Exclusive:
The disability advocate, 32, has shed light on several overlooked challenges of online dating
Jay Howard has opened up about her dating life, three years after tying the knot on Married At First Sight. The 32-year-old shot to fame on E4’s reality TV show in 2023, as relationship experts set her up with Luke Worley, 32.
While the pair started off strong, their journey was cut short when Luke was removed from the experiment after a physical altercation with co-star Jordan Gayle. Although Jay is no longer in touch with Luke, she has now stressed the importance of being authentic in the pursuit of love.
As MAFS’ first disabled cast member, this hasn’t been easy, but she stressed that anyone bothered by her limb difference, is ‘not worth it anyway’. In an exclusive interview with the Mirror, she said: “I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to sit here and say it’s all sunshine and rainbows because it isn’t.
“You know, it’s hard work. Especially with everything being online, I hate online dating, I can’t stand it. I think it’s very tedious and everything’s all very accessible because you can just swipe left or right just on the basis of the looks.
“People who have a disability do have a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to online dating and that’s just because people automatically see them if they’ve got a physical disability and go, ‘No can’t be bothered with that’.
“They’ll swipe on, which is hard. But it just depends, not everybody is so close-minded, there are people out there who are open-minded.” Sadly, Jay isn’t alone in her thoughts, as many other individuals with limb difference also face discrimination on dating apps.
In 2023, Alannah Marchewka, from Leeds, told the Mirror how several dates were unable to look past her stoma bag, fitted in an emergency operation following a Crohn’s diagnosis. “It’s really frustrating when one of the first questions that people will often ask is, ‘can you have sex?'”, the 26-year-old said.
“I think that just circles back to that feeling of worth – if I couldn’t have sex, does that make me less worthy of intimacy and care and love?… It’s happened maybe three or four times with different people, we’ve been chatting for a while and I would disclose the fact that I had a stoma and fistulas to this person and they would just unmatch me.
“Or, I would get responses like, ‘ooh, that’s gross’ and people have asked me before ‘Do you sh*t in a bag?'” During the same year, research from disability charity Sense UK also found that people with disabilities are more likely to feel isolated compared to the general population when it comes to relationships.
Amidst such experiences, Jay is keen to draw further attention to the often overlooked needs and views of people with limb differences and disabilities. Last November, she led a first-of-its-kind chat show Unfiltered Women on ITV alongside Samantha Renke and Fats Timbo to openly discuss everything and anything about living in a ‘disabling world’.
“It’s something that’s never been done before, people loved it, they want more of it,” the Lancashire-born star said. “It was light-hearted and it went the way that I wanted it to go, it wasn’t all doom and gloom, it wasn’t all like ‘feel sorry for the disabled [people]’.
“It was more, ‘this is how we live but we live in a positive way’. And the stuff that we are talking about is the stuff that people want to know but they daren’t ask because they think they are going to open a can of worms.”
