Hi Kimberly,
I suspect our good people here have already given you the answers you need about why your wife did this 180. Still, I can't resist offering you my own comments. It's nothing new, and I know this is extremely long!--my only hope is that you may be amused by the way I thought it through myself, in detail. To me it's often all about the way we think.
I may be wrong about this, but if you've had trouble understanding your wife's reaction, that may possibly depend to the answer to this "deeply philosophical" question:
Do you think of a smartphone simply as a kind of "Swiss Army knife"? Or as something more: more synergistic, let's say?
There may be two answers to your own question, and the one that sprang immediately to my own mind was that this was a matter of time spent dressed. I can imagine that after a lifetime of work you'd be looking forward to all the wonderful spare time you'd have as a retiree--much of it enjoyably en femme! So sure, you might have overdone it a bit, to your wife's discomfiture. You might need to scale back.
By all means ask your wife how she feels about that! Do communicate! Do dare to ask leading questions--to give her an opening to formulate the answers that she may find hard, or embarrassing, to formulate herself.
But then you got to how the real trigger for your wife's reaction appeared to be finding those photos on your phone. Now that had me scratching my head to start with, because I was faced with a possible contradiction. So I can't pretend I'm as instantly perceptive as some people here!
I sure understand the urge to take selfies. I've got a bunch of pictures of myself, taken in various outfits to see how I looked in them. A couple are on my cellphone, but most of them I took years ago--with a 35mm, not with a cellphone--even though I have digitized many of them since, which are now on my laptop.
So I was asking myself if it was the shock of seeing you fully dressed, all dolled up complete with bra and breastforms (as opposed to just panties and girl jeans) that upset your wife so much. (Incidentally I don't wonder you're missing your bra. It's the bra that makes us feel fully feminine. That's been discussed here recently.)
But I wasn't sure that was the explanation, since you said your wife used to "let" you dress any time you wanted to. Didn't that mean the whole nine yards, a dress or a blouse and skirt, nylons and heels, wig and makeup and everything deliciously feminine like that? If so, why would she be so shocked to see mere photos of you as a woman? It didn't make sense.
So I'm grateful to others here for pointing to what I suspect is the true explanation. Just like Krisi, I've taken lots of pictures with a camera. Now a camera is a "tool." It does one thing: it takes pictures. She stores them on a digital medium, which is personal and private, just as I store mine on digital media--some on my laptop PC, my "personal" computer. The phrase "personal" computer of course originated to distinguish "personally owned, home" computers as opposed to large shared mainframes and the like serving organizational purposes. But the word "personal" also implies "privacy," and like Krisi, I certainly regard my PC and associated media as "private." I do not expect any outsiders to be snooping around my "personal" computer. Even my (sadly late) wife, bless her, didn't use it without asking me--since she had one of her own--though it would have been no problem, since we always trusted one another, and she too was happy to accept my dressing.
I regard my cellphone the same way. It's mine; it's private, I don't lend it to others. I don't lose things much. I only ever "lost" a cellphone once--and got it back. Now and then I show people a photo or two on it, but what are the odds that anyone would see those few photos of me dressed on there? Even if they did, would they even recognize me? The picture you see in my avatar is standing on the oak coffee table in my living room, in full view of any friend or other visitor. To my immense amusement, nobody has ever recognized it as "me"!
But how do we conceptualize a smartphone, a cameraphone? I got my first cellphone twenty years ago, and while it was cool to be able to call anyone no matter where I was, out walking or whatever, that was all it did: make and receive phone calls. Come to think of it, I guess it told the time as well. That's two things! Wasn't that enough?
It started malfunctioning half a dozen years later--robust as it was, the fact that it fell on the ground while I was riding my bike at speed probably didn't help--and when it was time for a new cellphone I bought a RAZR, the latest thing at the time, because it took photos in addition! Hey, wasn't that neat? And if I remember correctly, I think it could text as well. That's four things!
Ever since then, smartphones have improved so that today they're just like a Swiss Army knife. We all know what that is. It's a multitool. It's a knife all right--and that's how it started life, as a knife, before it evolved into something more. Today, it doesn't just "cut things" like any old knife! It's far more versatile than that. It has screwdrivers (Phillips as well), it opens cans, it bores holes, it's got pliers and tweezers, it saws wood, it files our nails, it guts the fish we've caught, it even pries stones out of horses' hooves! In short, it does everything under the sun! Gee, isn't that handy-dandy?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Champ_XAVT.jpg
A smartphone is the same way. It's a phone all right; it makes and takes calls, and that's how it started life. But today, it doesn't just make phone calls and send text messages. It tells us the time; it keeps our appointments; it reminds us where our friends live, and when their birthdays are; it pays our bills; it orders our groceries; it does calculations for us; it tells us anything we want to know, like "when was the Civil War?" "what is the meaning of 'synergistic'?" or "who is Kim Kardashian, and why the hell does she matter anyway?" It tells us where we are, and how to get where we're going; and if we can't drive there because our car has broken down (or because we had "one too many"), it will call Uber or Lyft to help us on our way. Incidentally, it takes great photos as well, even videos. That's just a bonus, one more function among many!
I wouldn't mind betting that's how you think of your cameraphone. It's a great device for taking good photos and storing them for later perusal--among other things, such as making phone calls and whatnot. It's a "multitool." I couldn't help being reminded of this because I was out shooting with my daughter and some friends of ours a couple of weekends ago when I ran into a problem, and a good buddy of ours lent me a multitool off his truck to fix it.
Despite my feminine side, which I grew to love, I'm sharing a deliberately "masculine" view here. It's about "tools," about mechanics, about the physical universe and how it operates. How do you get the barrel off a Steyr AUG to adjust the gas tube when some previous owner busted the release button off and you need a tool to pry it open? A screwdriver is a multitool in itself; it can do more than turn screws!
Naturally I was grateful to the long-term friend who lent him his multitool. I was telling myself what an idiot I was for not keeping something of the kind in my own car. But that's not what I wanted to emphasize about the concept of a multitool. Rather, there were two other things.
The first is that by sharing his multitool with me, he wasn't giving anything away about his own life--any secrets he might be keeping to himself, or sharing with his own wife, for instance. It was his tool, and for him, sharing was a perfectly safe thing to do in this physical universe we inhabit.
The second is that when we use a Swiss Army knife, or any kind of multitool, we're only doing one thing at a time! We might be cutting string or unscrewing a screw, or paring our nails--but we're never doing all the same things at once! Although the knife "brings these tools together" for us in a design sense, these functions are still all separate, and isolated from one another. That's the nature of a Swiss Army knife.
I repeat that this is a "more masculine" view: the separateness, the practicality in a physical world. The safety--and yes, the power--of possessing a multitool. We're glad to have such a thing at our command. We'd be happy to share it--lend it, that's to say--with anyone who needed it--because, after all, "lending" doesn't imply "giving anything away" that we can't afford to lose. Not in the physical world, at least.
We don't necessarily see things from a "more feminine" view, however much we may be kidding ourselves.
So to you, when you take pictures of yourself with your cellphone, that's all they are: pictures of yourself that are private, kept separate from anyone else--unless you choose to share them with anyone you trust! "Taking pictures" and savoring them may be a totally separate activity from textng or telephoning friends--let alone posting them on Facebook!
It's just unfortunate that your wife may not look at a smartphone in quite the same way, simply as a "multitool" whose uses are separate from one another. To start with, I think women are more inclined than men to "integrate" things together, to "make connections" than men don't make--sometimes, bluntly, to muddle things together that ought to be kept separate! Anyway, as this applies to smartphones, it's the integration that counts. This is not just a collection of separate tools that we use one at a time, in isolation from one another. Oh no, it's far more than that. Because in many users' minds, the first thing they do after taking a photo or a video is to share it immediately with friends! Indeed, that's often the very purpose of taking photos in their minds! Not to study in isolation, but to share with others. To text or email, to ship off with Snapchat, to post on Facebook, or whatever.
And this is the whole way that women especially think, because of the entire difference between women and men. Not the usual "yin and yang" nonsense about men being supposedly "active" while women are "passive," or any of that rubbish, none of which is true anyway! What is the true psychological difference between women and men? It is simply this: that in terms of evolution, men as a sex are adapted more toward survivwl in a physical universe, while women as a sex have adapted more toward survival in a social universe.
Naturally, there's a huge overlap between the two. We all have to survive in a universe that's both "physical" and "social." Not to mention that individuals vary widely in their own adaptation, regardless of sex. Otherwise there would never be any of us crossdrssers, right?
Just the same, I'm betting, along with others here--thanks to them for pointing it out!--that the reason your wife was so upset to see your photos on your cellphone is that she does not see a cellphone just as a "Swiss Army knife" that's handy to take photos for personal use--as well as doing many other useful things, all separate from one another--but as an integrated instrument whose functions, far from being "disconnected," are frequently related to one another. Most of all, to her it's not just a "mechanical" tool to perform physical functions, but a social tool, whose paramount purpose is to facilitate connections and relationships with others in the social world of the humans around us.
"Synergy" of course is about the consequences when some things "come together." It's about how some things are "greater than the some of their parts." Certainly this is true of the social consequences of multifunctional cellphones.
I get this idea, even though it's not the way I see it myself. I couldn't help being reminded of a woman many years ago, on a Web site very different from this one, about abusive relationships. She was assaulted in a parking lot by an ex-partner, who fortunately didn't hurt her too much, but he grabbed and smashed her cellphone. She was so upset about that little cellphone! At the same time, she felt she was making "too much fuss" about such a "silly" detail--as people in abusive relationships often minimize what's been done to them. I'd be pissed as hell too, if anyone smashed my property! But it's more than that. To her, the phone was her lifeline, both physically and symbolically, her connection to her support network in the social world around her--which she needed all the more when she was being threatened. To see it broken was a dusaster. In a social world, she was certainly not "making a fuss over nothing."
Fortunately all this is far removed from your wife's situation, but the way we think--and the different ways we think, as men or as women--are nevertheless deeply embedded, whatever their implications. And let's be realistic, many of us here, despite our "feminine sides," were still born male, think in largely "male" ways--and don't think as women do.
Often this results in unfortunate misunderstandings. To you, and to me, a smartphone may be a "Swiss Army knife" with all kinds of clever tricks that includes taking selfies of us we can later enjoy in privacy--or share only with those special people we trust. To your wife, quite possibly, a smartphone is a device for taking pictures she can immediately share and display to other friends, opening her up to connect with the world outside. But "sharing" of that kind always entails risks.
If you did that, what would that mean to her? That the secret you'd shared between you, maybe had fun with (as my late wife and I did), would suddenly be revealed to the outside world? That could be embarrassing at least! you might be seeking male admirers as partners to "hook up" with? That you might want to transition into the outside world as a woman, instead of the husband she'd always known and counted on? How frightening might that be?
None of these female fears are necessarily real, or even "logical." But they can arise nevertheless--even if only triggered by a "different way of thinking" about the concept of a smartphone, and the role it plays in our lives.
I do urge you to explore these issues with your wife. It sounds as though you've had a good life together so far. With love and mutual understanding, I'm betting you can get this sorted out.
I apologize for this being so long. I just hope I hit the nail on the head with the hammer of my Swiss Army knife--and didn't hit myself on the thumb, as I have done before!
Good luck,
Marianne
