Telling the SO, Bad Reaction, Giving up CD'ing

[ReineD]

Toward the middle of the spring of this year a lot of threads kept popping up with the 'tell her, tell her' mantra as a common theme. Many closeted cd'ers were berated, I believe unfairly, for not telling their SOs and were pushed into believing that the only road to happines was to free the inner woman and tell the truth.

I appreciate your wish to warn other CDs that telling the truth is not always the best policy. I'm in no position to judge whether this is true for you or not, since you first describe the CDing as a sexual fetish that can be shelved for the sake of your marriage, and then you speak of it as a deeper identity issue:

(and it is a fetish, not a lifestyle)

the only road to happines was to free the inner woman and tell the truth. For better or for worse I followed the siren song.

The surface goal in telling wives is to have honesty within the relationship, and not deceive the wife. But the reason honesty is preferable over deceipt is that in enables the person to be true to who he is, thus making it possible to achieve optimal self-actualization. This is true for everyone. I can't imagine living a life, feeling I could not disclose who I am to the people I love.

If the CDing is only a fetish to you, then I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to realign your sexual desires in order to be more in tune with your wife's. There are sex therapists who can help with this sort of thing. Honestly, I don't see a difference between CDing purely as a sexual fetish, and other fetishes such as the need for bondage or sado-masochism. If your wife finds any type of sex play distasteful, if the totality of her sexual experience is sourced from her emotional bond with you and her desire to maintain traditional roles within your sexual relationship, and if she wants to be the sole source of your sexual desire, then it would behoove you to do what you can in order to meet her there. Sexual compatibility is important in a marriage. In other words, it is best for your relationship if you become aroused by your wife rather than the CDing.

In any event instead of telling her that you are an ex-CD, tell her the truth that you will sacrifice your own needs for the sake of the relationship but that these CD thoughts will always be with you and she needs to deal with that knowledge and accept it.

But I suspect you told your wife because the CDing is more than a fetish. Or maybe you felt the inner conflict between your sexual desires as Georgi and as your wife's husband. Either way, you felt stuck somehow and this made you unhappy, else I don't think you would have told her. But if you suspect that you might engage in the CDing for deeper reasons than the purely sexual, I wholeheartedly agree with Satrana's approach. If you don't do this, you risk eventually losing your marriage, your sanity, or both, since you cannot deny your gender identity, even if you only partially have a femme identification together with your male ID.

I wish you and your wife all the best in this, and I'm glad you posted your experience.