This has certainly opened up some interesting viewpoints, and having read through the thread again I am minded by the lack of context we have to Lola's situation. I therefore suspect that many of the 'stances' that seem to be being taken are more subjective than objective. Nothing wrong with this, but this opens up another level of debate around those subjective stances. In this arena, it is usual that a lot of assumptions are being made and then the tendency is to retrench to comfortable 'positions'. And then the debate gets polarised and breaks down into the usual male - female perspectives. Certainly I have approached this from 'my position' of 'intention'. As people we develop and change over time but my intention in my relationship has always been positive. I have always put my wife's feelings, needs and wants before mine. The case I guess I was postulating was that sometimes it is difficult to tell what we don't understand and maybe haven't realised yet. This is certainly true for me and my marriage. My wife has been deeply upset that she now has something going on that she didn't 'sign up' for... but I feel the same about other things... I just rationalise it as 'she didn't know life was going to pan out like this at the time, so how could she have told me?'.
Now if Lola's partner has 'known' about where his interest in women's clothes was going to take him all along and he had a plan to deceive her, then yeah, guilty as charged... and I really feel for Lola. If he is just mixed up and trying to work through his issues so that he can then communicate, this is very different.
I have learned so much from this forum and if I knew then what I know now I would have done things very differently indeed. It would have been a very different journey indeed.
My natural inclination is not to judge and condemn, but to understand... and then build for the future...
