SophiaRose; I wanted to share something else I thought of that might provide some food for thought for you. But first... I think your latest post (#24) is great. You're showing a lot of thought and caring. Hopefully that does not get overlooked.
I have a dear friend ("Beth") who I was engaged to decades ago. We broke up on amicable terms, and have remained exceptionally close since. I told my (then girlfriend, now) wife about her early on in the relationship and informed her there was nothing to be concerned about. I said we were very close, but we had not been together for 10 years and that wasn't going to change. We had even tried to change it about half way through those 10 years and it hadn't worked. We were just friends, better as friends, and would always be friends. My wife accepted that without issue, and has encouraged the friendship ever since. Anyway...
6 or 7 years ago, I finally came out to Beth. I'd of course been a crossdresser (as mentioned in an earlier post, just pantyhose really) while I'd dated her many years ago, but always hid it. Beth asked me an interesting question about this a couple of years ago. She asked if we had gotten married, would I still have tried to keep it secret? I said that I would have, and she openly wondered why. This is the part that might provide some food for thought for you...
I think of crossdressing and I think of a long journey of self acceptance. So much of society tells us this is wrong, we are deviants, we are the weirdest part of LGBTQIA. Men aren't supposed to be like women, and any thought of dressing as a woman is undermining your own masculinity, and you're a cretin for even thinking of doing that as anything other than a Halloween joke. So many of use try and try and try to suppress crossdressing. We purge, we engage in 'manly' activities, we join the military, etc. and deceive ourselves thinking if we just had a wife or close girlfriend, we wouldn't feel the need to do this. We struggle mightily to gain even a bit of acceptance in ourselves, much less in anyone else.
I couldn't have told Beth because I hadn't even begun to accept myself. It would have been irrational to expect her to accept me when I hadn't even accepted myself.
I think you are in a similar situation; your self acceptance is finally reaching a point where you can begin to share this. I'm sure you tried to repress it just like I did. You probably had purges like I did. You probably thought the desire to crossdress would fade over time, or be suppressed by being married, etc. All things pointing to...this will be in the past. Except, it doesn't go into the past. Until we begin to accept that and begin to accept ourselves, it is incredibly hard to share it with anyone else because we're not even really sharing with ourselves.
