The first thing the world will try to give you is a script, and the script is wrong. The script casts the non-disabled partner as a saint, the disabled partner as a recipient of saintliness, and the relationship as a daily act of inspirational generosity. Every part of this script corrodes the actual partnership. The saint role is unsustainable and condescending. The recipient role is infantilizing. The inspirational frame turns your private life into other people's morality theater. The first job, before any other work, is to refuse the script. You are two adults in a relationship, one of whom has a disability. That is the entire frame.
Disability is not the same as illness, and that distinction matters in a way most couples discover only by getting it wrong. Illness is a state of the body that may resolve or change. Disability is, often, a stable feature of how a body or mind interacts with a world that was not designed for it. The social model of disability, articulated forcefully by Tobin Siebers and the generation of disability scholars and activists before him, says that what disables a person is largely the environment, not the body. The stairs, not the wheelchair. The unsigned interface, not the blindness. The pace of conversation, not the speech difference. This reframe is not a feel-good slogan. It is a working tool for the marriage, because it tells the two of you, with precision, what the actual project is. The project is rarely fixing the body. The project is, often, rearranging the world around the body so that the body can do what it wants to do.
The first law is unity. In a partnership where one of you is disabled, unity is constantly under threat from two directions. From outside, the culture insists on collapsing the two of you into a single inspirational unit, erasing the disabled partner's individuality and turning the non-disabled partner into a heroic backdrop. From inside, the asymmetry of certain practical realities can slide into an asymmetry of voice, where the non-disabled partner increasingly speaks for, decides for, and explains the disabled partner. Both of these are failures of unity. Real unity in this relationship looks like two voices, two maps, two competent adults, with the disability factored honestly into the logistics without being allowed to dominate the meaning.
The practical accommodations matter and are not the point. Yes, there will be ramps, captions, schedules built around fatigue, assistive technology, medication, attendant care, accessible vehicles, particular furniture. These are infrastructure. Infrastructure is necessary but it is not the relationship. Couples who let the infrastructure become the relationship end up running a small assisted-living facility for two and wondering where the romance went. Couples who treat the infrastructure as background, build it well, automate what can be automated, and then put their energy into the relationship itself, do better. Anne Finger's writing about disabled intimate life, decades ahead of its time, kept insisting on this: the disabled body is also a desiring body, a creative body, a body with preferences and humor and erotic life, and the partnership has to keep meeting that body, not just servicing it.
There is the question of the able-bodied partner's experience, which the disability rights tradition has sometimes been wary of centering, with reason. Centuries of disabled people had their narratives overwritten by caretakers. But inside the privacy of a marriage, the able-bodied partner's experience is real and has to be tended to, or it becomes resentment that poisons the partnership. You will sometimes be tired in ways your disabled partner cannot share. You will sometimes grieve a version of the relationship that included activities now off the menu. You will sometimes feel invisible inside the social narrative that treats disability as the only relevant fact in the room. Find places to put these feelings that are not your partner's plate. A therapist, a friend group with similar experience, a journal. Bring back to the partnership the version of yourself that has somewhere to put the difficult honest feelings, so that the partnership does not have to hold them all.
The disabled partner is doing more emotional labor than the world sees. They are managing the able-bodied world's reactions to them, advocating in medical and bureaucratic systems, monitoring their own body in ways non-disabled people don't have to, holding the line on their own dignity against a thousand small daily indignities, and protecting you, often, from the worst of it. Notice this. Name it. Make space for it. Unity in this partnership is the slow daily practice of two people refusing the cultural script, refusing the caretaker-charge dynamic, refusing the inspirational gloss, and instead doing the actual harder work of being two specific people, one of whom is disabled, who have built a particular shared life that belongs to them.