WEBVTT

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Anne: You know, my husband
has a very loud voice.

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One of the reasons I married him.

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I can hear him.

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Rene: That's a top secret, by the way, you know...

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I met her in the dorms.

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Carl: There were basically two criteria
when I was dating:

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one, she’s got to have a driver’s license,

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because I want to go places and I can't drive.

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[music plays]

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Anne: Well, I first met
my husband through a friend,

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and it's funny because

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she was not setting us up.

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She did not want us to get together.

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But anyway.

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I didn't know that she had told him
that I was DeafBlind.

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And of course, he was like,
“Well then, how do you communicate with her?

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How do you talk to her?”

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And then he met me.
And again, I had better vision then,

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so I kind of told him about the hearing
loss, but I was still trying to fake it.

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We were at a restaurant,

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and I think I went into the bathroom
and I bumped into the tray...

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...you know, going in.

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And then when I came out and I said,
“oh, you know, it's dark in here

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I have trouble seeing.”
And he goes, “it's okay.”

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And then we started dating and
a few weeks into dating I told him I had

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vision impairment that I had, you know...
but I didn't tell him I was legally blind.

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And finally a few weeks later
he said, “baby, I know.”

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And I'm like, “oh, how did you know?”

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Well, he's like, “Nicole told me, first of all.”

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He said, “second of all,
the first night I met you,

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you were walking out of the bathroom
and you were totally lost.”

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He’s like, “you didn't know where
we were sitting, you didn’t know...”

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He’s like, “Anyone could tell.”

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So that's when I'm like,
okay, I'm not faking it.

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[laughter]

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I'm not fooling anyone.

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Brian: We met online through
a dating app called Match.

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And so we started talking
and messaging back and forth.

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And we just decided to go on
a first date through a state park.

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It was my idea, it was a state park
I've been to before.

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Me and my guide dog, we've done the trail
before and know it pretty well.

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My wife doesn't have

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a lot of experience
with that particular place.

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So we went there for our first date and

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it was a lot of fun.

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You know, it was probably the first time
that my wife met a guide dog.

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And so there was a little bit of a
learning curve there.

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On our first date

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the dog had to use the bathroom.

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I lost track of where the poop had landed

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so I asked her where the poop was

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and trying to find it, I accidentally stepped in it.

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So it was a comical first date

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and luckily it worked out. We're still together.

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It’s been about six years.

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Carl: That was back in 2002.

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At the time I was working at WGBH

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and a friend of hers
who teaches here at Boston University

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who I went to high school
with needed access

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to a Frontline video
so she could use it in a class.

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And I said, “I can get it.”

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She said, “I'll tell you what, I'm
going to take you out to dinner.”

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So I went out to dinner
and we were in a bar slash restaurant.

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And Megan, my wife, who was also
a professor at Boston University

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walked in...on another date

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and later said to our mutual friend,
“can you give that guy my phone number?”

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I, at first, said no

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but my friend said,

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“oh, Carl it was dark, you didn’t see her,
she has red hair.”

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I've got a thing for redheads.

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So we went out to a local Irish pub.

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We met at 7 o’clock.

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and we got kicked out at 1am

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when the bar closed, at last call.

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We talked about everything.

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Politics, religion,

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literature, film, history.

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I wanted an intelligent woman,

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and Megan is incredibly intelligent.

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And I did something I had
never done that night.

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When we left and departed,
the minute I got home,

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I called her right back and said,
“I enjoyed meeting you. Let’s do it again.”

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She played the hard to get
and waited like three days,

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and I was freaking out for three days
whether I was going to hear from her again.

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But I did, and we dated for almost
two years before we got married.

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[music plays]

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Brian: It didn't really matter to either of us.

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I would have been comfortable dating anyone
with any kind of disability or not.

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I think the nice thing about my wife

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is that she’s a special education teacher,

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so she’s pretty comfortable being around
people with disabilities

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and working with students with disabilities.

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Obviously dating and marrying someone with
disabilities is a whole other ballgame

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and I’m an adult and not a kid, so...

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our conversations and dialogues are very
different than the ones she's used to in school

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but I think it didn't really matter
for either one of us.

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Carl: But my wife will tell you
I never talk about it.

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And it's frustrating to her for us as a couple

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because she doesn't know what I can't
see and what I can’t hear

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and when I'm picking up things
and when I'm not.

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So we've had to work on our communication.

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What I want,
what I don't want, when I want it.

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We live in the city here in Boston,
so we have a galley kitchen.

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One day she was making tea.

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I didn't know it.

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I couldn't hear the tea kettle going.

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I burnt my hand, you know, I exploded,

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“how dare you?” You know...
it’s her house too!

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She can make tea.

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So, you know, you have to adapt
and you have to reinvent yourself.

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And this is probably the fifth or
sixth time I'm having to reinvent myself.

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And, you know, Megan

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tends to see people
as who they are and not what they are.

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Anne: So, you know, we kept dating
and we talked about it some.

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And then, you know, his family,

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they love me now, but they were like,
“are you sure you can handle marrying

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someone who's going blind and who's,
you know, DeafBlind?”

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And his friend did

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although his friend also warned me about him.

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[laugther]

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But, you know, we just decided
we were going to do it.

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And when we got married,
you know, we talked about having kids.

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He was nervous about it.

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He thought we should
have genetic testing, so...

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[music ends]