My wife is away for about a week. Oh, what to do? I know, I could Dress Up At Home every night!

Okay, so why aren't I? Why haven't I been changing into a skirt or dress the moment I get home??

Sure, I have been putting on my black satin nightie for bed -- but I've been wearing some "lounge wear" (a stretchy cotton dress) to bed or around the house in the morning for a few months, so the black nightie is more a matter of degree rather than of fact.

But beyond that... I just haven't really felt overly like ramping up. I could be going out. I could be practicing my makeup. I could be going through and trying on all my clothes and figuring out which ones are now too big for me. I could take the opportunity to sort through all of my clothes, separate into proper bins, get rid of the ones I don't want anymore... and so on. But I'm not.

In thinking a bit about the matter this morning (after describing the situation to my gender therapist yesterday), and remembering that in the past, when my wife was away, I usually haven't dived into dressing, I came up with a possible explanation.

Question: Why do I often feel more strongly about dressing up in public than in private? Why do I often forget about what I'm wearing when I'm in the middle of my (solitary) computer work at work or at home, but remember (and again feel the urge to dress) when I stop my work?

Possible Answer: Because dressing is a manifestation of gender. Remember the difference between gender and sex: gender is usually defined in terms of "roles" -- and "roles" imply interaction with other people. Thus, dressing more strongly in public becomes more important to me because doing so is (amongst other aspects) a mechanism for signaling my desired interactive roles and interpretations of me. But when I'm alone at home or deep in thought in my computer work, I am not interacting with other people (at least not in a way in which what I have on is serving as a signal of anything.)


I do not mean to imply that the above is a complete answer; obviously the situation is more complicated than this. This hypothesis is, though, interesting to think about.