So I had a good long talk with my wife.  She shared what was bugging her.  I shared what was bugging me.  I even told her about considering hormone therapy, about looking for friends on Adult FriendFinder (even though I’m still strictly platonic on AFF, it was bugging me not being honest enough to tell her), and about my “other” blog.  (AKA this one.)

She’s always known that I was having gender issues, but I don’t think she truly honestly gave them as much credit until we’d talked the other night.  And at first it scared her, because she thought I might be looking for a way out of our marriage.  I tried hard not to laugh as I reassured her that if that’s what I’d wanted, her health issues alone, our sexual issues, our money issues, I’d had plenty of previous opportunities to make up an excuse to leave her.  I love her.  I’m doing my best to give our marriage an honest chance.  That reassured her.

And she reassured me.  She actually surprised me by saying she expected me to cheat on her.  That kind of caught me off guard, because I’ve been extremely commited to her.  It took me a moment to realize that she wasn’t criticising me.  She was criticising herself.  She knows fully well that there are parts of the marriage she’s not meeting my needs on.  And basically we came to the conclusion that so long as what I do doesn’t bring anything home to her, and doesn’t change our relationship, that I still snuggle with her, respect and support her, treat her as an equal in our journey through life, and give her madly outrageous orgasms when she is in the mood, then what I do outside of the marriage are just … extracurricular activities.  She doesn’t mind.

Of course I don’t know if I trust that 100%.  Maybe she thinks she means it, but if I did anything, I’d certainly take it slowly until I know she actually is okay with it.  And that’s a big if.  I don’t want sex just for sex.  I want to be with my wife, the woman I love.  I want to make her happy.  I want to be happy with her.  I want us to connect.  I’m not even certain that I can have sex with someone else without it hurting my opinion of myself.

Which, actually, is kind of odd.  Because I believe in polyamory.  I believe that people can love more than one person.  In different ways.  Even in the same ways.  Sometimes a good relationship needs more than two people to fill in all of the gaps and make it solid for everyone.  I honestly believe that.

And I honestly believe that there are plenty of people that can just have sex for the sake of sex.  That it’s just physical pleasure.  It’s fun.  Damn sex is fun!  Having sex with someone doesn’t mean you’re going to leave your spouse for them.  It can be on the emotional level of playing a video game.

But just because I respect other people’s rights to these views, and believe in them, doesn’t mean that I hold myself to the same values.

Basically, my way of coping with having sex again after rape, was to tie my act of having sex tightly into an emotional expression of love.  I understand that in theory there are plenty of other reasons for sex.  I just can’t bring myself to allow myself to explore them.

Psychologically speaking, it’d probably be good for me to reach a point where I could.  If I don’t do greivous damage to myself in getting there.  And maybe if I could find a good therapist, I might get there safely.

But that’s pretty much all theory for me.  Been there.  Tried that.  Couldn’t even find a therapist that impressed me as actually caring or for that matter, just understanding.  There’s an intellectual level at which we can read and know about things, and there’s an emotional level at which we understand things.  Try as we might, we can never replace one for the other.  You either understand, or you don’t.  You’ve either been there yourself, or you haven’t.

In a very weird twisted way, it’s this very reason that brings me to believe that even “evil” acts, can, in fact, be used for good.  And that, in a way, they’re necessary.  You can’t truly understand something until you’ve gone through it.  You can’t truly empathize with someone who lost a loved one until you’ve lost a loved one yourself.  You can’t fully emotionally support someone who was raped unless you yourself were raped.  You can’t really understand how someone felt when they were robbed unless you were robbed.  If you don’t have a wellspring of actual experience to draw from, try as you might to be earnest in helping, you lack a very integral tool to help.  And so, in a sick twisted way, doing bad things to people makes these “victims” uniquely qualified to help other people victimized in a similar way.  It’s an opportunity and insight that no Harvard degree can give you.  It’s a strangely necessary part of the human experience.

And no therapist who hasn’t actually been there themself can honestly reach in an provide that level of understanding necessary to achieve healing.

Anyway, I’m kind of rambling I guess.  The point is, the wife and I both have our issues.  We don’t know how they’re going to affect our lives or our future.  All that we do know is that we love each other and don’t want to lose what we have.  We both want to keep what we have.  And we’re both willing to try to be flexible.

So even though we didn’t really “solve” anything, we at least re-affirmed our commitment to one another.  We got our slates cleared.  We’re willing to be open-minded and give things our best shot.  And we still love one another.  So at least in that, we both feel better. 

Then yesterday, I guess in support of who I am, my wife took me out shopping to a local goodwill store, to shop for women’s clothes for me.

I greatly appreciate her enthusiasm and effort.

I mean I could theoretically find some of her clothes to wear.  In some ways we’re pretty similar in sizing.  (In others not.)  But there’s two problems with that, at least for me.  The first is that I don’t have her same sense of fashion.  We have very different tastes on that front.  But still, I could find some things.  It’s the other thing that matters more: that for some reason it creeps me out to wear her clothes.  It’s some personal stigma.  I guess I feel like if I’m just raiding her closet to play dress up, that I’m not really taking myself seriously.  This is about me, finding myself.  And to do that I guess it’s greatly important that I put my own energy into my own wardrobe, that it be a representation of me.

So, we went shopping.  At a goodwill store.

Unfortunately, the store pretty much was the worst goodwill store I’ve ever seen.  And having grown up and been relatively unwealthy most of my life, I am certainly not unfamiliar with this kind of shopping.  And I’ve seen bad.  But I’ve never seen that bad.

And it wasn’t just the dirty atmosphere, as if no one gave a damn enough to take pride in the place.  It was also the quality of the merchandise, which looked to be about the bottom of the barrel of goodwill, which is a truly unimaginable experience until you see it.  And added to that, the organization of everything was just as unimpressive.  Nothing was organized by size.  It was organized by color.  Yes, all grey tops, in a row, in no particular order of size whatsoever.  On the next rack, all black.  On the next rack, khaki pants.  On the next rack, a completely random assortment of skirts of every size, shape, and color … with no organization to them whatsoever.

And you know how hard it is to find that missus XL / 20 or that plus 1X / 16W when things are organized.  But an entire store where absolutely nothing is organized by size?  In any way?!  Good freaking luck!

So that was, of course, greatly disappointing.  I have no real wardrobe to speak of.  I certainly don’t have the money to just buy one.  It was really the only chance to experiment and add without a serious monitary commitment.  All shot to hell.  Because in spite of our nation’s failing economy, apparently the people around here are just to self-important to care?  That itself is pretty depressing.  I mean it’s one thing to jilt a silly crossdresser.  I can live with it.  Not happily, but I’ll most certainly live.  It’s another thing altogether to jilt pretty much everyone locally who is suffering through this mess that Dubya has created.  That ain’t right.

So such are the days of my life.

I just signed up for an Adult FriendFinder account.  Same name: HinkyCorners.  I’m feeling a little out of sorts.

(For those not in the know, AFF is a place where grown-ups hook-up at the drop of a hat.  It’s pretty much all about getting laid.)

I love my wife.  And she used to satisfy me sexually.  Lately though …  She’s been through a lot of tough times because of her job, and because she’s having some weird health issues with inflamed joints.  Sex is rarely if ever lately.  It’s about to the counting monthly point.  I wish I didn’t have a libido.  I wish I didn’t need more than that.  I’d like to not need more than that.

I mean I shouldn’t feel guilty.  I’ve had three real sex partners in my whole life.  My wife has had … well … I try not to mentally count.  She’s had more fun than I have, let’s put it that way.  And so we talked about it.  She even told me once to go out and “get more experience”.  I know that to her, sex is sex and love is love.  I even promised her that if I wasn’t enough for her, if she needed other partners, that I would be okay with that.  Because when we met, she lived a much more … entertained lifestyle than I did.

And we both believe that we can love more than one person at a time.

So I’m 99.999% positive that if I just asked her, she’d say go forth and have fun.  Just be smart and stay clean.

But I worry.  I don’t think she’s ever really be “in love” until me.  I don’t want to hurt her.

But then I also don’t know that I’m going to have sex with anyone just because I signed up for AFF.  The last time I did, I made new friends.  Friends I never had sex with.  And right now that’s really all I want, I think, are just some friends.

Part of me though just wonders some times.  Am I missing anything?

And then I really worry about what if I hooked up with a man.  And what if I liked it?  How would my wife take me wanting sex that she doesn’t even have the equipment for?

But then I tell myself that I’m just being silly.

I think what really has me down is that I just don’t want to bring her down any while she’s already feeling down.  I don’t want her to feel guilty.

Love is hard.

And then there’s that other issue.  Me becoming a woman.  I tell myself that I don’t do it because I’d make an ugly woman.  But honestly, with enough hormone therapy and surgery, I bet I’d be fine.  Money, of course, is an issue.  In that I just don’t have that kind of money right now.  But much more than that, I know my wife isn’t bisexual.  She’s not attracted to women.  So I’m pretty sure if I became a woman, if I made the transition, then our marriage would be over.

And so I have to ask myself, which is more important?  My happiness from love?  Or my happiness from being a woman trapped in a man’s body?

I honestly don’t know.

Lately though, I’ve been wondering about finding some half-way middle ground.  Maybe just hormone therapy would let me feel better, and give me just enough edge to crossdress outside of the home on occasion.

The funny thing is, as a man, I look pretty awful without my facial hair.  But as a woman I’d look hideous with it.  Even if I shaved, the stubble under the skin is so dark you just can’t hide it.  And then there’s the body hair.

I shaved my legs a couple of weeks ago on a whim.  It was the first time I ever did it.  It took forever.  It was a huge pain in the ass.  But gods did it feel good once it was done.  The skin was so incredibly sensitive to touch.  And the smoothness felt so right.

**sigh**

So, I don’t know.  I just don’t know.  How far can I press being a woman before my marriage suffers?  How far will it take to satisfy that part of me?  Do I just experiment and hope and pray?

I’ve heard that there are herbal things to take.  To be honest, that scares me a little though.  Normally I’m all for herbal remidies in place of drugs, because the human body recognizes, say, crushed leaves as food.  Where as a condenssed pill of chemicals is basically a pebble.  I’m all for the holistic whenever it makes sense.

But HRT sounds more like it’s a major shock to the system, not just a quaint small amount.  So to match that in herbs, you’d have to consume tons and tons of them.  Which has got to both cost a lot and be dangerous to screw around with without a doctor.  So if you’re going to bring in a doctor for safety, then I think in this case taking actual medicine is a safer way to go.

But then what do I know?  My experience in this is squat!  I dunno…

So many choices.  So many ways to screw up.  I wish I just had the confidence to go forward and feel good about it.  Why is life so full of crap like this?