You Are Not a Burden (Navigating Dating and Romantic Relationships When One Partner Has a Chronic Illness or Disability)

Romantic love is one of life's great joys - and one of its greatest challenges. Add a chronic illness or disability, and dating and lasting partnership can feel more daunting still. Many people living with illness or disability carry a painful, often unspoken fear: that they are 'too much', and that they will only ever be a burden to the person they love.

You Are Not a Burden is here to tell you otherwise. Clinical psychologist Dr. Jennifer Caspari brings together two kinds of expertise rarely found in one book: her professional knowledge as a therapist specializing in chronic illness, and her lived experience as a woman with cerebral palsy who dated, married, and built a thriving relationship with a non-disabled partner. With warmth, honesty, and clear, evidence-based tools, she guides readers through the real challenges of 'interabled' relationships - where one partner has a chronic illness or disability and the other does not.

Through personal stories, self-reflection prompts, and practical, easy-to-apply skills, the book helps readers navigate insecurity and vulnerability, self-worth and confidence, stigma and disclosure, communication and intimacy, boundaries, conflict, and the tender territory of caregiving. Whether you are dating, newly partnered, or years into a relationship touched by illness or disability - as the ill or disabled partner, or as the one who loves and supports them - this is a warm, affirming guide to showing up as your worthy self and building a connected, lasting love.