Telling or not telling the wife

[Teresa]

Becky,
This is a personal question which I'm asking on an open forum , if you chose not to answer that's fine.

You say you're reluctant to come out to your wife because you love her so much and you don't want to hurt her, I can't deny that's great to hear that and I commend you for it. We are to assume your wife has those same feelings for you but dare we ask without reservations, so the question is are you more afraid of losing that love for you ?

I'm asking this from my personal point of view, I will admit that my wife doesn't show excessive emotions and has very rarely in forty years of marriage put her arms round me and told me she loved me, if I tried it with her most times she would brush it aside telling me not to be so stupid .
When I came out to her twenty years ago it felt like a millstone being lifted off my shoulders, it also opened up deep affection for her which I felt when we first dated , I so wanted to share the whole aspect of CDing with her, bearing in mind I'm bi-gender so there was a lot of deep feelings as well as the sharing of clothes , I tried tactfully to tell her this.
For the first couple of weeks she was OK about things, she knew it was very deep because she has never seen my cry before or since the day I told her . From that point I had much deeper feelings for her but hers ebbed away, my whole being felt rejected and unloved, my mood spiraled down to where I nearly ended my life . I was sent for counselling by my GP but that lasted two sessions because my counsellor needed to see my wife and she totally refused , he said the therapy couldn't progress without the cooperation of both of us. The outcome was long term use of Prozac.
It did get me through but every so often the question of how much she loves me does come up, I have to admit on occasions I feel like the paid handyman.
I was still on the rollercoaster when I joined the forum after a further twenty years. It's taken me three years of sharing thoughts with other members and two separate sessions of counselling, the first to determine if I had thoughts of self harm again and then followed on with gender counselling. During that period we did nearly separate but we realised too many other people were going to get hurt so we compromised, I get to go out socially but she doesn't want to see me although we do have conversations about the meetings.

As I asked in a thread a while ago , " Do you enjoy your double life ?" and that's what I'm living, we both know how I would prefer to live it but at the moment it works.

Sorry I've gone on some but the question I asked is which are you more afraid of, spoiling the love you have for your wife or risk losing the love she has for you ?