difficulties, she stayed. That single fact – that she stayed, and kept staying – is where her resilience begins. The relationship grew, and eventually the couple had a child. But their path to marriage was not without opposition. His family questioned her intentions. Some suspected she was after his money and property. She remembers being asked why he could not simply marry someone like himself – another blind person.
The questions and suspicion could easily have unravelled the relationship. Instead, the couple pushed forward. Eventually, they married and were blessed with a daughter. Today, she describes married life in remarkably simple terms.
“Man, married life is good,” she says.
Many people warn that marriage is difficult. Her own experience has given her a different perspective.
“I hear a lot of people saying marriage is difficult and I’m like, which marriage is that?” she says.
She cannot picture herself single again, or back at her parents’ home as a divorcee.
“I don’t see myself single or at my parents’ house as a divorcee,” she says, though she acknowledges that life can take unexpected turns.
For her, marriage has not made the challenges disappear. It has meant learning how to face them together – steadily, and without flinching.
One of her biggest concerns is her husband’s mobility. Unlike many blind people who use a white cane to navigate their surroundings, he does not use one, and so he often relies on her when moving around. This worries her. She has encouraged him more than once to learn to use a cane – not to distance herself from him, but because she worries about what might happen if she is not there.
She says he was not born blind but completely lost sight after finishing his studies at the National University of Lesotho where he graduated with Bachelor of Arts in Social Work in 2021.
“I keep thinking, what will happen when I’m gone?” she asks.
It is a question born not of frustration, but of love. She wants her husband to have as much independence as possible, even as she continues to show up for him every day.
Her experience has also exposed her to another reality of disability – that one health problem can ripple outward and affect other parts of a person’s life. She describes it simply as “a connection”: when one part of the body is affected, others can be too.
She recalls a time when her husband developed a lump under his chin. Doctors suspected it might be linked to a dental problem. At the same time, he was struggling to hear out of his other ear. Doctors told the couple they could not treat the ear until the lump was addressed, since the two conditions might be connected.
For Lerato, moments like these have made caregiving a central part of married life. Her husband is physically sensitive and falls ill easily. He experiences seizures, though unpredictably – sometimes seasonal, sometimes with no obvious trigger at all. They rarely last long, and there have even been stretches of a full year without one. But whenever they return, fear returns with them.
“When they come back, they put me in fear,” she says.
Her greatest worry is what might happen if he has a seizure while she is not there – a fear that many caregivers of people living with disabilities quietly carry: the fear of not being present at the exact moment someone they love needs them most.
And yet, despite it all, she refuses to see herself as a victim. She sees herself as strong – and rightly so.
“All in all, I’m managing and I feel strong and empowered. I am happy where I am,” she says.
Her story, then, is not simply about disability. It is about love that challenges assumptions, and about a quiet, hard-won strength that has been built one ordinary day at a time.
It is the story of a young woman who once knew little about disability, and who learned – through one relationship – that a person’s disability does not define the entirety of their life. It is the story of a woman who once wondered what it would be like to date a person with a disability, and who eventually became a wife, mother and partner to a blind man. And it is a story about the barriers created not by disability itself, but by society’s attitudes towards those who live with it.
Above all, her story challenges the idea that disability makes love impossible.
For this couple, love did not erase the challenges. It taught them how to face them. Their marriage has demanded patience, courage, adaptation and understanding. It has also demanded that Lerato confront her own fears, and the judgement of others – and she has done so, again and again, without losing herself in the process.
The journey has not always been easy. There have been moments of worry about the future, moments when public scrutiny chipped away at her confidence, and moments when her husband’s health left her afraid. But she keeps going, one day at a time – and it is precisely that persistence, unglamorous and unrelenting, that makes her story one of resilience.
What began with a Facebook conversation between a high school girl and a young man preparing for tertiary education has grown into a marriage and a family – a relationship that reshaped her understanding of disability and changed the way she sees the world.
Her message is not that living with disability is easy. It is that disability should never be allowed to erase a person’s humanity. Behind the disability is still a person who wants to live, love, laugh, step outside and experience life.
And beside him stands a woman who, despite the fears and the challenges, has chosen to walk the journey with him – not because she has all the answers, but because, as she puts it, she is taking it one day at a time.
*Lerato is a pseudonym used to protect her identity from stigma and unwanted attention. The article was written in celebration of Women’s Month, highlighting Lerato’s resilience.