Thank you OutOfHisCloset, you've Shown me ways of seeing my situation in a different light. My TG husband is seeing a therapist once a week right now. I know he's very depressed, he's always struggled with depression. But now I believe it's all due to him being TG. I don't think going to his therapist is going to solve anything. Even though he says he'll never transition or "come out" to everyone, I think he's not going to happy until he does. We have a blended family, 6 all together. Several know of his secret and they are not ok with it. Their ages are 23 years and up. He has said that he would never transition because he knew he would lose everything. Then a couple of the kids didn't really make a big deal out of it and I think that gave him some kind of false hope. He thinks they are ok with it. I told him they are NOT ok with it. He had surprised them with it and they just didn't really know what to say. He acts like I'm making it up. 2 of our girls are the last to yet find out. I don't want them to know - I never wanted any of them to know. It's so hard, and I see now that it's going to be hard for a long while. But I'm already feeling a lil stronger being able to confide on this forum. Thanks again for the reality checks!

I plan on getting into seeing a therapist very soon. he is seeing his once a week now. we talked a long time last night about how miserable we both are. He says he isn't dressing anymore - I really don't know. Although from what I've seen on here they are usually lying. I let him know that I don't want him to offer me clothes again, or try to talk to me about his Friends. He's asked me to please be patient with him, I said I'd try. It's been since June 2015 that he "came out" with his feeling like he was a woman, it has been a long 1 1/2 years. I don't know why this past month or so that it has hit me so hard.  I guess I just can't keep ignoring this situation anymore. I've got to deal with it one way or another.  So far I'm not seeing anyone on here that has been able to make it work, which doesn't give me a warm fuzzy.  It's the holidays, and of course all of our adult children will be here will our Grandkids. One day at a time....

Oh, No!  The dreaded "be patient with me"!  Took a little blow from reading that, because I have heard it from my husband several times now, right along with "I know I need to communicate better." But you know what? Nothing ever changes.  He doesn't talk unless I initiate, and it's never made clear what exactly I'm supposed to be patient about.  
    He's always relied on me to caretake his emotional life, to initiate the conversations, to read his moods. What CajunBelle said on another thread rang true for me: I was trained to believe that subordinating my needs to others--particularly to the man in the household--was my role and that acting on my own behalf was selfish.  In addition, because I grew up with a father who was manic-depressive and unpredictably violent, I learned to be very, very good at reading moods and at placating. (And I was trained to do this by my mother.) I've spent my life trying to get out from under that.
    I'm trying now with my husband to get some emotional distance, to stop engaging with his drama, to stop eliciting and participating.  This has upset the domestic apple cart, of course, because when one person in a marriage or family shucks off his or her "designated role" in the dynamic, others are upended, and resentful, and want you to keep doing what you're doing, and they keep doing the things that have worked to get you to occupy that role in the past, because they need you for their own reasons to fulfill that role.
   My husband has said, after conversations I have initiated, "be patient with me," but he never follows up.  When three weeks ago I spent the weekend at a friend's who was out of town, he said he wanted to use the time to "figure out what I want from you," but has never followed up. (And that he put it that way was so telling: "what I want from you."  Told me all I needed to know!)  His "I'm going to have something to tell you about what I want from you" now hangs over the household, and he's waiting, I have no doubt, for me to now say, "What did you decide, dear?" because that will make me the initiator: I'll be the one soliciting from him the obligations to which I'll then be subject.  Well...eff that!
    Over the summer when I was away for six weeks, he wrote to say he was working on a long letter and to "be patient with me," but ten days passed, and nothing, until I wrote to say, "wtf?" and then got a short missive that was again a temporizing "I've been so depressed; be patient with me." I've decided these teases are designed to get me to extend myself, provocations to me to caretake him, ask him how he is, what he's thinking, invite him and his condition to be, as usual, the focus of my emotional energy and my role to be the one who figures out how to alleviate his stresses and accommodate his needs.  But I've decided I'm done taking my husband's emotional temperature. "Be patient with me" in my house means nothing more than "I feel bad, so do what is needed to make me feel better, don't ask me any hard questions, and don't ask me to change my behavior." 
   As for their depression...they think they're depressed because they can't get what they want.  They can't crossdress around us, or we don't offer them the validation they crave from crossdressing, and so they blame us or the world's prejudice for their unhappiness rather than the mental condition that drives them to find their sexual pleasure in the idea of themselves as women.  In my husband's case, he's decided he can't ever come out, because he was "born too early" (unlike today's young genderqueer or transgender people who fearlessly become what feels right to them) and because he doesn't have the "androgynous look" that would enable him to pass.  He's displaced his shame and fear onto society and onto me, and resents us, rather than admitting he can't for whatever psychological reasons do what he wants to do.  (If you want to know what it's like to be woman, I think, to have your status as a woman called into question every day, try living as a fat, old, ugly woman! A lot of us do this every day, and learn to thrive, but of course real life as a real woman is not what's attractive to him; what he wants is some fantasy of living a life as a coy, seductive minx.)  So he lives in a state of existential unhappiness.
    I outright asked him, over the summer, whether he thought he could ever be happy, given what he's told me, that even if he does what he wants to do, to feminize himself via hormones and dress unfettered at home and under his men's clothing (the women's undies under men's pants deal), every time he looks in the mirror he sees the jarring reality that he is not a woman but a man dressed in women's clothes, that even if he could pass as a woman, he knows he isn't one.  I never got an answer to that question: do you think, given those realities, that you can ever be happy? I've asked him twice, months apart, and nothing.  'Be patient with me," I imagine he'd say if I asked again. 
    I wanted to know because at the time this seemed like important information for me in deciding whether I wanted to stay in the marriage, important to the possibilities of my own happiness.  Being married to someone who can never be happy doesn't make for a life I want to live.  No one of us can know we'll ever "be happy," but it does seem to me that there are conditions for happiness, and the most important of those conditions is our ability to act on behalf of our own happiness, to pursue it, if you will.  But he'll never feel free to pursue his happiness, and even if he did come out, he will never get what he needs to be happy--he'll always be aware he is a femininzed male/man, not a female/woman --yet the urge to be female and a woman--will never leave him.  
   Even if I were ok with the crossdressing--which I'm not--even if I were ok with subordinating my sexual orientation to his in bed--which I'm not--even if I wouldn't mind seeing my male husband feminize himself with hormones--which I'm not--I can't see spending the rest of my life married to someone who knows he can't ever be happy and asks me to share his unhappiness and trim my own sails to the winds of unhappiness.

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (November 8, 2016 7:05 am)

OutofHisCloset wrote:

Sun,
 I realized that I never answered your question.  What do I think my husband is fantasizing about when he's cross dressed and/or engaged in acting out his fantasy of being a woman?  He's told me.  He is imagining himself as the woman he would like to bring into being through his acts, the one he fantasizes about being.  Note: This is different than "the woman he knows he is inside."  My husband has never said he "is" a woman; what he's said is that he has a vision of the woman he would like to be if he were a woman, and by acting out and dressing up, he is "bringing her into being."  He feels sexy when dressed in a chemise, and vamps, because acting that way makes him feel closer to his ideal (because that's what he thinks makes him more like a sexy woman).  
  Sorry for this next, which is maybe too graphic, but it answers your question:  He also fantasizes during sex that he has a female body, and is feeling the sexual response a female does, and experiencing sex the way women do. He has told me he imagines the glans of his penis is a clitoris; he imagines his "breasts" are a woman's; he thinks being penetrated is giving him a woman's experience of "being taken" and "giving herself up."  
  I don't think, by the way, that he's perverted.  I think that for whatever reason--a physical condition in the brain, maybe caused in the womb during development--this is natural to him, his natural sexual orientation.  My objection to it is not that it is disgusting or shameful; my objection to it is that it has opened a rift between his sexuality and mine.  I am not prepared to think of him as a woman or to treat him as if he were one.  I am not opposed even to participating in his fantasies in bed, but I am increasingly dissatisfied that he cannot act as a male/man to me in bed.  His sexuality and mine overlap, but they don't match.  Every straight spouse, whether married to a GID or a TG, knows what it feels like to suddenly know that one's mate, one's intimate partner, has a sexuality unlike your own, and unlike that you always believed your partner had.  I'm all for gender bending, would have no objection to any of the acts--what I object to is that he genders them, rather than ungenders them!  AGPs aren't in any sense "exploding the gender binary"; they're embracing it from the other side.  
  Ok.  My two cents worth at the end of a long work day. 

Thank you for this comment. I am new here and my mind is running away with me and I wish I could offer advice to those in this forum but this is all new to me. If you have time, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on my first post here as it seems to be relevant. http://straightspouse.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?id=477
 

My story is very deep and complicated.  To get to the point I spent the last 3 yrs in a relationship with a man who supposedly worshiped me. Expressed his love and actually did try to repair our damaged relationship. I was not present for many reason especially after I found out he was cross dressing and having numerous sexual encounters with tranny's and other CD's. Found websites all dolled up in wigs and heals...the works.  Seeking all sorts of sexual shit BDSM too. Saw explicit videos, photos, emails, posts, adds he put up...ALL OF IT.  Been doing this for years apparently. I caught wind not long ago and he said he would stop. Actually caught him 3x. Obviously couldn't stop. He said it was just 10% of him I was the other 90%. Had no idea of how deep he really was into this. Created a whole personality, name etc in my imagine. He wanted to look/be like me....creepy.
Well... he killed himself in my home 2 months ago and left notes saying it was because I didn't love him enough or try harder...WTF !?!?!? Who was I supposed to love? Him or her? I never made our split up about this. I didn't want to place that type of judgement. I tried to handle with as much grace as possible but mind you I didn't know the extent at the time. It's only after his death I am seeing all this stuff.
It is killing me, I am tormented by this and just want to SCREAM!!!.  I can't confront him like I want to.
I want answers. I feel so deceived. I am so lost. I was hoping for a support group of other woman in this position. Kicker is when we had sex it was incredible. He was a very sexual man as you can tell and very
talented.  I wish I never watched these videos he took of him self and the "others". I am losing my mind and need help.  Please someone offer advise

Last edited by Jennifer65 (December 6, 2016 9:25 pm)