An able-bodied woman married to a disabled man has called out trolls online who claim the pair aren't able to get intimate together.
Shane Burcaw was born with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and has been wheelchair-bound since he was two years old. He met Hannah Aylward in 2016 after she saw him in a documentary and decided to get in touch with him. The rest, as they say, is history.
While the two, who tied the knot in September 2020, are still head over heels in love, they get a lot of flak for their relationship.
One point of "contention" among the haters is that the pair are supposedly not able to express their love in more physical ways.
So, appearing on DIPSEA'S StyleLikeU series in an episode titled Laughing At Your Ableist BS, Shane and Hannah got candid about their sex life - and dispelled some of the misconceptions about their relationship.
Hannah shared with viewers: "Often people will assume that I'm Shane's sister or mom. We definitely get a lot of comments from straight men thinking that it's not fair that I'm with Shane and that I should be with them. People say that I couldn't possibly be satisfied, we get that every day."
Shane added: "They perceive that I can't have sex in their very limited, missionary man f***s woman. They think that is the be all and end all of sex. Little do they know… Our intimacy benefits from my disability and our intimacy is not just me enjoying it. It doesn't look like what you see in the movies but I can totally do it."
He went on to explain that his inability to move in the way an able-bodied man would has been no cause for concern for him and his wife in the bedroom department.
Shane continued: "I am more often that not the initiator. A non-disabled man might come up to Hannah and start rubbing her shoulders and I just say, ‘Hey, do you wanna go have sex?’ and I know that that probably shakes people as like ‘Oh, that must be not romantic,’ but take our word for it. After I ask that, we are romantic.
"When we are in bed together, I can ask her, ‘Will you roll me towards you?’ or ‘Can you move my arm so I can reach your neck or cheek?’"
