It was always among the first things Dan Powell wrote in e-mails to prospective dates -- that he was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the chest down.
"It's one of those things that shouldn't matter, but does," he explained.
Often, the responses he got, when communicating with women through online dating services, were swift and emotional: "They were like 'Well, I'm not really sure I'm ready for that.' Or 'Gee, I'm so sorry you went through that,' " recalls Powell, who became a paraplegic at 16 after breaking his neck in a pickup football game at a Boy Scouts camp.
Still, after getting out of a decade-long relationship, the 34-year-old rocket scientist had enough success to fill the next two years with a string of first dates. "I wanted to feel successful with the process," says Powell, who spent a year using Match.com before switching to eHarmony. "I just kind of wanted to say, 'Well, I'm not the leper, right? I can go out and have a date,' which was necessary at a basic level."
Lori Coates, meanwhile, wasn't putting nearly as much effort into her love life. The 36-year-old technology manager had spent the better part of a dozen years single, immersed in her career and content among her set circle of friends. "We all started getting on her because she wasn't dating," recalls Coates's best friend, Jen Marie Parker.
A bad flu sidelined Coates in March 2008, and by the fourth day of watching daytime television at home, Coates started to think the frequent eHarmony commercials flaunting deliriously happy couples were speaking to her. She filled out the site's questionnaire, thinking, "I'm only going to sign up for it month-to-month because I'm going to prove my friends wrong and it's not going to work out."
Within that first month, Powell's profile popped up and, like always, he quickly informed her of his disability.
"When I got that, it was unexpected," she recalls. "It hadn't been in my realm of possibilities."
But she didn't reply with shock or sympathy. Coates had questions -- namely, "how does this all work?"
Despite her uncertainty, Coates decided she "wasn't going to let it be a deal breaker. . . . I was willing to figure out if we were actually compatible and work through the whole dating thing and let it fall out that way."
After e-mailing for several weeks, they set up a date. Coates, who lived in Falls Church, offered to come to him in Columbia, but he wanted to meet on her turf. Within minutes of arriving at Willow Restaurant in Arlington, Powell, who has limited use of his arms, accidentally sent a menu and silverware flying across the table.
"There are all these concerns about a guy in a chair. 'Can he move? Can he talk?' And the first thing I do is reinforce them," Powell recalls. Immediately he thought, "Well, I'm never seeing this girl again."
But drinks were had, nerves were calmed and they soon slipped into a 90-minute session of teasing banter. At the end of the date, they agreed to go out again, but both had some measure of ambivalence.
Powell wasn't sure Coates was his type. Coates thought Powell, the lead nanotechnologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, was "one of the smartest guys I've ever met, and that was a little bit intimidating."
But they spent the next two weeks writing long e-mails and talking on the phone for hours at night. And through that dialogue a connection that hadn't materialized during their first meeting began to appear. He made her laugh and think and reveal herself. She gave him sincerity and the kind of substance his previous dates seemed to lack.
"It wasn't about what they looked like or what they could do, it was about who they were, down to their souls," says Coates's friend, Parker.
But there was still a question of whether that affection could translate to attraction in person. They decided to meet for a jazz concert at the Natural History Museum. It quickly became apparent that the music wouldn't be the center of attention that night. "We went from [trepidation] and take-it-or-leave-it at the end of the first date," Powell says, "to where -- with enough conversation, enough chemistry, enough interest developing -- the second date was pretty hot and heavy."
Coates embarked on an Internet research project, trying to learn everything she could about the way a paraplegic's world works. Powell, who has a full-time aide, was careful not to force too much information on Coates too quickly, but if there was an awkward pause or hesitation, he'd explain.
"I do everything everybody else does, just sometimes a little different," he remembers saying. "So if you want to cuddle on the couch, my assistant Ron is going to throw me in the corner and prop me up like this, and we'll do it."
Coates worried, initially, about how her friends and family would react to news that she was dating a man in a motorized wheelchair. But, she says, "they didn't really think anything of it. So I was really pleasantly surprised."
"She loves to laugh and he makes her laugh," says Parker. "And he brought out this huge heart in her. It's been great to watch."
Five months after they first met -- a year ago today, Coates's birthday -- Powell proposed. On Aug. 22, with thunderstorms rolling in, they wed before 105 guests. As rain pinged the glass ceiling of the atrium of the Meadowlark Botanical Gardens in Vienna, the couple was introduced for the first time as husband and wife.
Powell wheeled into the room beaming. Coates -- "the woman I've always wanted" -- was on his lap, along for the ride.