Some of you may know a bit about me and this could be surprising, but my wife of 15+ years and I separated about 10 months ago. Nothing to do with the dressing or Drag, and we remain best friends. That did put me in the unenviable position of having to date outside the binary for the first time ever since I didn?t come to terms with my gender issues until my wife and I had been together for some time.

To say that the prospect of trying to meet and forge a new relationship with a total stranger was intimidating is a massive understatement. I have noticed that I?m apparently not the only one with dating on the mind, as I?ve seen a few other threads on the topic. Thus, I?ve decided to create this self-indulgent little thread exploring my experiences. Maybe some of you might receive some degree of edification or entertainment from this.

Obviously the dissolution of my marriage was difficult and took some time to heal. However, once I was ready to date, I realized the first thing I needed to figure out was WHO I wanted to date. My marriage was open, and during that time, I had considered dalliances with men, as I am sexually attracted to all genders. But once I took some time to consider, I realized that I am only SEXUALLY attracted to men, and that my ROMANTIC attraction leaned heavily towards ?feminine? individuals. That is, I have no problem having sex with men, I just don?t have any interest in developing a relationship with one. So women it is for me!

So the next step was to put myself out there and try to meet someone. Since I don?t really have much of a social circle to speak of, my go-to was going to have to be the internet. I had some experience with some of the old dating sites, but this is a world that has evolved a lot since ?my day?. To the dating apps! This was a can of worms I was NOT prepared for. Just finding a dating app that so liked and felt like it accommodated me was a challenge in and of itself. I decided to try CD/Trans/Drag oriented dating sites. This was a waste of time. The few that were out there and catered to us weren?t good. Very small pools of users, practically all functions locked behind a pay wall, and the users that were there were all Dressers or chasers. Practically no GGs.
I knew that I still wanted to put myself out there as my AUTHENTIC self, so I decided to take a chance on more main-stream apps. Lots of frustration and disappointment there. Not because of the users, but the apps themselves. While almost all of them offered multiple gender and sexual identity options, I HATED that most of them, once you?re done filling out your profile, ask a question that basically totally invalidates all the gender options. That terrible question is, ?Do you want to appear in searches for men or women?? UGH!!! After paying lip service to this community by giving us gender options, you?re going to pigeonhole me back into the gender binary?? NO THANKS! I must have tried almost of the major apps. I could literally only find 2 or 3 that didn?t force that on me. Fortunately one is a pretty major one and another is strongly ?alternative? oriented, both with decent user bases. Pickings starting to seem a little thin at this point, but the apps I did like were solid enough to move forward and hope for the best. Like I mentioned earlier, I wanted to date authentically, so I loaded up my profile with pictures of Micki and crossed my fingers.

It turned out that this was NOT a great plan. Even though I tried to be clear as possible on my profile, but my pictures were all en femme, and not to toot my own horn, but I can be pretty fishy (passable). This led me to receiving a lot of messages from guys that left me wondering if they really understood my gender situation. I did receive a few messages from women, but they mostly just wanted to talk about makeup and drag. Overall it was a rough go, as I felt I needed to preface every response with ?You DO understand my gender, right?? NOT a great conversation starter.

After a lot of frustration I decided to change tactics. I replaced half of the Micki pictures with pictures of me in obviously male mode. This was actually enormously helpful. The number of men messaging me dropped significantly and the number of women rose. In addition I found that I was making better quality connections too.

Eventually I matched with an amazing woman who is probably out of my league if I?m being honest, but we?ve gone out a couple of times and there seems to be real potential here. She?s aware of Micki and my Drag up front, and she?s not only accepting, but excited by it.

So that?s the happy ending of it all. The most important lesson I learned from this experience is that you have to be active. You can?t just sit back and hope Mr or Mrs Right comes knocking. It can be a rough, discouraging road, but if you stick with it, good things can happen.