when do i tell someone about my access needs without it becoming the whole conversation

thirty six, use a wheelchair some of the time and a stick the rest, and i am trying to work out where in the process this belongs.

the options as i see them. put it in the profile, in which case it is the first thing anyone knows about me and i am fairly sure it costs me a lot of matches. raise it in chat before meeting, which is what i did last time and which turned into a forty minute conversation about my medical history that i had not signed up for. or leave it until the meeting itself, which is unfair on both of us and also makes venue choice a mess.

there is also the practical layer that nobody writes about. i need to know about steps and loos and whether the accessible entrance is the one that is locked at seven. asking those questions early makes the whole thing feel like a logistics exercise before either of us has decided we like each other.

for people who have done this: what actually worked? and how do you tell early whether someone is going to be normal about it, because the reaction is genuinely more important to me than the answer.

My honest experience, and I have a chronic condition rather than a mobility aid so take it accordingly: putting it in the profile in one plain line was the single best thing I did. Not a paragraph, not an explanation, one line stated like any other fact about my life. It stops being a reveal, because a reveal requires something to have been withheld, and nothing has been.

Agreeing and adding the mechanism, because the timing question is really a question about who is carrying the awkwardness. Raised late, you are managing their reaction while also having already invested. Raised in the profile, the awkwardness happens before you ever meet, invisibly, in the head of somebody who scrolls past. That costs you some matches you would not have wanted and saves you every one of those conversations.

the ones who scroll past were going to be exhausting at the venue stage anyway lol