After 34 years of marriage Tina appeared one morning. That's not an exaggeration. The first time was really meager, but the first person to see me en femme was my wife. That fact that I was comfortable doing that (I have always hated the idea of dressing for Halloween, for example) fascinated both of us, and Tina was born to find out what this "comfort" was all about. There was never deceit, lying, or any other normal crossdressing issues because I had never before crossdressed.

I guess because I had been nominally "male" for so long (I was 55), I had a male life I liked a lot, and a great life with my wife. There was no way I was going to give that up, but Tina needed to be investigated as she had clearly been lurking in the background all my life, from what we could tell.

What happened next was talk talk talk talk talk. She and I both asked questions, many of which had no immediate answers. We needed to experience Tina, and that's just what we did. As a part of it, Tina had to learn what being a women means from scratch, and this is where it turned incredibly positive! I learned so much about my wife I could never have known. Little details of growing up: emotions, experiences, expectations, and desires were all compared to what it is like growing up as a boy. After 9 years my wife still thinks Tina is still in her "girl-equivalent" late teen years in terms of growing up as a girl. So now my wife has the husband she had, but she also has the equivalent of a girlfriend being carried around in the same head that used to just house her husband.

I'm sure that if I had crossdressed earlier in life and had not mentioned it before we were married, the whole Tina experience would have been so very different, and certainly not as positive.

With all the threads there have been about this topic of "coming out" to one's spouse or prospective spouse, I have mused about how I might have handled the situation if I had been aware of Tina before meeting my wife. If Tina had been public in my late-teen/early 20s years, I can see that it would have been completely natural to explain that to she who was to be my wife. But if I had hidden Tina from everyone and was very afraid to have it generally known that I was "gender fluid", I really don't know when or how I would have brought it up for fear of having my gender status suddenly made very public. My conclusion was that I would have to be prepared to be outed completely before sharing that part of me with my prospective wife. Those thoughts have made me very sympathetic to those now caught in this problem of disclosure, and extremely sympathetic to the wives now trying to deal with that disclosure, especially after being married for a while before learning about their husband's gender situation. Add to that fact that if the wife knows little about MtF crossdressing, looking to the web for information could be a complete disaster!

JessM: For us, the one persona that my wife knew for 34 years was the composite me. In our opinion all we are doing is identifying which persona belongs to which gender identity. It's actually made our situation clearer. We do understand how emotional this all can be, and because of that we've agreed that if there is a day particularly that she "wants her man", Tina stays in the closet. That seems only fair since she assumed it was a man she was marrying! The obverse is that some days she really wants to visit with her girlfriend, and as long as I'm also agreeable, the transformation takes place and Tina arrives. It's still all the person she married, just gender clarified I know I'm only one data point, but your response above prompted a further explanation of my experience.