Maria, you have a phenomenal wife! I know you don't take it for granted now, but you really do

The idea of "choose the dressing over her" is a very unfair question. I know your wife didn't intend it as such, but it is. Insert any other characteristic of you that you can not change and read it again. "Choosing<having brown eyes> over her", "Choosing <having two feet> over her", "Choosing <having lungs> over her". It obviously just doesn't work. For me, I 100% recognize that crossdressing is part of me that is never going to change. It's been part of me all along, and some of my earliest memories are wrapped up in crossdressing. I've tried lord how many times to repress it, make it go away, and act like it isn't me. I've been actively repulsed by the image I see of me when crossdressed and seriously question my sanity and what the hell I'm doing, leading to going back to male mode. Yet, it's always there, always part of me.

Before I met my wife, I finally got to a point of self acceptance (a never ending journey) where I decided to never accept a woman who didn't accept me crossdressing. I would give it a couple of months, then tell her about my crossdressing. If she didn't accept, I was breaking it off. I would have rather spent the rest of my life alone than live a lie, live in secrecy. I wasn't going to do it. I told my now wife a couple of months in, and two days later she bought me pantyhose. There was a bad patch a few years after we married, but we figured it out. Over the last few months, we've been temporary empty nesters, and I've spent about 90% of the time at home crossdressed (mostly fully). This doesn't bother her. She treats me the same as when I'm not crossdressed, though she does occasionally make a playful jibe about most women not feeling their husband's breasts in a bra pressing up against their own breasts, or that her breasts are real (neener neener), etc.