The Other Side of the Coin
Many of our Transgender Life features here tell of understanding wives. Unfortunately, such reactions are not always the ones encountered. Here, an anonymous wife of a transvestite gives a point of view that may be all too familiar...
The marriage guidance people suggested I wrote down my feelings about everything that's happened. I don't think it'll do any good, but I'm not going to be accused of not trying.
My God, I've tried to understand. I've tried to forgive, but every time he comes anywhere near me he gives me the creeps. To think I married him and I loved him and trusted him and he's done this to me. You think you know someone and suddenly one day it all pops out. I daren't tell even my best friend about it. It all makes me feel so dirty and used.
When I got married I wasn't entirely inexperienced, if you see what I mean, but even so, my mother thought she could pass on a bit of advice. You know the sort of things mothers go on about. Share the job. Don't become a drudge or a mat for him but try to have some common interests.
It puzzled me when she went on about men's foibles, I presumed she was going on about sex but Bill and I had always enjoyed it. He wasn't fantastic but he was understanding and frankly I'd assumed if one of us was going to stray, it would have been me.
Different
For weeks I'd half noticed something different about him. I wasn't sure what it was but now I've decided it was he didn't walk about the house naked any more. We're not nudists or anything but when we come out of the shower and are getting dressed, we're not shy about our bodies.
Suddenly, he became shy about this. It was odd rather than disturbing. I began to peek at him when he didn't think I was looking. I found it a bit of a turn-on but he was strangely reluctant until the lights were out.
The fateful Saturday he was getting dressed when I saw those marks on his body. They looked vaguely familiar, but I innocently asked him what they were, conversation as much as anything. His reaction was startling. He blushed in embarrassment and muttered. Oddly, I recalled a comment of my mother's, "Beware when a man mumbles". I'd laughed at the time but now I just knew there was something wrong. What the marks were still didn't occur to me and since I thought we had always been open with each other I pressed him. I was interested and cared!
That's what hurts. I cared and then he threw this back at me. I still can't bring myself to use the words he stuttered out. Harmless, he claimed, but how would you feel if you were sure your husband had been trying on your personal things? The marks? They were from bra shoulder straps that were too tight! Not to mention some sort of waist clincher. To give him shape, he said.
He's always been so normal and suddenly I find he's a pervert and has been visiting some place where he's been dressing up. It gives me the shivers just thinking about it. The marriage guidance counsellor said I mustn't get emotional? How would you feel if there was that niggling uncertainty your husband wanted to be a woman. And act like a woman?
I sent him off to sleep in the spare room. I couldn't bear to have him near me. Then I began to wonder. I'm a normal girl. I like my bit of fun and fantasise with the best of them, but the thought I've been engaged, unwittingly, in a lesbian thing during our married life gives me the creeps...
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