Why are married men afraid to communicate with thier wives?

[Dana44]

One thing I want to point out is that communication is the most important thing and some may not have that skill. On some of our ones that are accepting, we had to do a lot of communication and come to an understanding. Also, when we dress to go out , my SO dresses up too and I make sure she knows that she is beautiful. We are men and to think we are more feminine than them is a bit much and there should be no pink fog that does not allow you to communicate and love your wife. I feel sorry for some of the gg's here who don't get that communication and have brought themselves up. It speaks more for them. They are truly great women. I agree that we should not have fear and on the flight through life, I had so so many relationships and many beautiful women. But in a way I am more happy now with the SO that I have. But in any relationship you must tell her that she is the most important person in your life and appreciate her feminine ways. Then she might be able to help you.

[ClosetED]

Falling in love is one of the best, but short term, ways to suppress the desire to crossdress. So with society, in the past and still to a strong degree, shaming crossdressers (or why would a SO be 'shocked' at finding out about it [other than Trust issue]?
So a man finds a woman to love, and the desire to dress goes away. Without knowing it would return, he thinks he is 'cured' and does not see a need to tell her. Then they marry, start a family, the woman's interest may change to the child and away from the husband, and so the desire returns. Now you have the situation where he is afraid to tell her, afraid what this means to his own control, to the child, etc.
If society changed to not care what kind of clothes humans wore or how they decorated themselves, then wives wouldn't be shocked and this website would not exist.
My wife knew 2 years into the marriage (now almost at 27 years). She went along with buying minor items a few times a year for bedroom use, but then stopped 6 yrs ago and I held out for 18 months before the pink fog overtook me and she told me to do what I had to a leave her out of it. I did not want to hide it from her, but it was her request, so I did. I experimented and went to makeup and wigs and made my dream come true, one she did not share. So I was honest in my deception, as it was only done at her request. When she found out how far it had gone, she was upset, but was it only my fault?
Hugs, Ellen

[avant1465]

I told my SO that I dressed almost immediately upon our meeting. (We met through a matching site)..... She said she was OK with that (C/D-ing) ... and wanted us to continue seeing one-another. It's been 4 and 1/2 years, now... and I couldn't have prescribed a better S/O...... My C/D-ing is part of who I - and WE - are. It's confined to "between us"... and we are both OK with that..... I consider myself extremely lucky to have met her.....

[Stephanie47]

Well, Imeni, thank you for giving us old folks "the benefit of the doubt" when it comes to revealing or outing ourselves to our wives. I read your comments and went back and read some of your older postings. I gave you "the benefit of the doubt" when it comes to figuring us out. I just chalked it up to your "youthful inexperience" or really your lack of experience. Your thirty and unmarried which in my book makes you "wet behind the ears." Until you have "walked a mile in our heels" you really cannot judge anyone.

I'm sure if you read all the comments above mine and numerous other threads on this issue, you got the picture why and how this "deceitful" action comes about. I will make one thing very clear. Unless you have walked the walk, you are in no way or manner able to judge others. As a child of the 1950's and 1960's there is a minimal difference in how society accept or rejects cross dressing men. All one has to do is follow on the ongoing rants and ravings against men wearing women's clothing using the ladies' room. I really do not expect any man to raise his hand and wave, "Hey, that's me!"

As to the "backbone" comments further down from your post, it really seems to be one sided. There's two ways to look at it. The guy has no backbone because his wife does not accept cross dressing and she prevails. Or, the wife has a backbone and will not put up with cross dressing. So, one spouse should rule over the other? The admirable thing to do is to divorce, once or twice or as many times as it takes to find an accepting wife who will not change her mind in the course of a marriage. Two things can happen in a marriage with both spouses having a "backbone." They will either compromise or they will divorce. Or they should divorce. I've said it many times on this site. If you and your wife cannot get along it is better that they divorce. I've seen many marriages, where the wife has no backbone, and routinely succumbs to the dictates of her husband. I've read on this site many post over the years. "Just do it." Sit around the house in your femme clothes and makeup. If she does not like it, tell her to stuff it or leave. Frankly, I'm happy to be married to a wife who has a backbone.

Frankly, you're doing the best thing for yourself. However, I wonder how much you are willing to compromise.

[Pumped]

When I look back I dabbled in cross dressing years ago, but never thought anything about it. It lasted a short time and it was done. Years later my wife found a pair of panties and we had the "talk". By this time I had a fair assortment of undies and shoes. I confessed all and my wife said it goes or she goes. I love the gal dearly and other than the dressing we get along great so I hide it and life goes on.what happens when she finds my stash? I don't know, I guess I will deal with it then. She does ask me if I miss it and I tell her do and wish she would allow me to dress but the look of disgust and the firm no makes it clear that it will not happen.

[Jenniferathome]

... And one thing I've noticed is that there are all these men here who will straight out either lie to their wives or simply not talk with them about their cross dressing....

Excuses are easily made when one is humiliated and shamed. That was me. Of course, there is the early denial that it will go away. And it does for many, for a time. When we know it is not going away, the excuse making starts. The classic is, "I don't want to hurt my wife." And to that, one can only laugh. It is very hard to admit cowardice.

[Teresa]

Imeni,
If only it was as easy as your comment , communication works both ways you can only sit someone down an ask them to listen if they really want to.

Before I married I had two GFs who accepted my CDing, being naive I thought most women would go along with it, so when I married there wasn't any feeling of guilt or shame or I was lying to my wife. From the start our marriage was so full, it didn't really crop up, it was just in the background for me. It carried on like that gradually building up inside until I felt I was trapped in solitary confinement, so after twenty years of marriage I came out to her. Our marriage didn't end but it wasn't a good time and I began to slide into a situation where I nearly ended my life. For the last twenty years it has been a DADT situation , after counselling and finally sitting down and talking we have managed a working relationship, i go out socially once a month and dress at home when my wife is out.

Being afraid of communicating is the wrong way of looking at it, after all these years I finally realised that you need to get to know yourself and where you are on the TG road, find a way of being comfortable with it and try and be as considerate as you can to your wife and family. They will communicate with you when they need to, you can't force the issues. I accept I live a compromised lifestyle, I can't live without CDing and I can't live without my family.

I appreciate you are thirty and OK with your situation , just imagine being twice that age before your life may be blown apart, there's far more to be afraid of then !

[rachel1985]

I've been around for a few years now, lurking and reading different threads. Some nice, some not so much. And one thing I've noticed is that there are all these men here who will straight out either lie to their wives or simply not talk with them about their cross dressing.

Whats up with that?

I'll give the older members here the benefit of the doubt as things weren't really an easy place to even start to have this talk with wives back in the day without serious issues but even in the past ten years, how many of you guys have had the chance to actually sit your ladies down and just tell them? I'm thirty. And I've been doing this so far back that its nothing that i can hide or even want to. Dating is a challenge as in my mind, I don't think anyone would WANT to date a cross dresser so i don't really put myself out there. But when I do end up dating, you bet your panty covered ass that I tell them. With a few questions around the topics of LGBT and the trans community on the whole, I can gauge whether or not they would be cool with it and I'll end it because of it. Not just for my end of it but if you can't be even open to the idea that trans people can use the bathroom, we sure as hell ain't going to date. No thank you.

But with all that said and done, you guys are married. Not dating, not just friends who live together. But married. You are sharing your life with someone, but many of you here are straight up afraid of your wives. Let's not forget the one thing we all have in common, GG's aside. We're men. Under all the dresses, panties and wigs, we're men. While yes, its important to take the considerations of your wife into play about how to proceed, you owe it to them to be honest, you owe it to your marriage and your vows that you said to each other not to lie, and most importantly, you, as men, should be man enough to live the way you want to live without fear of what they would say.

I mean, if you are going to come out, do it with class, style and don't just broadside her, especially if you think that she might seriously leave. Make sure your ducks are together, people. Brains. We all got em. But for heavens sake, stop being afraid of being truthful with the women in your lives. They loved all of you when they married you. And for some of us, that includes cross dressing.

It's a very interesting question. One I can't really answer as I'm not married. However, not long into my last relationship, I explained to my partner that I'm TG, and she embraced it.
She saw my clothes, and offered to support me through transitioning, however I'm too scared to.

I also have some girl friends who've said they'd support me, help me dress, do my makeup (never my strongpoint) and look more femme.
I know I could rely on them through transitioning also, but still too scared to.

As for the wives, as you say, they're your best friend, partner in crime, and your significant other. Tell them who you are, be it a dresser, TS/TG etc. If anything, most will embrace it too! It's the 21st century!

[Alice Torn]

Conservative religious women will not accept it, period.

[stlmichelle]

I did tell my wife when we were still dating, it was because of stories like this that I felt she needed to know.

[nothingclever]

My ex and I weren't married, but given my experience, if anyone is considering telling their SO, I'd hope they were absolutely prepared for ANY reaction....I think it's hard to trust anyone with a secret especially one that is uncommon and has a lot of stigma attached. It's scary to put yourself out there when you've been hiding for so long....I understand why some women don't like it, I honestly don't think I would have even considered dating my ex if I had met him dressed....I fell in love with him before I fell in love with her. I did enjoy his dressing, but I get that's not typical. It would be safe to assume there would be a negative reaction and that is probably why a lot of guys would have trouble communicating to their wives about their CDing....

[Mylie Taylor]

I can understand how early in a relationship it can be pushed to the back burner, then as time goes on the fear of rejection and keeping a secret builds guilt, shame and major anxiety. But I'm amazed at the courage of so many finally talking to their SO about it, especially in the face of all the consequences of a marriage ending. What I find totally unacceptable is (not quoting anyone in this thread) "slid on the wife's panties while she was out shopping". Ewww and go buy your own damn clothes if you're going to do it.

[marlacd]

I think Magnetar explained it very well.

Mine expected me to be in the strong male mode all of the time. Prior to me getting married, I had thought about dressing up, but didn't for about 16 years. Once I got married, I didn't at all. What got me started on the road back, was that my wife started to let her looks slip. Her putting on 50 pounds made her less sexually desirable to me. What really yanked the lid off, was that she decided that red hair was her color. Since I disliked all redheads, she fell into that slot also. How could I tell her that she was pretty, when I didn't think so?.

It got worse when she started to be more demanding of my time. And whatever I did that she didn't like, put me in the wrong. I guess, if I'm wrong, then I might as well be really wrong by dressing, because it made me happy.

Now I have read that women, to a point, want to be told what to do. I can see that. But then, if the woman wants equal rights, then isn't that contrary to being told what to do?

I don't believe that I have had the opportunity to meet a woman that didn't have some sort of self esteem issues. Since most overweight women do have image problems, and eat to comfort themselves, then I'd say, better than half of the women in my area have a pretty poor view of themselves.

I'll go along with the idea that women aren't sexually excited about a man in a dress, or aroused by a man in lingerie. But to me, a woman in pants and a tee, and no makeup, or buck naked in bed, doesn't stimulate me at all.

[Dana44]

Marla, I agreed with all you said, except, a woman in bed buck naked in bed, yikes I would not pass that up.

[Dinky39]

I agree with everything Magnetar has said in both of her posts. The only thing that annoys me now after all the lies and bs,I've only seen him dressed once. I have no problem with him under dressing when he wants or going the whole hog every so often but it's all gone quiet. After all that drama and this is what happens! But I am exactly the same as Magnetar,if he wanted to transition,I'd support him...as a friend,not a wife.

[Andrea2656]

From a GG's perspective:
YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT THIS ALL THIS TIME?
WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT?
...
Don't blame it all on the GGs for reacting the way they do.

Magnetar you are exactly right. I am older than fell into that group where I was fearful that there would be no understanding of my CDing. I love my wife and did not want to hurt her. For some time now she has know about my CDing. The response has been as Marla commented ranging from acceptance to being less tolerant and "I just don't understand". However, I will admit it was a problem of my own creation. The question still lingers "What else are you lying to me about?". Honestly, some of my secrecy regarding my purchases and dressing (which are within my budget) is because I am never sure where on the acceptance spectrum she is. I understand that this needs to be a continued discussion but sometimes it is simply too difficult to have.

[Teresa]

Andrea,
The comment I will make about Magnestar's statement is that goes both ways !

We may be accused of lying, somehow it appears to be expected of men , but women aren't whiter than white ! There are things that maybe my wife should have told me in the past and still are some , but we usually have to bite our tongues and give them the benefit of the doubt !

[ClosetED]

Quote Originally Posted by Magnetar GG
From a GG's perspective:
YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT THIS ALL THIS TIME?
WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT?
...
One flip side of this that I felt:
You said you loved ME - now you say you only love the masculine aspects of me.
You lied to me - what else have you lied about?

I felt my wife fell in love with my caring, gentle, romantic, calm personality - and that owes itself to many 'feminine' qualities that I as a person brought to the relationship. Do I turn those off and be a nasty macho brute?
That is just a fake a person as an imagined full time feminine life she is scared of.
Most of us do not want to transition or spend 24/7 en-femme, so stop worrying about that.
Ellen

And I have seen way too many naked people on the examining table/stretcher - no turn on. An evident desire for me is the biggest turn-on, but I do like my wife to set the mood with lingerie I buy her and perfume I buy her.

[ReineD]

I've been around for a few years now, lurking and reading different threads. Some nice, some not so much. And one thing I've noticed is that there are all these men here who will straight out either lie to their wives or simply not talk with them about their cross dressing.

Whats up with that?

It boils down to fear of loss. Fear of losing something considered essential to one's well-being:

• Fear of losing a relationship and being alone.
• Fear of financial loss due to a divorce.
• Fear of losing relationships with children should there be a divorce.
• Fear of losing someone’s good opinion of you, whether this is a spouse, girlfriend, parents, siblings, adult children, friends.
• Fear that telling a spouse will result in others knowing and losing their good opinion of you, or you will lose your job, or lose friends.

A big fear not mentioned here, for those of you who have been dressing for awhile and still not told your wives?

• Fear of losing your freedom. If a wife doesn’t know, she’s not on the look-out and you are more free to dress. If she does know and is not thrilled about it, knowing you are causing her angst when you dress diminishes your enjoyment of it. This also affects your freedom to dress and have fun with it.

It wasn't really about the dressing. It was that the dressing took off with him. It's that dmn pink fog some of you get into. It was me saying okay when he first told me he was interested in exploring it, then trying to deal with the initial shock, because my first exposure was him in FULL dress, and no matter how open minded you think you are, seeing your husband completely dressed up, wig, makeup, breastforms, hose, shoes, clothes, the works is a LOT to take in. And then he disappeared for half a year. We had a baby to care for. If you have kids, you know your wife goes through a period of low self-esteem after becoming a mom, seeing her body changed, destroyed even. She may or may not even suffer from PPD, something most won't care to admit. I did, I didn't admit it to him. So here I am with a baby, I feel gross and anything but sexy, and now my husband was completely engrossed in his femme self. I thought I did something wrong. I thought maybe he didn't feel attracted to me anymore because I was a mother. (Look up the madonna-***** complex - I was seriously thinking my husband had that.) So now I'm gross, I have a baby I care for 24/7, housekeeping, and not one word about me being beautiful. No interest in me in the bedroom unless he's dressed, like he was making up for the fact that I was gross and unattractive. Just like many of you go through this whole thing of shame and guilt and self-consciousness, women do too. But it's ALL the time. We're constantly picking ourselves apart. He's dressing up as his perfect idealized form of a female, all the things he finds sexy, and to me it was just another way to rub it in all the ways I'm not. It hurt. It really really really hurt. No amount of "sometimes you need to focus on me too" and "don't you care what I'm into?" didn't matter. There was no give and take. It was just him doing his thing and to hell with my feelings or whether or not it affected my self-esteem. CDing is a very selfish thing. It just involves you and your femme, and what you want and this fight because you deserve to be happy. But is your wife happy?

[Tina_gm]

It is so easy to fall into the trap of not telling someone. Right at 1st, you just want things to go well, so why risk putting the breaks on? Then as things progress, you want to keep them progressing, so it becomes hard to tell her this. then marriage, kids and life in general start happening. We likely think with all this going on the CDing will abate, and sometimes does for years maybe. But then it comes back, or hasn't left but we were so busy with our lives. Now it's been years, maybe decades. And maybe we just really like our life in general. We have seen our wives reactions to gay guys, dressers. They might be somewhat open minded, might even have a giryl gay guy friend at work or where ever. But still, the little giggles, the small ways in which she considers them to be less than desirable, or comical, or whatever. And now WE have to consider whether to admit to something we know she basically doesn't think highly of. The longer the secret goes on, the harder it gets.

It isn't even just admitting to our dressing, but fessing up to a lie, a real big one that is basically not just a thing that did or didn't happen once or however many times, but a lie of our very existence of who we actually are. That by the way is often times as hard if not harder for wives and other S/O's to get past, the big lie.

Looking back, so many of us will think, I should have told her from the start, or at least not waited so long. After all, we ARE still together, and since we still are after years, or decades of not knowing, the likely hood of her handling it far better early on would be quite a bit higher.

[SIZE=1]- - - Updated - - -[/SIZE]

Quote Originally Posted by Magnetar GG
From a GG's perspective:
YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT THIS ALL THIS TIME?
WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT?
...
One flip side of this that I felt:
You said you loved ME - now you say you only love the masculine aspects of me.
You lied to me - what else have you lied about?

This is something so few CDers ever understand, although I think I am able to better than many-

I see many CDers be not happy when their wives are not handling the CDing well, and feel put off that their wife is only in love with a part of them. But what those who feel this way fail to understand IMO- is that that is what YOU presented of yourself. For a wife to be in love with only the part you presented, and faked it as the whole of you, you only have yourself to blame. Don't think that when we lie about our very core being of who we really are, that any person should just shake it off like no big deal because true love should be unconditional.

As for the lie and what other lies we might be telling- well, again, if WE are capable of lying about our very core being, we are basically capable of lying about anything. So it does take quite a long time to rebuild that trust.

[Jenniferathome]

Quote Originally Posted by Magnetar GG
From a GG's perspective:
YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT THIS ALL THIS TIME?
WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU LIED TO ME ABOUT?
...
One flip side of this that I felt:
You said you loved ME - now you say you only love the masculine aspects of me.
You lied to me - what else have you lied about?

...

Wow, classic delusional cross dresser response. Utter nonsense.

You are comparing math to the color purple. THEY'RE DIFFERENT. The "man" with whom she fell in love had whatever emotional characteristics he had. Wearing a dress is not an emotional characteristic, it is a physical act and it is way off the norm AND you hid it from her.

[Patrica Gil]

Was married for thirty plus years to someone who said they were okay with it. Then soon after we were married she suddenly changed her mind. DADT was her policy. She was not a nice person and 6 years after the divorce she still isn't a nice person. Both our children rarely talk with her and both call me rather almost everyday. She is an alcoholic and is looking for someone with a nice pension to take care of her.
I met someone and pretty much in the beginning I told her about me because I was not going to impose myself on anyone. She totally accepts me and encourages me to be myself. I am the housewife and she finds she enjoys having a housewife better than a husband.

[Amy Fakley]

Not telling is like an interest-bearing mistake. The longer it goes on, the deeper the poo you find yourself in, and the greater the cost to correct the mistake.

On top of that, crossdressing is f'ing complicated. Yeah I'd been doing it my whole life in various fashions, but I was doing it in the deepest denial you can possibly imagine. I was afraid of myself ... literally terrified of what I always knew, but never admitted, was lurking beneath the surface. For cryin' out loud ... google was 10 years old before I ever had the nerve to type 'crossdressing' into it.

Didn't mean I wasn't crossdressing when I got the chance, just that I'd do it, then lie to myself like I didn't do it, and I positively refused to look inwardly and examine my motivations. Wham-bam-dress-like-a-m'aam then act like it never happened.

So in the midst of that I fell in love, and made the fateful mistake of not telling her about this thing I could barely even admit to myself that I even did. To be fair, I was like 23. I wasn't very mature. I was practically still a child.

But, from that moment on, my mistake began to accrue interest. Got married ... the poo got deeper. Bought a house, even deeper. Had kids, deeper still, and there was no going back now. Can you imagine looking your new born daughter in the eye, looking around at the beautiful nest you've built with the woman you truly love, and then contemplating the fact that you are about to blow all that to pieces.

Because there's this terrible thing inside you that you can barely understand, and you truly hate yourself.

And every single day, the noose get's tighter. It damn near killed me on several occasions, but I couldn't bring myself to that either, because again ... everyone I loved in the world depended on me being who they thought I was. Who they thought I was supposed to be.

Why did it take 17 years for me to tell? That's how long it took the noose to snap my neck, and when I finally reached that point ... it's not that I didn't care about the consequences ... it's just that the pain I was in was so intense, so unrelenting, I literally had no other choice.

It was either take the chance that coming out might blow up everything I cared about, or go insane with 100% certainty.

I know it was unfair to my wife to hide for so long. I feel awful about that, and she does remind me from time to time how I hurt her. I can only hope that on balance, she can at least understand why I did.

It really is not entirely unlike opening a high interest credit card your first year out of highschool, then making minimum payments for the next 20 years until one day you realize you owe more on your dumb mistake you made as a kid than you do on your house. It's a lot like that in fact.

you asked why some people don't talk to their wives. That was pretty much my reason in a nutshell

[Tracii G]

ClosetED I'm not quite sure where your head is but if you didn't tell your wife before you got married its pretty safe to say she didn't marry the both of you.
I was talking about TG issues with a cis woman and she referred to it this way "What woman wants to marry a big hunk of a man only to find he likes to dress like a 2 dollar hooker on the week ends"." That to me as a woman would be the ultimate slap in the face".
To be honest I saw her point and couldn't argue with her logic.
To expect your wife to say "Oh well I'll just have to deal with it" is a bit of long shot.

[marlacd]

I'll agree that violating the core values of what women want in their men is lying to them.

But women aren't the little angels they portray themselves. Once the "I do's" are said, that's when things start slipping. Mine, in particular, went from 115 to 190. The makeup no longer went on. That passion that we had for them should never change. But they want to change you to suit their needs. Be honest- how many times have gotten chewed out for not reading them correctly? Then menopause hits, that's no picnic. Lots of times women will change drastically, and you have to accept it.

It's a fifty-fifty chance that your marriage will go the distance. Why then, 63% of women bring about divorce proceedings? If you really think about it, some women will find another reason to divorce if it isn't crossdressing.