I think your friends probably meant to say that this is their rational decision, if they were not involved with the disabled person in question. I think that if you are in the position to get to know someone with a disability profoundly, then you can change your mind, and the disability would no longer be a factor. Because you fall in love with a person's personality at that moment, the physicality is only a secondary issue, though it helps of course, this is undeniable. But you can't choose to not love someone because of your rational ideas on relationships. Of course a disability can be very central if it is a very serious one, but I don't think it's impossible to overcome this superficial aspect of a person. I happen to know a lady who is now 80, she became deaf at a very young age through meningitis. She is a lovely lady, and was a real beauty as a young woman, and yet she has told me she never married because all the men who dated her eventually backed out because her disability was too daunting for them. Hopefully times have changed now, it really saddens me to think that she was cast aside that way.
To lighten the issue, and give a simple example, I could tell myself over and over that I don't want to date a guy who smokes, but lo and behold I go out with such a man! It's not something you choose, at least not for me. It really just happens. My boyfriend will kill me if he reads this heh.
