I can hear my husband in his office across the hall, conducting an interview with a potential new employee, and he sounds exactly like he's always sounded. Nothing seems to have changed. 

But we've been married for a year and a half, together for eight, and three days ago he told me that he's been secretly cross dressing for years. He had made oblique references in the past to being gender fluid, but never expounded on it, and frankly, I think I chose not to hear it. Deep down, when he made passing comments like, "It would be so great to be in your body for a day and see what it's like!" and would mention how disappointed he was that women have so many more options for fashion and self-expression than men do, I would try to brush the comment off or tell myself that he was going through a phase. I never, ever, ever suspected that his urge to expore his femininity was to such an extent that he felt compelled to put on my bras and underwear and dresses when I was away.

Part of me wishes it were purely sexual, and just a kink of his that I could help him fulfill on occasion. But the way he described it to me, finally, three days ago when I sat him down and handed him a drink and poured one for myself and told him that it was time he was completely and totally honest with me, wasn't just sexual. It was... experiential. He wants to lie around the house with me, watching movies or TV like we always do, but in a bra and padded underwear and a wig and a dress. He wants to go on a walk with me, dressed up. I started out so cool and collected -- I told him all of the things I knew I needed to say, that I love him, and this was a safe space, and a judgment free zone. But when I found out that what I thought was just a fantasy of his was actually something he'd been actively doing for years, before we got engaged or married, I lost it. I feel betrayed, confused, angry. I didn't choose this. I didn't ask to have to figure out how to feel about marrying a man who wants to lie on the couch with me with silicone breasts and hip and thigh padding and a wig covering his beautiful head of hair. 

My mind has gone all over the place in the last three days. Angry, curious, aroused, deceived, mournful, accepting, confused, distracted, hurt. I love him, and I know that he's causing no harm and coming to understand his truest self, but I didn't know this was the man I married. As much as he says this won't change a thing, I still feel like I need to recalibrate. That I've been knocked off my axis. He wants to brush it off now that he's told me, and seemed surprised when I told him I'd ordered two books about it already and that I need to do more research into what all of this means, because for him he's just been living like this for so long that, now that he's told me, he's... fine. He's great. He feels like a huge weight has been taken off and that we've just dealt with it by virtue of the fact that we had a conversation about it and I didn't run away screaming. But I'm sitting here in the middle of a workday, with a to-do list a mile long I should be working through, and instead this is all I can think about. I'm not fine yet. I will be, I think. But not yet. I don't know what the next steps of this are -- whether it will escalate now that it's in the open, whether it will become an urge he wishes to fulfill every day instead of just sporadically, whether it will become integral to our romantic life to the point where he can't perform without it -- I just have no idea. And I'm scared.