The reveal trap

[sometimes_miss]

OK, just some random thoughts I had as I read through this thread:

I knew she wouldn't be happy about it, but I was 99% sure she would accept me no matter what, as she had already stuck with me through worse.

I, too, was sure that everything would work out O.K.; that all that was good about me would easily outweigh the one, single downside of crossdressing. I was terribly wrong. Sexual attraction is at the base of male-female marriage relationships, at least in the non-arranged marriage world. Screw that up, and your marriage is essentially toast, burned toast.

But it if your relationship is solid in every other way, it's one that can be adjusted to fairly easily. The caveat is that cross dressng can't be all consuming. If it is just a piece in your life, it would s easily manageable.

Doesn't matter if it's a large or small piece in your life. For a lot of women, it's a deal breaker. They simply are turned off by crossdressing.

so is one to accept a life of sadness and being alone if it just never works out... ?

This of course, is what many of us face. There simply aren't a lot of women out there who are interested in dating/marrying a guy who is a crossdresser.

Would you want the girl you fell in love with, to come along 3 yrs later and tell you that she was really not who you expected.

Couples face that every day, because no one can tell the other every single event that has happened to them through their life. The best that can be done is to tell what we think they need to know. However: What WE think they need to know, and what THEY think they need to know, are sometimes, disastrously, two very different things. It's been said more times than I can imagine, that if a woman is physically hot enough, a guy will overlook practically anything. That doesn't work the other way around. What our potential mates face, is something that can drastically affect whether they are attracted to us sexually, or turned off by it. When someone is sexually turned off, that's the beginning of the end of the relationship, because shortly after, they will start looking for a male to fill that void we've just created. Women stay with all kinds of bad men; rapists, wife beaters, murderers, violent prisoners, drunks, liars. The one thing in common, is that they're all still masculine. And the one thing that we screw up, is that masculine image that they're attracted to.

Those with understanding spouses have little idea as to how blessed they are.

I see this one over and over on this forum. Those are the 1%'ers in the CD world. It often appears that they have no clue as to how the rest of us live, or how the other 99% of wives react when they find out their 'man' isn't the man they thought he was, but a girly guy instead.

Basically CDing isn't a problem if your partner accepts it !

Now there's the understatement of the year!

And yet, if you don't stand up and fight for your right to simply be whom you are, no one else will fight for you either.

And yet, some of us just are exhausted from fighting. We don't want to live the rest of our lives in continuous confrontations, putting our lives out there for others to destroy as they wish. Because you don't always see the enemy coming. That's how we get killed. So we just stay out of the shooting range.

If I were you, I would admit early on to a minor fetish for women's lingerie (or whatever).

Uh, Jess, how many of your friends are married to crossdressers? Liking lingerie, and wanting to dress up entirely as a woman I'd think would be seen as two very different things. If you read the forums over at plentyoffish.com,you'll come across numerous threads about girls finding their guy trying on their panties or such, and the response is virtually 100% negative. That's the general population, not here in pink fog land.

I would offer up that timing is NOT everything. In some cases, regardless of rather you told early or late, they just don't like it and don't want any part of it. Ever.

Or they may be able to handle it. And THAT is the chief point.

However, the problem comes when they CAN'T handle it. Which is the majority of the time. Those of us who have found, and participate in this forum get blinded by the pink fog, and wind up crashing into a tree, so to speak.

It is the CD controlling what the SO knows and thus control their reaction, good or bad. The difference is how much you have invested early (not much) and later (a whole lot). And you keeping your SO from pursuing a life unfettered by YOUR crossdressing. It is selfish to take years and years from a person, and that is what you do by not telling them early, where they could be living with someone who doesn't hold secrets.

And yet, everyone has secrets. Maybe they don't think of them as secrets, but they are. Anything you don't tell your mate, is a secret. Anything. Had oral sex with your second girlfriend in the front seat of car, then 20 years later buy a restored vehicle of the same type, perhaps subconsciously wanting to remember the episode? Yup, that's a secret, whether you want to accept that or not, if you never told your wife about it because you didn't think it was important.
One of the things that bothered me was, throughout my life, I'd hear repeated stories about the same thing. Some women in her 40's or 50's would discover that her husband was unfaithful 20 years ago, and it would consume her, because she'd then believe that he wasn't the man she believed she had for all those years. And the marriage would fall apart. Yet, another would go on just fine because the husband didn't ever reveal that he'd fooled around. In many cases, yes, ignorance is bliss. What she doesn't know, doesn't hurt her. Think now; 75% of men, and over 50% of women, are unfaithful. How many spouses know? And how many go on through life, happy, BECAUSE they don't know? In the UK, some 10% of men unknowingly raise children that were fathered by other men. And this has been going on throughout history. So, it does bring up the question of, whether we can keep it out of the relationship well enough.
Oh, and one thing that women might be better able to tolerate is telling her, 'I USED to be a crossdresser', rather than 'I AM a crossdresser'. And if that passes muster, you can later try to see if you can ease doing it again into the conversation, say, maybe at Halloween or something. Just a thought.