"So," an old friend asked me not long ago, "when should you show the disability card?"

I knew what he was talking about. Having taken a job in a new city, he is experimenting with Internet personals as a way of meeting new women. As a person with a visible disability, he is trying to figure out when best to introduce that element of his personality.

The question wasn't new to me. I once asked it of another friend myself. She, in turn, had probably asked someone else.

Thousands of people have turned to Internet dating services as a safe, anonymous way of meeting new people. Not only is your identity protected until you're sure you want to let the person know who you are, but that anonymity can inspire greater openness in the questions asked and responses offered.

In some practical ways, the medium is a perfect fit for people with visible disabilities.

If you have limited vision, you don't have to worry about scanning a crowd, singling out one interesting person to engage in conversation.

If you have a hearing disability, you avoid the awkwardness of trying to communicate with strangers whose lips you can't read in the wrong lighting.

If you use a wheelchair or crutches, there's no concern regarding whether or not you can get into a gathering place or use its restroom after you've been there a while.

But there remains that tricky business of knowing when to "show the disability card" or "break the news" of this one feared characteristic. That fear is what the question is all about. Not the fear of the person with the disability, it's the fear held by many who have not experienced physical difference in an up-close context.

Some say you should mention it in the first message you send a person. Others say you should be sure you would want to meet before bothering to "break the news." Almost no one seems to believe you should just throw the disability out there, type it into your personal summary of yourself and wait to see what happens.

What would happen, of course, is that no one would write to you. Despite all of our efforts toward inclusion, our tolerance goes only so far. It's the attitude "Be my neighbor, but don't marry my children."

Part of assimilating a disability means accepting yourself as the whole and beautiful human that you are and shedding any shame that old attitudes might try to attach to your person. It's difficult, then, to reconcile the launched adventure of meeting people via Internet personal ads with the notion that your pride in who you are must be slightly modified for success.

I told my friend this: Disability can loom larger than life in the eyes of those who haven't met you. For those who know and love you, it shrinks again into a role of near irrelevance. People arrange their personal traits in such a way that the most popular attributes are out front immediately - you make a lot of money, are a fabulous cook, love going to exotic places, whatever. I told him to mention his disability only when he's decided a person is someone he wants to meet.

I told him to be tolerant himself - remembering that everyone holds back some traits.

In Internet dating, like in life, there will most likely be an astonishing mix of attitudes. There will be some who will be afraid to talk to you once they know about your disability, and there will be those who don't seem to notice even after they've seen it clearly. And the person you finally, bravely, reveal your disability to might turn out to be holding back the same news.

Contact Deborah Kendrick by phone: 673-4474; fax: 321-6430; e-mail: dkkendrick@earthlink.net.