Quote:
Originally Posted by
CarlaWestin
When I was told that it would have been a deal breaker and should have been disclosed, I asked where exactly was the list that I was given?
Well said, Carla! That's the best defense I've heard yet. :)
Geena, I can certainly appreciate your dilemma. It's hard to choose the best course of action when you don't know what's going on in your wife's head. And there are several possibilities.
On the one hand, Candy could be right. Depending how careful you've been--and how observant your wife is--she might have picked up clues to your crossdressing over the years, but chose to ignore them. At best, this could be because it doesn't matter to her what your private hobbies are as long as the marriage is sound and you haven't shown signs of "going off the rails" in any other way. And she might have been reluctant to broach the matter with you out of tact, so as not to embarrass you about a private issue you're not comfortable discussing. She did after all pass last week's incident off by echoing your lighthearted remark about "too much time on your hands."
If that's the case--and it is "best case"--you have choices. You can let the matter lie, or you can touch on it with her, and there should be no harm done either way.
A variant of this is that she might have been observant, but in denial: she doesn't want to think about what crossdressing might imply. Do you leave her comfortably in denial of what she's perceived (DADT), or do you raise the matter to reassure her about what it means? Will reassurance "work," or are you better off with her continuing "not to think about it"? That's a harder choice.
At the other end of the scale is the possibility nobody has mentioned yet. Namely, that your wife might have noticed no clues, never suspected you of a marked "feminine side," and actually bought your explanation that you were "just wondering how you would look as a woman." It's not impossible. It was consistent with the camera on the tripod, and she never actually saw you dressed. And with respect to Candy's observations, if my own wife hadn't known about my crossdressing I doubt if she would have picked up on any clues.
Caress body soap getting low? No, I never used her hand soap next to her wash basin on her end of the vanity. And we showered in the same place with the same soap: namely, Irish Spring. So what's to notice?
Nail polish remover not in its usual place? Well, I'd put things back where I found them. Anyway there's some in every bathroom, and if she even noticed the level was down a bit in any of them, she'd no doubt assume--often quite rightly--that I'd been using it to clean something else. Acetone is handy for that.
Heel marks on the kitchen floor? Not on tile. As for the carpet, my wife wasn't a fussy housekeeper and didn't go looking at the floor with a magnifying glass. There's still a plaque on the wall reading: "My house is CLEAN enough to be healthy... and DIRTY enough to be happy."
It all depends on you two as individuals, your traits and your lifestyle. If you're in the habit of doing wacky things anyway "just for fun," your wife might have dismissed your "experiment" as just that, and thought little more about it.
That presents different choices. The easy one in the short term is to "let sleeping dogs lie": to dismiss the whole thing and not worry about it, as your wife might have done herself. The only problem with that is, what happens if she catches you again in the future? Unfortunately you've painted yourself into a corner a bit by giving her an explanation that was not entirely true. That could make matters more awkward for you next time, unless you can "prepare the ground" beforehand. But if you're lucky, you may have plenty of time to do that.
Unfortunately the most dangerous possibility lies somewhere in between these extremes, as Rhonda and Charlotte pointed out: that your wife may have read significance into the incident, and is processing it on her own without discussing it with you. The obvious risk there is that she could be encountering false, damaging information--or have some already in her head.
If she turns to the Web for information, there are certainly worse places to go. I was pleased to see that simply typing "crossdressing" into Google immediately yielded the following results: a link to a sensible enough Wikipedia article, then this:
What does cross-dressing indicate?
Dear Alice, The term cross-dressing is usually used (but not always) to refer to cisgender, heterosexual men who wear clothing and accessories that are considered feminine or associated with women. ... Folks might cross dress for fun, for political motives, for sexual reasons, or to entertain.
This was followed by a link to a more detailed article from Columbia U. titled Understanding cross-dressing | Go Ask Alice!
Thankfully this was all very CD-friendly. The problem with some wives is whatever misleading trash others might already have put in their heads; or worst of all, the habit of yakking to female friends who could be thoroughly ignorant or prejudiced or both, and can poison a woman's mind against her husband. Eric Berne more than half a century ago was one who pointed out how some of these "friends" can be toxic and destructive to a woman's marriage.
If that kind of damage is occurring, then it's important to try and monitor what kind of misinformation your wife might be receiving and be in a position to correct it with regard to your own crossdressing. How delicately you open the discussion with her is another matter.
But overall I'd play it by ear. See if you can sense any subtle change in your wife's attitude toward you, or if there seems to be anything "on her mind." If not, take your time. If you need to discuss the subject with her, you might want to "ease into it" in a light and roundabout way, "test the waters" beforehand and gauge her reaction, rather than plunging in heavily with "Dear, there's something I need to tell you..." If you can convey the notion that crossdressing isn't such a big deal to you, it may not seem such a big deal to her either.
