A Minnesota couple with a wildly popular social media following is out with a new book about relationships — specifically, relationships like theirs where one person has a disability and the other person does not.
You may know Shane and Hannah Burcaw from their YouTube channel called Squirmy and Grubs, which has 1.85 million subscribers. They wrote the book “Interabled,” about how they and other couples see each other and navigate the world. Hannah and Shane join MPR News producer Ellen Finn to talk about it.
Why did you want to write a book about romantic relationships with one person who has a disability and one person who doesn’t?
Shane: Hannah and I have been making content online about our life and relationship for about eight years. I was born with a physical disability, and Hannah, my wife, is nondisabled. And as we began making our content and sharing our life online, we discovered that our society has a lot of really messed-up misconceptions about interabled relationships like ours, and about disability. A lot of negative stigmas and stereotypes. So we wrote the book to fight back against that ignorance and misinformation.
Your book was super funny at times. That’s the norm for your YouTube channel, ‘Squirmy and Grubs.’ All the couples you talked to for the book have been through pretty hard times, too. How did you balance those narratives?
Shane: It was important to us to be authentic to each couple and to give their story the kind of dignity and respect that it deserves. It was hard at times, because these couples were being very vulnerable with us and sharing some very difficult life moments and some really beautiful life moments as well. And so we just took each couple for what they were and what they wanted to share with us, and tried to showcase the heart of their story. It was hard at times, balancing the good and the bad. But that's life, you know. And I think that is a good feature of this book. That it's really authentic to what life is.
Did you see a throughline of assumptions people make about couples that are in interabled relationships?
Hannah: So many. A lot of them dealt with family not being supportive of the relationship. And also people in public making assumptions that they're not a couple, stuff like that.
Shane: There's this underlying idea that we all have faced, that a disabled partner cannot be a good partner, simply by the fact that they are disabled. And that is wildly untrue. That's the main mission of this book: to show the world that disabled people can and do make fantastic romantic partners. All the couples in our book are a testament to that.
You’ve mentioned in a number of your YouTube videos that people leave comments saying really mean, negative things about your relationship. How do you keep making content, or even keep wanting to make content when you’re facing that?
Shane: At times it’s really difficult. Someone commented on a post and referred to me as a vegetable, obviously in a negative way. And that comment got over 50,000 likes from other people. Real people out in the world who are OK with just blatantly insulting a disabled person simply for being disabled. Those people have jobs and families and votes, and that idea, if we let ourselves ruminate on it, is really disheartening. But it's also motivation for us. Those are people that need to be educated, and they need awareness to improve their understanding of disability.
Hannah: I try to not read comments as much as possible. I haven't for a long time. So that helps, to tune that out and focus on actually making the videos, which we really do enjoy doing. I think that's a big part of it. We like to make the videos together. I like to edit them. We do that process and then educate as many people as we can.
Shane: And remembering that all the conspiracies, like, “we’re not a real couple,” things like that, are all based on the fact that they think that I can't be a good partner because I'm disabled. I just need to remember that they’re wrong. It’s just not true. And we want to show people that.
Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
