His Comfort Is Not My Responsibility

A young woman with a prosthetic leg hopes to make the world a more empathetic place. If only she didn’t have to do it on first dates.

Rob and I had been talking on Bumble for about a month. We matched while he was apartment hunting in New York City. He was handsome, funny and well-educated, with roots in Boston. He could do his job from almost anywhere and said he was moving to New York just because, and I liked that. We stayed in touch. After he arrived and moved into his new place, we switched over from app messaging to texting, the crucial next step. Those first few days of texting, we were deciding among restaurant recommendations in the East Village. “Trust me,” he wrote. “I’m settling in as fast as I can!” And then, finally: “Let’s try one of these places early next week?”