“If I ever saw the pope, I would ask him to pray that I find love,” she says with a sad smile.

Dating is an emotionally risky proposition for everyone, but it is particularly challenging for people with disabilities. People who rely on wheelchairs or who have another form of physical impairment often begin to date much later in life, and the rate of marriage is lower, according to Dr. Margaret Nosek, who is the director of the Center for Research on Women with Disabilities at Baylor College of Medicine and has muscular dystrophy. The overall first-marriage rate in the United States for people ages 18 to 49 is 48.9 per 1,000. For people with disabilities it’s just 24.4, according to Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland-College Park who studies family inequality issues.

In many ways, young women with disabilities are just like other women their age when it comes to dating. They like dance clubs and meeting new people and some participate in the casual hookup culture common among young people today. But women with disabilities can also be more vulnerable.

They are more likely to experience relationship abuse and less likely to report the behavior than nondisabled women, Dr. Nosek said. The less mobile a woman is, the more likely she is to experience relationship abuse, research has found.

In 1992, Dr. Nosek spearheaded the National Study of Women With Physical Disabilities, one of the first research studies to find that its participants had experienced abuse specifically related to their disability. For instance, a person might take the victim’s wheelchair to isolate her. Emotional abuse might involve ridicule or mockery of her body or her disability.

Online dating services have created both new opportunities and risks for people with disabilities. DisabilityDating.com caters to the disability community. Sites like eHarmony and Match.com offer specific advice to people with disabilities and those who are open to dating someone with a disability. Be realistic, advises eHarmony, reminding us that the “heart works, even if some body parts don’t.”