So much hate, ladies! So much hate! I don’t know when I became “bitch about my freaky husband lady” but it’s getting a little old. It’s not that I don’t want you to express your frustration – I’ve been there, I understand exactly where you’re coming from, and I want to be able to help – but is it really necessary to spew the fury with your life entirely onto your crossdresser? I know, I know, you’re having a rough time of it. Work sucks, the kids suck, your in-laws suck, the neighbors suck, your car sucks, and something expensive just broke down in your house AGAIN. Now was NOT the time for your husband to “come out of the crossdressing closet” so to speak. But he did and now you’ve got to deal with it.
It’s hardly fair, is it?
You just wish you could have a “normal” husband, right? Like, for example, that neighbor down the way who has that pretty yard and that pretty house and her 2.5 kids are SO well-behaved, it could make you sick? Or your sister-in-law with the lawyer husband and the champion dalmatians who just bought that nice loft downtown?
One of the hardest lessons I ever had to learn once I “grew up” was that real life is exactly like high school. You can try hard to make it not like high school – cut out the drama-llama friends, for example, or lose weight/stop drinking/actually wake up on time – but at it’s core real life is filled with the same petty bullshit as high school, just on a larger scale and with more money worries. Backstabbing bitches still exist and they will still backstab you at the likeliest opportunity. That douchebag jerk who bumped you in the hall still bumps into you in the hall, but now he calls it a joke and is just trying to “lighten up your Monday, bro.” And, like high school, you occasionally come to the crashing realization that, just like high school, NO ONE is normal.
Your perfect neighbors might get intimate twice a year. He may be more interested in porn than people and she might be schtupping her brother-in-law. Your fantastic family might be drowning in debt and fighting every night of the week. No one has a perfect life and that Norman Rockwell Normal that tv commercials and pop-up ads try to sell you is pure fiction. There’ve been studies done and books written (The Nostalgia Trap) on that very subject. Society needs us to think that there’s some normal standard to live up to and it needs us to feel guilty or angry when we don’t. You already know that money is made by making us feel bad about ourselves and our lives. We’ve been told since we were very small that a man acts one way and a woman another. When our spouses don’t act the way we’ve been told they’re supposed to act, we get angry. But why?
One piece of advice I find myself giving over and over again these days is this: Take a Good Long Look at your own perceptions of marriage and the man you married.
When you married him did you think you needed to “fix” anything about him? His hygiene, the way he kept house, maybe some of the friends he keeps or activities he participates in? Why do you think that? If he’s good enough to marry, why do you want to change those aspects of him? Because it’s more convenient for you? Because society frowns on the way he spends his spare time (gaming, watching sports, playing poker, etc)? Because it doesn’t involve you?
If you want to change aspects of him (not related to crossdressing) then you need to figure out WHY and possibly sort out if his changing is really and honestly going to make your marriage better. A crippling WoW addiction is one thing but getting together one night a week for some D&D with his buddies is something else entirely. If his hobbies aren’t hurting your marriage by taking up 1) more time than you (as a family) can reasonably spare or 2) more money than you (as a family) can reasonably spare, then what’s the harm?
With me so far?
I want you ladies who are feeling so very put out at your man for crossdressing to take a few minutes and relax. I know it doesn’t seem fair. He gets to have hobbies and maybe he doesn’t spend nearly as much time helping out around the house as you’d like plus these days he hardly ever has time for the kids… and THEN he drops this crossdressing thing on you. And you, of course, are a chore-finishing, job-working, soccer-game-attending, homework-helping super hero. Why should you have to put up with One More Thing?
Because.
Just because.
Think of it as another hobby, if it helps, but one that you have a little say in. One that he wants to share with you. One that has the potential to really open up avenues in your marriage that you never thought of before. One that, yeah, maybe you might not want to share at Jimmy Jr’s playgroup, but one that is important to the sanity and security of your marriage. Because it’s important to him to share this with you, which means it’s important enough for you to take ten minutes out of being Super WifeMom to listen.
The other point I’ve found myself making A LOT lately is simply this: You married your husband, not some dude. You (hopefully) married a guy you can laugh with, hang out with, get stuff around the house done with. You married a man with a personality, not a caricature of who a man is supposed to be. Sometimes aspects of his personality will grate on you, sometimes you’ll go together like PB&J. But, like Chris Rock says, you have to love the crust of a motherfucker, not just the white part of the bread. You’re not going to like everything about your spouse, but hopefully you married a guy that you like to be with. Hopefully you married a man you like to hang out with. Because if you married some dude just to be married, or because it was expected of you, or because you just felt like it, or because you were running out of time, or because he knocked you up and you needed a baby-daddy… then you might not be able to make your relationship work.
The most important thing to remember about being in a relationship with a crossdresser is that if You Love Your Husband then you can make it work. You can. I promise you. You’ve got my word on it. If you love your husband enough to try, and KEEP trying, even when it gets hard or you get angry/annoyed, then you can make it work. It might seem easier to quit, to walk away, to say to yourself that some other man will make you happier or will be less effort… and that might be true. There might be some other guy out there who is easier than being with a crossdresser… but I guarantee you that if you work hard to make your relationship work, you won’t find another man who’s more loyal.
Hear me out. Seriously. I have NEVER EVER worried about my husband cheating on me. I am not an ugly woman but I’ve got some extra curve and I always have. I probably always will. I’m part Italian – I’ve got some extra hair on me that sometimes, in the winter, I’m not so quick about maintaining. What I’m saying is that I’m not the most alluring lady out there… but when we pass a hot red-head in a short skirt on the street and my husband takes a second look I don’t think to myself, “That asshole is checking out her ass!”
I think to myself, “Damn it, now I have to help him find that skirt.”
I once asked Melanie, relatively early in our relationship, “Would you ever leave me for her?” (referring to a famous actress)
She said, “Nope. Never. Not even for her.”
Me: “Really? Never?”
Melanie: “It would take you doing something phenomenally awful for me to leave you. Like cheating on me. Possibly murder. Depending on who the murder victim was, of course.”
Me: “Okay… why?”
Melanie: “You accept me. Really, honestly, 100% accept me for who I am. Do you think I’m going to find that with just anyone? Right. Uh huh. Nope, sorry, you’re stuck with me.”
Then he noogied me.
But you get the point.
IF you want to make your relationship with your man work, you can. You CAN. But if he, the man himself, is not worth it to you, if saving your relationship with that particular human being is not worth it to you, then you need to consider ending your relationship. But don’t tell him it’s because of the crossdressing, because you would be lying. That sort of lie can screw up a person for the rest of their life. Tell him the truth. Tell him it’s because you were expecting marriage to be different, that you married the wrong sort of person for you. Crossdressing has nothing to do with it, it’s just the last straw, you just need someone who better fits YOU.
If you want to leave, you don’t need permission from me. You need to figure out why you want to go, the real, down deep core reason you think your relationship isn’t working. But I’m not going to tell you that crossdressing is a valid reason to go. Because it’s not. If you want to make your relationship work, ladies, you can. It may be hard. But if you love them enough to try, you can make it work. I promise you. You don’t have to go. And you don’t have to be angry.
You’ve got my word on that.
(On a side point, I would like to note that a crawling 7 month old who’s figured out how to crawl stairs SUCKS. Add rapidly growing head full of grey hair to my list of less-than-attractive attributes.)
I’m not complaining… but being a mom is HARD. Like, holy cow, I regret every bad thing I’ve ever said about my mother (especially those persnickety teen years) hard.
I’m lucky in that my husband is many, many synonyms with awesome and hard-working. He makes my life easier in so many important ways. The only problem? Handling a six-month baby who’s started to CRAWL ALREADY doesn’t leave a lot of time for things like Melanie. Now, granted, he knows that if he really needed some Melly time I would work hard to get it for him… with the understanding that I’d get equal amounts of time for me.
That’s how relationships work, folks. And I’m getting more and more emails in my inbox from women – wives, girlfriends, even an ex-wife or two – who all are asking me the same thing over and over again: Why Is My [Crossdresser] So Selfish?
My response? To go to my husband and say, “Hey sweetie? Umm, why were you so selfish?” Because, you see, he was for a time too. That changed, obviously, in that my big complaint is that there just aren’t enough hours in the day anymore, but early in our relationship, yeah, I had problems with a “selfish ‘man’” too.
His response was long and varied and somewhat apologetic. I didn’t exactly have a tape-recorder on me at the time but here’s the gist of it:
While your Crossdresser has had (at most) their whole lives to come to terms with their crossdressing, you’ve only been given… oh, the time between when you found out and when you decided to type in “Crossdresser’s Wife” into Google. For some of you… hours. For others, years.
I know that it feels like it’s still not enough time and that it might never be enough time to come to terms with it.
Here’s how the feeling was described to me:
Imagine that you’ve felt lost in some essential way your entire life. Imagine that you were (for example) Amish, and it’s time for Rumspringa. You go out into the world, to experience it, and in doing so you put on a pair of pants for the first time in your life… THE FREEDOM! Your legs don’t chafe when you walk, the fabric is silky against your flesh, there is no encumbrance, no weight dragging you down. Some part of you, some secret, quiet part, exalts in the realization that this, this feeling of freedom right here, was what was missing your entire life. Yes, it’s only clothing, but in many ways the clothing symbolizes who you are in a core way mere words can never outline. The pants are freedom. The right to wear the pants is freedom.
And for men? The right to put on the skirt in the privacy of their own homes is the freedom too.
So why the (perceived) selfishness?
Imagine you’ve found that freedom.
Imagine you’re wearing those pants, maybe you even had to sneak around to wear the jeans or tights, to feel that freedom, even if it’s only temporary, but you love someone so much that you want to share who you are, who you REALLY are at your core, with them.
Now imagine that person (tentatively!) doesn’t ridicule you.
Imagine that they encourage the pants-wearing.
Would you only want to wear the pants for an hour a day? Two hours?
Or would you wear those damn pants Every Chance You Got? Would you push to wear the pants more often? If they made you feel more yourself? If they made you feel better, stronger, more capable?
And how would you feel about that person if they supported your pants-wearing… but only at first?
Look, ladies, I’m not saying that your husband should flaunt society and wiggle into a miniskirt for Thanksgiving Dinner. There ARE limits. But before you get angry at him for pushing his boundaries, remember that he trusts you and loves you enough to show you who he really is inside. He’s vulnerable and excited that you’re letting him be himself. I know it’s hard to walk a mile in his stilettos (especially since they’re SO uncomfortable!) but keep trying, okay?
It’s worth it in the long run, I promise.
(Additional Note: There will be a future post to our gentlemen friends, don’t you fret. In the meantime, boys/girls, keep in mind that you’ve got a GOOD THING in your girlfriend/wife/friend who is willing to put up with your fledgling forays into the world of crossdressing. Don’t dive in too deep and forget to keep their feelings in mind… especially if you want to keep them around… and open-minded. Just food for thought.)
Your back. So what? You’v gotta kid. Congrats on spiting out out anouther mouth to feed in this cutnry. I bet hes gonna be a fag like his daddy! god says that queers shouldbe stoned. Guess your gonna need to man up and throw th first one if your a good christian woman! or not. fatugly queerlover!And theres never gunna b a fag like youre husband in the Whitehouse. Keep dreaming!
You know… the hate doesn’t bug me. It ought to, seeing as it’s HATE and all, but really I find people who feel the need to spew obscenities at total strangers on the internet pathetic more than anything else. Honestly, have you nothing better to do with your time? Really? My time is precious – I don’t bother emailing people I dislike. They’re not worth the effort.
No, the REAL bother to me here is how this individual BUTCHERED the English language. I’m not perfect, granted, I can splice a sentence with the best of ‘em, but… I mean… come on. Just look at it. Look at it. Painful, huh?
My final complaint is that the immature child who sent this to me bothered to skim the site just enough to note how proud I was that we elected a black man as President and how I have hope that one day we’ll elect an openly homosexual individual to the office… yet they somehow came away with the impression that I am Christian, against my husband’s crossdressing, or think he’s gay. None of which is true.
For the record – most CDing men are not gay. Just so you know.
And if my son DOES turn out to be gay? So what? As long as he uses protection when he’s experimenting and picks a nice son-in-law for me, why should I care the gender of the person he loves? Furthermore, since he’s not YOUR son, why should you? Plus the fact that it’s a little early for all that. He’s barely six months old. Let’s get him walking and talking and off the boob before we start throwing around gender stereotypes and preferences, okay?
Have a (blessed!) day!
The Wife
I vanished into the ether for over a year and I’ve received several emails asking why. Some of them I responded to and others I did not. Reasons vary as to whether the email was answered or ignored. Generally, however, if I found an email in my inbox asking for help… well, I answered it. That was the very least I could do.
So why, you wonder, did I drop off the radar so abruptly? The simple answer is this: an agent, two miscarriages, and a baby boy.
That’s right, I got an agent for my 9-5 regular job, I had two miscarriages, and this past January I gave birth to my first baby. He’s wonderful but a handful.
Does this mean I’ll be back full time? Yes and no. I won’t be writing as frequently as before but I will post every now and then and, as always, I’m still available to email with questions and comments.
It’s good to be back.
Johneen Manning from Suite101 has a few things to say about how to properly put on a bra.
Not exactly the sort of quad boob I'm talking about
How to Put On a Bra Properly
Just because you wear a bra every day doesn’t mean you know how to put one on correctly. If you put on your bra by hooking it underneath your breasts and spinning it around so that the closure is in the back, you’re putting on your bra incorrectly.
According to the experts at Figleaves.com, the correct method of getting into your brassier is as follows:
1. Adjust the straps to the maximum length.
2. Lean forward into the cups and rest your breasts into the supports.
3. Reach behind to hook the bra on the middle hooks of the closure.
4. Put the straps on your shoulders.
5. Position your breast in the cup by slipping a hand into the cup and lifting the breast while aligning the underwire on your ribcage along the natural crease of your breast to prevent pinching of the breast tissue.
6. Tighten the straps so that they support the breasts lightly without cutting into the skin or putting too much strain on the shoulders.
7. Adjust the straps every time you put on a bra.Signs that Your Bra Doesn’t Fit or Needs Adjusting
When helping women find the right bra, lingerie specialists at LaSenza, Victoria’s Secret and Figleaves.com most frequently troubleshoot these problems for their customers:
* Front Band Falling Down: The center front of your bra should lie flat against your breastbone. If the underwire is being pulled down far below the crease of your breast, this is a sign that you are wearing too small a band size.
* Back Band Riding Up: This common problem happens when a band is too big, and in an effort to compensate for the lack of primary support, the straps are tightened too much. Remember, it is the band that provides 80 percent of the bra’s support; it should sit firmly against your body so that it does not slide or move away from the chest during your daily activities.
* Asymmetrical Breasts: Most women are at least a little bit asymmetrical, with one breast being larger than the other. If this is the case, fit the bra to the larger cup, then adjust straps individually, tightening the strap a bit more on the smaller side.
* False Back Fat: Also known as boobs in the back, false back fat occurs when the band is too tight. Fix this problem by loosening the back strap or choosing a wider band size.
* Cups Runneth Over: When your cup size is too small, your breasts bulge or spill over the top or sides of the bra. Fix this problem by going up a cup size or choosing a style that offers more coverage.
* Bumpy Boobs: Loose wrinkled cups with unsightly bumps that show through your shirt occur when your cup size is too big. Remedy this faux pas by going down a cup size or choosing a more flattering demi-cup style.
* Seeing Red Marks: If you’ve got red marks on your shoulders and back after you remove your bra, your straps are too tight. Get over this pain in the back by loosening your straps or choosing a more supportive bra with wider, padded straps.
* Slip and Slide Straps: If you find that your bra straps are always slipping off your shoulders, you should either tighten your straps or choose an alternative style, such as racer-back or convertible styles that can be worn traditionally, crossed in the back, or as a halter style.
While exploring around yesterday, I found this site. While I’m not exactly Christian myself (agnostic-diest is the closest religion I’ll claim these days) I do have great respect for those Christians who actually follow the ideals behind Christianity rather than tow the anti-everything-that’s-not-Jesus-based party line. The problem with Christianity is simply that there are so many people out there who apply their beliefs to their religion and don’t bother to take into consideration that this was a book written by many people centuries ago, translated, and then translated again. Does the Bible have good advice? Sure. But it also says shellfish is an abomination and that it’s totally okay to stone your daughters (not to mention all the getting drunk and incest). So it’s important to take the Bible with a grain of salt.
Europeans are slightly more open-minded about Jesus' last dress.
So is it impossible to be both an open crossdresser and regularly religious? I would like to think not. It would be hard, no joke, and there will most likely be some hard feelings by time the whole thing is said and done, but wearing a dress doesn’t preclude a deep spiritual side and your personal beliefs don’t have to interfere with your crossdressing. Not if having both really matters to you.
I have vivid recollections of cross-dressing since the age of five. Virtually every reference I heard or read was derogatory, so it seemed prudent not to tell anyone. Instead, I attempted, unsuccessfully, to submerge my feelings and drive them out of my life. As the years went by, my secret became unbearably heavy.
Then, in my early forties, a great burst of lightness entered my life. I was convinced it would permanently displace the heaviness. Through a mutual acquaintance, I met my wife-to-be on a commuter train and we quickly became friends. She was warm, friendly and non-judgmental. Over time, like turned to love and, with our marriage, a deeper love developed that was as close to unconditional as I have ever experienced.
But, even with Marsha’s loving presence, cross-dressing didn’t become a thing of the past. It steadfastly refused to go away. I previously thought that it simply filled a void in my life. Now my life was full, so why didn’t it go away? I didn’t understand.
So, at age 50, I embarked on a quest for the truth about my sexuality and emotions. Eventually I was able to understand that cross-dressing was an integral part of myself, that it was neither good nor bad, and that I had to balance it with all of the other aspects of my psyche and my life.
My relationship with my wife was built on truth and openness. I had come to feel safe telling her everything – everything but this! Despite my fears, I knew that I had to tell her about my cross-dressing.
My story was a difficult revelation for both of us but, instead of pulling away, she drew even closer. We talked. And we talked. And we talked. In time, she was able to accept my cross-dressing as just another aspect of the man she married. She showed herself to be God’s greatest gift to me. She loved me just the way I was.
While working out the issues related to cross-dressing, we realized that it would be valuable to share what we had learned. So, I wrote The Bliss of Becoming One!, which became a best-seller for cross-dressers.
With the publishing of the book, I began to become active in the gender community. At our first gender conference, my wife said she felt as though we were attending a professional women’s business meeting. Everyone was beautifully and stylishly outfitted including matching shoes and handbags.
At the workshop where I was speaking, I described my journey to become a complete person. As I spoke, painful memories surfaced among the participants of the rejection that they had endured. I witnessed the impact of that rejection: lost relationships, escapes into drugs and alcohol, ruined lives of quiet desperation. The fear is all too real that we will lose our wives, our children, our jobs – everything of importance – if anyone learns our secret.
Personally, I was at peace, but I was determined that I would never forget the suffering of others. Contrary to the well-meaning advice from other cross-dressers never to tell anyone, I vowed that I would try to tell everyone. That day marked my renewed commitment to continue to reach out to help other cross-dressers and their families and friends to deal with their suffering and unnecessary anguish.
The roots of our suffering begin early in life. Like many of us, I was conditioned from childhood to believe that the way things were was how they were supposed to be. I learned to be guarded in my personal interactions, to be suspicious of anyone who was not like me and to place them “over there” where they couldn’t affect my world. As a cross-dresser, I personally discovered what it meant to be treated differently because most of the world mirrored my attitude and behavior by placing me “over there” because I was different.
I realized that if I wanted the attitudes and behaviors towards people like myself to change, I would have to take the initiative to reach out to others. So I learned to tell my story to others with whom I had a relationship. By sharing intimate parts of my life, a deeper bond usually developed. Telling my secret story made it safe for others to tell theirs and many did. Telling instead of hiding increased our mutual understanding and made both of our burdens lighter.
Telling our stories can be all the more traumatic for cross-dressers seeking a place within a faith community. The desire of most Christians who cross-dress is simply to be accepted as members of a congregation. We are hesitant to confide in our clergy for fear of being labeled sinners, excluded from the church and separated from God. As a result, most of us say nothing and continue to hide the truth, thus re-enforcing our guilt and shame.
On my journey, I have had discussions with hundreds of religious leaders and have been dismayed by their overwhelmingly negative reactions. A large segment of Christianity still selectively uses Deuteronomy 22:5, the only biblical passage that appears to directly address the subject, to automatically condemn cross-dressing:
“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abominations unto the Lord thy God.”
Literalists use this verse to brand all male, but not female, cross-dressers as sinners in urgent need of repentance. Mention the word cross-dresser and their strong condemnation gushes forth. If the cross-dresser fails to repent immediately, he is characterized as being in open rebellion against God.
I researched 30 commentaries regarding the verse. The scholars varied widely in their views, and most qualified their position or provided multiple possible explanations. A surprising number said that the verse has nothing to do with what is commonly known today as cross-dressing. The prohibition was most frequently attributed to pagan religious ceremonies or deviant sexual practices. Since none of those conditions applied to me or to the cross-dressers that I knew, I thought the issue should be settled.
The spiritual realm, including a desire to be part of a supportive church, has always been a crucial component of my life. While I had become comfortable with my cross-dressing, the church did not occupy the same comfort zone. In my search for a supportive church home, I contacted nine local churches of various denominations asking if I could be accepted as a cross-dresser. Most avoided answering me, and several said no. Only one responded positively.
I began attending services there in ordinary male attire and connected with the pastor. I took the class for prospective new members and subsequently joined the congregation.
The pastor was an outstanding orator who encouraged members to take action. I made several proposals for programs to address cross-dressing but received no reply. After several months, he finally agreed to meet. He confirmed that it was OK for me to have become a member. He confided that there also were several gays and lesbians in the congregation. He stated, however, that it would not be appropriate to discuss any of this openly because the congregation was “not ready.” I was devastated. I thought that the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was awful, but this was even worse. I had done everything I could to fit in, and it still wasn’t enough to be openly accepted. With great sadness, I left that church.
Months later a good friend suggested that I visit a church which she knew was gay-friendly and would likely be open to me. After my recent investment of two years waiting for church acceptance, I was very bold in approaching the pastor. Surprisingly, she said it would not be a problem (was it significant that the pastor was a woman?). I began attending on a regular basis, again dressing in male attire. After several months I decided to join.
During the membership ceremony, the pastor read a statement prepared by each person, and mine announced to the entire congregation that I was a cross-dresser. The reaction was scattered applause followed after the service by many open expressions of support. The church had a committee on reconciliation that led an annual Sunday service. That year I became a very active participant. During the months that followed, I took on the leadership of the committee and was able to conduct several workshops on cross-dressing and Christianity. The audiences were large and appreciative.
The overall experience was an unbelievable high, one that reached its pinnacle after one of my workshops. I live in the San Francisco Bay area where the 49ers are football kings, but I’m from Wisconsin; Green Bay Packer green-and-gold blood is in my veins. As a result, I took a lot of good-natured ribbing about being a “cheese-head.” In the social hall after one of my workshops, a female member of the congregation approached the group with whom I was speaking. She winked and asked if it was more difficult for me coming out as a cross-dresser or as a Packer fan. The group dissolved in laughter. It was the most loving embrace possible. I felt truly blessed.
Unfortunately, however, the congregation’s denomination still considers homosexuality incompatible with Christianity. So, just beneath the surface acceptance, significant tension still exists within the church regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues. My pastor and I agreed that seeing a cross-dressed person whom they already knew and accepted, might help our members to better understand those issues. We announced a repeat of the prior year’s workshops. The only difference was that Richard had led them the year before, but this time I would be dressed as Rachel.
To my surprise, by simply putting on a dress, I had inadvertently created a litmus test for just how open the congregation really was. I had crossed an unstated line. Some church members embraced the idea of a cross-dresser but not the visual reality of actually cross-dressing. To them it was acceptable to have LGBT members as long as they looked and acted like everyone else. A man wearing a dress certainly didn’t meet those criteria. Some left the church while others withheld their donations. No one knew quite what to do. I voluntarily pulled back from my committee leadership position, announced my readiness to serve in any capacity and awaited the next step.
For more than a year that step has been to stand still. The church’s membership stabilized, but the subject of reconciliation was shifted towards the back burner. If the clergy push forward, it could cost them their jobs and livelihood. If lay leaders push too hard, it could cost them their official positions in the congregation. So it has been less costly to church leadership to quietly ignore a transgendered person and gently nudge him towards the margins than to openly confront the issue.
This would be just another sad story if it were an isolated instance. But similar stories occur in every denomination in every town, and they add up to a significant spiritual problem.
Christians talk about taking the Gospel into the world. First, however, we must implement it within our churches. Jesus succinctly stated the Gospel message by saying that the two greatest commandments are to love God and love our neighbor and made it clear that everyone is our neighbor. If we listen to much of the current rhetoric coming from the church, one could reasonably conclude that being gay is the greatest sin. If we listen to Jesus, though, we would know that the greatest sin is the failure to love. Of that sin the church is most decidedly guilty!
If followers of Christ are to be known by their love for one another, what are we to make of the institutional church? During its history, it has failed to love blacks by supporting slavery and then segregation. It has failed to love women by consistently relegating them to the back of the ecclesiastical bus. And today it consistently fails to love LGBT people often not even recognizing us as Christians.
The Gospel is absurdly simple to articulate but extraordinarily difficult to implement. Learning to love and accept Christians who look and act differently, lies at the heart of the Gospel message. The issue isn’t merely about loving gays and lesbians. And it certainly isn’t about being comfortable. It is about loving all of God’s children!
Dan Schutte’s song, “Here I Am, Lord,” recounts much of the world’s suffering and poses God’s response as: “Whom shall I send?” The refrain asks: “Is it I, Lord?”
As one who has experienced rejection by the institutional church, I feel challenged to answer God’s call by saying, “Send me!” Meanwhile, the church demonstrates a chronic failure rate in answering that same call. That failure continues to have an extremely high personal cost to those of us in the LGBT community. And, if the church fails to end its hypocrisy, the long-term cost to its credibility as an instrument of God’s love will be immeasurable.
Written by Rachel Miller
Tags: debate, discussion, links, religion
I can’t say how thrilled I am about the following news. Normally when you hear about these sorts of stories you only learn about the tragedy – how dare a boy put on a dress and think he’s got the right to parade up in front of folks, etc – but this time love won! Article culled from Lauren Gonzales’ newsletter and links provided below:
FAIRFAX, Va. – George Mason University senior Ryan Allen dresses in drag and doesn’t mind being called a queen — homecoming queen, to be exact.
Allen, who is gay and performs in drag at nightclubs in the region, said he entered the homecoming contest as a joke, competing as Reann Ballslee, his drag queen persona.
But he considers the victory one of his happiest moments and proof that the suburban Washington, D.C., school famous for its run to the Final Four a few years back celebrates its diverse student body.
“I was very touched by how Mason was so supportive through the whole process of allowing a boy in a dress to run for homecoming queen,” Allen said in a phone interview. “It says a lot about the campus that not only do we have diversity but we celebrate it.”
The senior from Virginia’s Goochland County won the pageant Saturday at a sold-out Homecoming basketball game against Northeastern University.
Large portions of the crowd cheered as Allen, wearing a gold-sequined top, accepted the tiara and the Ms. Mason 2009 sash.
The school, known for racial diversity and a basketball team that pulled off a string of upsets to advance to the Final Four in 2006, was selected the nation’s top “school to watch” in the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings.
Allen’s selection does not appear to have caused much consternation among the school’s 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students. An online article in the student newspaper prompted only two comments, both positive.
Alyssa Cordova, an officer with the school’s College Republicans, said she didn’t pay much attention to Allen’s election and is suprised by the media attention it has received.
“I just think it’s kind of silly,” she said.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equity and a former adjunct professor at Mason, said the lack of controversy “shows that the students and the George Mason community have a good sense of perspective.”
University spokesman Dan Walsch said the school is “very comfortable” with Allen’s selection and the contest rules are not sex-specific.
“It’s just that if you’re a man who runs for Ms., you’ve got to dress the part,” Walsch said.
The contest was half talent judging and half voting by the student body. Allen received the most votes but doesn’t know how he scored in the talent competition, in which he performed in zebra-print pants and lip-synched to Britney Spears.
He said his drag queen persona is fairly popular and well-known on campus — he has hosted events as Reann for the school’s Pride Week, as well as HIV charity shows and an amateur drag night cabaret.
“Reann is very sassy, very silly. She’s an entertainer throughout. She’s not afraid to do a high kick if that’s what it takes,” Allen said. “She’s got a little camp but is not as campy as some queens.”
Women on the Web (WOW)
The Washington Post
The Associated Press
Yahoo News
MSNBC
Tags: college, homecoming queen, Progress!!!
Culled from THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT CROSSDRESSING by Ellen Sherman. I was not at all surprised to recognize just how many of these misconceptions that the average populace takes for facts and how many of these I’ve encountered in my own life.
Every Fall, several hundred traditional husbands, fathers and businessmen come together in Provincetown for Fantasia Fair with parties, seminars and workshops exploring the thorny issue of how to buy the right wig and hide a 5 o’clock shadow with the foundation and blush-on. Heterosexual married men from suburbia with families who cross-dress? What’s going on?
Apparently a much more common practice than most people would imagine. It’s estimated that at least %1 of the male population crossdresses. And even as we approach the 21st Century, the idea of a heterosexual man in heels is still more than a little threatening. And confusing even for the crossdressers themselves. As JoAnn Roberts, founder of Renaissance, a Delaware Valley crossdressing support group of over 400 said” I knew growing up that I wasn’t gay and I was heterosexual. I thought I might be crazy, but I knew I wasn’t gay.” Crossdressing is a subject that’s been universally misunderstood. While producing the first documentary on heterosexual crossdressing called All Dressed Up And No Place To Go, I found a host of misconceptions rampant in most people’s thinking. The following are the
Top Eleven Misconceptions that abound:1) Crossdressers Are Gay
More than likely not. As Dr. William Stayton, Head of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Sexuality and himself a therapist for crossdressers, reported “People associate crossdressing with effeminacy and being gay and the fact is most of them are not gay. They are very definitely heterosexual. “In fact one of the most difficult areas for crossdressers was how to deal with the women with whom they wanted to be involved.
2) Crossdressers Don’t Like Women
The truth is that rather than shying away from women, most crossdressers are as married or looking for a relationship as any cross section of men in America. “There is even some advantage to being a heterosexual crossdresser,” says Dr. Stayton. “When dressed they often become more sensitive and understanding to the women in their lives. Their wives tend to find them delightful and often it can become a real enhancement to marital relations.” However that “enhancement” can only come if the woman feels comfortable with her husband’s occasional dressing. Many don’t. As Florida lawyer Jeff/Jean reports, “What would happen was that as soon as women found out about “Jean” the relationship would end, so why did I have to keep banging myself in the head. I was married to a woman that didn’t approve and it was painful. Now I tell the women and let them even see “Jean.” If we’re going to be involved then they’ll have to accept all of me just like I have to accept all of them.”
3) Women Who Love Crossdressers Must Be Lesbians
What’s it like to love a man who’s wearing a dress? Pam, the wife of a Bank V.P crossdresser recounts “I did feel funny at first. I love my husband as a man but when I saw him in a dress as “Barbara,” I thought how can I love him? The answer was I didn’t have to love him the same way. With “Barbara,” we’re friends like I would be with any girlfriend. When he’s dressed as a man, I feel free to love him as a man.”
4) Crossdressers Dress For Sexual Gratification
Most crossdressers reveal that relieving stress and relaxation were the feelings they most associated with their crossdressing. However many revealed that while teenagers there was a high degree of sexual excitement related to crossdressing mostly relieved through masturbation. As hormones calmed down and they reached adulthood the sexual element declined and the feelings the crossdressing elicited were very different.” What you’ll find,” Dr. Stayton reported, “is that very early on they associate these clothes with relaxation and stress relieval. They often use it to feel calmer. There is an erotic element to the crossdressing. Many will crossdress or fantasize about being CD to enhance sexual enjoyment, but its not necessary.”
5) Crossdressers Always Wear Women’s Clothes
In fact, most may only dress once a month or once every six months. Many men don’t ever even reach the point of fully dressing but feel the same relaxed feeling by just wearing women’s undies under their suits. “You can’t imagine how many politicians can’t give a speech in Congress without wearing women’s panties,” Dr. Stayton commented, adding he has first hand knowledge since many are his patients.
6) Crossdressers Have Weird Sexual Habits
No more than most. However crossdressers did report their sex lives were enhanced by crossdressing to some degree. “Dale” recounted that “Although many CDs will deny it, there is a degree of extra arousal that comes with being crossdressed when making love but many women are not comfortable with that and we men have to be sensitive to that and accept it.”
7) Crossdressers Look Like RuPaul
In fact many crossdressers are most comfortable dressing their ” femme ” selves as they would dress their male selves. Therefore most conventions of crossdressers find a roomful of men in dressed for success women’s suits, low heels, tasteful makeup and coifed hair…much more Margaret Thatcher than RuPaul.
8 ) Crossdressing Develops in Adulthood
“We really find that crossdressing starts very young,” reports Dr. Stayton. “Many remember that as preschoolers they got a certain feeling with Mom’s clothing. It’s very rarely something that develops in adulthood.
9) Crossdressers Are Made, Not Born
The current conventional wisdom seems to be that crossdressing is a result of both Nature and Nurture. “I certainly think there’s a genetic influence just as for all of us there are things that happen that program us as to how we’ll be sexual, whether we’ll like redheads or thin women. We all have preferences, but the truth is there’s no common thread and we really don’t know why it happens,” reports Dr.Stayton.
10) Crossdressers Are Schizophrenic
In reality crossdressers exhibit slight personality alterations in their “femme” role, but in general, their personalities only change to the extent that many people’s do when assuming different roles in life, i.e. CEO, husband, father. One wife reports her husband likes to dance as his “femme” self where he wouldn’t feel that free as a man. Other wives recount how their husbands will shop with them when otherwise they’d never have the patience.
11) Crossdressing Can Be Cured
“Truth is you can’t change it,” Dr. Stayton concludes. Most professionals now try to counsel the crossdresser to deal with his crossdressing rather than eradicate it. “When someone comes to me and feels it’s sick behavior, then to me helping them to be healthy is to help them accept it and to be able to appropriately accept their own crossdressing feelings.”
There’s some potential drama going on in our family life right now. I don’t feel like going into details but some family members I was under the impression already knew about Melantie’s crossdressing apparently didn’t and found out about this blog thanks to Facebook. Through the grapevine I’ve been informed that these family members “think [I'm] crazy”. I don’t know exactly WHY they think I’m crazy… for talking about it? For supporting Melanie? For creating this blog so other women (and men) who discover that they’re the spouses of crossdressers now know they’re not alone and can feel like they’ve got a friend in this? How am I crazy?
This attitude – being told that I’m crazy – saddens me IMMENSELY. I don’t expect everyone to get why I do this or to even realize that I do this under a pseudonym for a reason but family is family and when one family member calls up Melanie incredibly uncomfortable and upset because my actions have exposed him to scrutiny, then that hurts. Feelings have been hurt and not just Melanie’s and not just mine. There are other people involved here too – people who’ve had hard enough lives as it is – and the fact that people don’t realize or simply are too wrapped up in themselves to care… well, that makes me both sad and a little angry.
I don’t know what Facebook has to do with the whole mess. There’s some automatic feature at work here updating folks on my activities online and I suppose someone must have signed up for it or some such nonsense. I don’t know all the whys and wherefores because by time the message grapevined its unhappy little way to me I wasn’t hearing the story second-hand or third-hand but something like seventh-hand. I’m a reasonable person and I’m very aware that this sort of literal game of telephone can get very twisted very fast. So I’m going to wait to rant about it or allow any emotion other than vaguely hurt feelings and confusion to surface until I hear “you’re crazy and your life is disgusting” from them “face to face”.
But I’m sad. Your family is your family. They don’t have to like you but Melanie’s (to my knowledge) likes me… and the idea that her family – who has more than one crossdresser in the mix – is disgusted an appalled and thinks a wife supporting her husband and giving advice to other CDWives out there… well, the idea that they don’t like me and that they think what I do here is crazy, well I find that upsetting. On several different levels.
My mother and sisters are highly judgmental people. I mean some of them will judge you (and me) at the drop of a hat for a wide variety of reasons, some of them completely nonsensical. BUT they support this and they support Melanie. They’re exceedingly Catholic too so you’d think this sort of thing would get them riled up. But it doesn’t. Their biggest concern is that Melanie might be “secretly gay” and holding out on me, waiting until the perfect time to drop the “gay bomb” on our happy, comfortable little life and run off with a man. I tried to explain that it doesn’t really work that way – that most crossdressers traditionally are straight and just like to wear clothing assigned to the other gender – but they worry. I think if I took away their ability to worry about *something* they’d just explode.
Another friend of mine who is the most religious person I’ve met… just about ever… is also completely supportive of Melanie. She believes that “Jesus and God don’t care what the packaging looks like, it’s what’s inside that counts”. She’s all about piety and understanding and walking a mile in Melanie’s pumps when I get frustrated with the status quo. Do you understand where I’m going with this? I’m surrounded by people who you would traditionally would think would make judgments… and they don’t. They don’t care. So to be told “you’re crazy” by people it never occurred to me would be judgmental, people who I *thought* knew and were okay with it… well it hurts.
We’re supposed to move back home eventually but this has made us begin to rethink our plans. Neither one of us wants to be around people who can’t or won’t love us the way we are and I certainly don’t want to be around people who think I’m insane for not only supporting Melanie in this but setting up this website to support other women who are new to the world… to offer a helping hand and telling them that they’re not alone, that they don’t have to go through learning about their husband’s crossdressing alone.
I’m not going to apologize for putting this blog out there. This place is important to me. I feel like I’m making a difference in the world and the many, many thankful letters I’ve received seems to validate that belief. I do speak frankly about some things, some things that I don’t think need to be hidden. Sex is one of them. Married couples have sex, folks. When you’re married to a crossdresser you may have questions that you don’t feel comfortable taking to family members or friends. Hell, as far as I’m concerned, people are too hung up on sex anyway. So long as sex is used as a tool to deepen the bonds of love between two people, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s when you devalue yourself and your partner to the point where you give sex the same consideration as scratching your nose, then it becomes an issue. Either way, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you can’t talk about it, you shouldn’t be doing it. Period. If being willing to talk about a simple biological function that is used in a social way to draw two people closer together is crazy, well, sign me up for the nuthouse. Because I think it’s natural. Meanwhile, our puritanical obsession with hiding boob on the big screen while violence is glorified… yeah, I think THAT is crazy. I’m not saying go XXX for shits and giggles, but the sight of a woman’s chest isn’t going to kill anyone unless it’s one magnificent rack and their heart was really dodgy to begin with.
As for the rest of it… well I’m very cautious about putting names or faces to our lives. Right now that’s simply not an option. Melanie and I’ve discussed it over and over again and while we would like to be 100% forthright about who we are and what we do, the job market is too unstable right now to make it any more of a consideration than a mere passing fancy. Fake names and only the most general of occupations are always used to protect the innocent and/or potentially embarrassed.
In the end, it boils down to a feeling of betrayal. I tend to be a fairly forthright person and when someone says something and it gets passed along to me it hurts my feelings. If I’ve got a problem with someone I tend to call them up or email them and try to talk it out. There are exceptions to this rule – for example, if Melanie requests my silence on an issue in order to keep the peace, I generally comply – but for the most part I want to hash out problems one-on-one before they become like this… tangled, dramariffic messes.
Tags: drama, family, finding out
I really ought to have some sort of topical post up due to Valentine’s Day and the season of romance and whatnot but to be perfectly honest, TheWife has been more than a little busy lately. My recent miscarriage has put a toll on my physically, and combined with the physical that followed to determine the possible cause of said miscarriage… well, life has been… stressful. I’m not one of those “oh noes, poor pitiful me” folks, so I don’t talk a lot about what’s going on in the real world, but here’s a quick breakdown so you all know why there’ve been a lot of reposts lately.
I had the miscarriage and followed it up with a doctor’s appointment to try and figure out why the second pregnancy in a row didn’t hold. They discovered that I’m prediabetic and I apparently am on the verge of a thyroid breakdown. Fun fun. This sounds far more dramatic than it actually is (though it is a little bit of an important deal right now, especially if I want to get pregnant and stay pregnant).
SO all the time that I HAD spent on this site is now spent walking and working out in the evenings as well as reading books on the subject and learning to adapt and make these life changes for better health. No more restaurants, fast food, or prepackaged meals for now either – I have to learn to cook GOOD FOOD without adding sugar or fat, and using wheat instead of white. Since Melanie HATES wheat with a passion, this means I have to cook two meals instead of one. More time eaten away. I’m learning to cope, naturally, but this means that the time I USED to spend online is significantly cut down.
As you can probably tell, I make a point of stopping by the site every day just to check in, but the post dropped from two or three a day to one every two days. I’m going to try and maintain this every two or three days posting schedule and simply write long posts that are highly meaningful to make up for the lack of posting, but there may be a lot of links interspersed in there within the next few months. Bear with me, once I’ve got all the changes down to habits rather than activities I actively have to think about then we’ll go back to a more robust update schedule.
In the meantime, enjoy these interesting pics and have a fabulous and fun V-Day!
I am keeping out of the current discussion regarding Zucker’s comments. However I DO owe an apology to Diane who sent me a reply/rebuttal regarding Zucker. I sent back a quick query if I could post her rebuttal and skimmed the reply.
In essence, I caught the word “please” but missed the “no”. I would NEVER EVER knowingly repost anything on this blog without permission. So apologies to Diane, please forgive my sleepy posting. It was not at all intentional. The rebuttal post has been privatized.
TheWife
Tags: apology, debate, discussion, drama, website
Reposted from one of the newsletters I receive. Written(?) and posted by Japhy Grant.
Dr. Kenneth Zucker’s War on Transgenders
posted by Japhy GrantLynn Conway is one of the
trans community’s great heroes. An inventor and computer chip
researcher, in the late ’60s she was fired from her job at IBM when
she began to transition from a man to a woman. She decided to go
“stealth” and start her life over again as Lynn. She quickly rose
through the ranks and the Department of Defense began using her work
on top secret projects. Her textbooks became canonical works on
computer chip research, earning her tenure as professor emeritus at
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In 1999, researchers linked
Lynn’s current work to her earlier work at IBM and she came out as
transgender. Since then, her website has been the go-to place for
transgenders looking for the latest news about their community.On Jan. 30th, she received a letter from Peter M. Jacobson, a lawyer
for Dr. Kenneth Zucker, who is leading the revisions to the DSM-V, the
standard text used by clinicians and psychologists to determine mental
disorders. Zucker is accusing her of using libelous language in one of
her web posts. The only problem? There’s nothing libelous on the site.
Why is Dr. Kenneth Zucker trying to silence Lynn? And more
importantly, why is he determined to make sure the psychiatric code
book keeps saying that gender identity is a mental disease?
“[Zucker] was last year appointed to the DSM-V working group to help
craft its sections on gender identity.”The head of the child and adolescent gender identity clinic at
Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Dr. Kenneth Zucker,
has made a career promising the parents of intersexed and transgender
children that he can make them “normal”. His method, called reparative
therapy, in which children are pushed into assigned gender roles and
discouraged from behaving or dressing in a way that’s counter to their
‘assigned’ sex, was once standard practice, but in recent years, has
been increasingly scrutinized. A 2003 report in the Journal of the
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry called his
techniques “something disturbingly close to reparative therapy for
homosexuals,” and author Phyllis Burke has questioned the idea that
transgendered children should be treated as mentally ill, saying, “The
diagnosis of GID in children, as supported by Zucker and [his
colleague J. Michael Bailey] Bradley, is simply child abuse.”And yet Zucker is not some fringe lunatic. In fact, he was last year
appointed to the DSM-V working group to help craft its sections on
gender identity, where he intends to use his position to further the
idea that trans children can be shoe-horned into gender identities.
The APA, responding to criticisms by LGBT activists, point out that
Zucker does not advocate reparative therapy for teens and adults, not
for gays and lesbians at any age, but only for the trans community. He
is Public Enemy Number One to trangenders, who maintain that Zucker’s
views that trans people are mentally ill are not just based on bad
science, but harmful.In January, Conway posted a link to a story on the website of the
Organisation Intersex International (OII) which stated that the
organization had been told by an individual that Zucker had sexually
abused a child and that it had passed along that information to authorities. Days later, Conway received a letter from Zucker’s lawyer:Zucker’s lawyer told Conway that they had contacted the University of
Michigan and requested they shut down her site, but as Conway points
out in her response:“After boldly claiming that the allegations against Zucker are
located within Lynn’s news-feed (which they are not), Jacobsen does a
quick shuffle of the deck. He now says that the presumed allegations
are actually contained in another website that Lynn simply links to –
i.e. a page in the website of Organisation Intersex International
(OII).In doing so, Jacobsen claims that cross-website linkage is legally
equated with website-inclusion, but Canadian case law says otherwise:
(Crookes v Wikimedia).However, even that point is moot, because not even that
secondarily-linked webpage in OII’s website makes the allegations
against Zucker that Jacobsen alleges. Instead it simply reports the
fact that such allegations had been previously received by OII
personnel from a third party and had been turned over to Canadian
authorities.As readers struggle to follow Jacobsen’s tangled legal “logic” –
and as they click on links from site to site trying to figure out what
it all means – they can easily lose focus and simply assume that
Jacobsen must know what he’s talking about. This is a well-known
effect of “the big lie”: The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to
be believed.”So, Zucker’s threatening to sue not for anything Conway said, but
because she linked to a site that said something that was factually
accurate. But there’s more to this than a simple case of a lawyer not
understanding basic case law. This week, the International Federation
for Gender Education is having it’s annual conference in Washington
D.C. and Conway is leading a panel today challenging Zucker’s
inclusion.
The panel will :“Examine the stigmatizing Gender Identity Disorder (GID) diagnosis
in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and
the need for the elimination of GID from the DSM-V to oppose the
continued pathologization of trans youth and adults; the sexualization
of transwomen in the controversial theories set forth in the taxonomic
classification known as autogynephilia; and the exploitation,
colonization and appropriation that many cisgendered academicians have
engaged in when researching and writing about transpeople’s lives.”In short, the lawsuit isn’t about the website Conway linked to (which
incidentally, has been posted on the internet for over eight months),
it’s about discrediting a vocal and respected critic of his methods
and his position at the DSM-V.Conway writes:
“And as many news-feed readers may recall, as editor in chief of
the Archives of Sexual Behavior (ASB) Zucker previously stooped so low
as to exploit his power-position to subvert that journal into a
propaganda tool to support his ASB colleagues against widespread
complaints and internet blogging by the transgender community. In the
process Zucker was exposed as conducting his own personal vendetta
against Andrea James and Lynn Conway, two women who’ve been effective
in exposing his reparatist treatment of gender variant children
(more).Zucker’s series of actions suggest that he is now motivated to
suppress Lynn’s right of free speech (and especially Lynn’s ability to
publish on the internet) by any means possible, in order to minimize
his exposure as a trans-reparatist and suppress the escalating
questioning of his selection to lead the DSM revisions. ”We see a lot of crazy homophobic and transphobic people here at
Queerty, but rarely do we come across someone with as much power to do
harm as Dr. Kenneth Zucker. His position at the DSM gives him huge
influence on how transgendered and intersexed children will be treated
by doctors for years to come and in light of his scare tactics,
intimidation (never mind the allegations of child abuse), it’s
shocking that the APA would allow someone with such dubious ethics and
unsubstantiated views to rewrite the DSM.Less than a generation ago, gays and lesbians were considered to be
mentally ill and in need of treatment to cure them of their
homosexuality and while there are still doctors treating gays and
lesbians with “reparative” witch doctor therapies, the practice is
considered immoral and scientifically unsound. The trans community,
however, is still stuck in the dark ages, and Dr. Kenneth Zucker would
like to keep it that way– and he’ll sue anyone who tries to challenge
him.Why is Zucker still at the DSM? Do you think the APA should remove
him? How can the wider LGBT community support Conway and other trans
leaders who are struggling to change the institutionally accepted view
that they are mentally ill?
Melanie... sort of
Darling vain girl that she is, nothing cheers her up more than getting to play model. 
So there you go, a picture of Melanie… sort of.
Tags: photos
Edit: Following rant is not entirely valid at this point. My overall points still remain true but some of the specifics that weren’t outlined to me have been specified in a private conversation between Mary and I. In other words, we talked it out like adults (yay!) and there are no hard feelings. We agreed to disagree on some points but my friend and I are going to be able to continue chatting and catching up. All in all, mellow ending to the drama.
WARNING… WARNING… BELOW IS A RANT… WARNING… WARNING… LOTS OF CUSSING INVOLVED
So I’m on myspace. I’m not on it often, I much prefer Facebook, but I go on every other week or so to play with my apps and to see if anyone has messaged me. Back in December I got a message from an old high school friend (and boyfriend for about, oh, two mighty weeks) named “Jay”. Jay contacted me to catch up and we chatted a little about how life was going. He married his senior year high school sweetheart “Mary” and they’ve got X number of kids, he does X for a living and he’s away from home a lot because of it, he misses them dreadfully… all the usual “hey it’s been ten years, how’ve you been, let’s catch up” sort of chat. I like these chats. I’m not a terribly social person now and catching up with people who knew me when I WAS social is always a pleasant surprise.
Then he hits me with this:
I took a look at your profile, it says you are a writer, and in the pics your hubby was en fem, looks good, how often does he go that way? I’ve just recently come to terms with my sexuality and enjoyment of womens clothing. I haven’t told my wife yet, I figured it could wait until I got home.
Wow. Okay. Not something I would have expected from this old friend, but it’s not a bad thing. It was just a little funny since I’d recently received two other emails from previous boyfriends who ALSO had turned out to be CD. (Either it’s the South Texas water or it’s me… or maybe I just really like open-minded guys. Either way, I found the Third-Time’s-A-Charm sort of amusing.)
Okay, well, I offered said friend a little advice, told him he wasn’t alone, and promised to be an open and understanding ear if he ever needed one. I also said that I’d be there for his wife if she wanted someone who had been there to listen. I’ve never met this woman (who was a freshman when Jay and I were seniors and graduating) but I was more than willing to get on the phone and chat with her to help her figure out this whole new world they were going to face. Essentially, I said “I understand, it’s okay, you’re not alone, and if you or the wife ever need help, I’m here”.
That’s all.
I sent off my reply and waited. A few weeks later I get a very quick response that’s titled, “Sorry I didn’t get your response”.
My wife got to snooping because she knew I was conflicted about something. I asked her to do some deletions and she accidentally (Note: My emphasis) deleted your as a friend and thusly all your messages. She wasn’t very happy about finding out that way. She felt betrayed that I would go to you first. we’re talking about it now. I hope all goes well.
My first response on reading the message was, “Oh honey! That sucks!” My second, “Shit!” My third, “Poor Mary!” My forth, “That dummy. Why did he ask his wife to delete messages off of his myspace when he knew there were conversations there he wasn’t ready to broach yet?” My fifth, “Oh well, if they need to talk I’m still here.”
I sent back a reply reiterating the fact that I was there for them and left it at that. No response. I figured they were working stuff out and decided to leave it at that. If Jay really wanted to catch up he had my email address. If she wanted to talk she could get my contact info from him. Either way, my life was filled with other more important objectives than the drama of an old friend from high school and his wife.
Fast forward to today. I’m cleaning out my myspace messages and I find this, from Mary, hidden hip-deep among the app requests and sent between the first email from Jay and the “everything got accidentally deleted” email. (I did mention that I’m hardly ever on myspace, right?)
I know that you probably didn’t initiate contact with Jay, however I would appreciate it if you did not try and talk to him again. He is very confused and does not need someone like you supporting him. He is going to fight this crazyiness going on in his head and it probably has to do with the fact that he is away from his family and in a war zone. I will support his recovery from this mental illness. I will not support the ideas in his head, and I don’t want you to either. So please, I am respectfully asking you not to contact him anymore. Thank you for understanding.
Wait… what? I read it again and again, growing more infuriated each time. I went back and reread Jay’s messages, only THEN noticing the fact that he’d mentioned that she’d “accidentally” deleted me from his account. I couldn’t believe it. I was… well, floored is the nicest term I had for the fury that was building inside. The only GOOD thing I had to say about the whole passive-aggressive message was the “polite” tone used… (in that she didn’t call me a “freak-loving hag fag” or something along those lines.)
Okay. That’s it. It’s on. First of all, you NEVER tell your spouse who they can and cannot contact unless they have broken the commandments of marriage. You may not LIKE that he’s talking to me but telling him OR me that we can’t talk is just wrong. It shows mistrust in your marriage, mistrust in your love, AND a disturbing lack of self-confidence in yourself. It shows that you are threatened by me and honey, there is absolutely NO REASON to be. I don’t want your fucking husband. I’ve got one of my own, thanks. I’m very fond of mine, he’s mostly trained regarding the trash and the dishes and whatnot, and I’m not looking to trade him in.
Secondly, I will support whoever I want to support, okay? It is not up to you to decide who I can and cannot support. That’s what this website is about – support and love – and the fact that you’re pissing all over who your husband IS just makes me want to scream. Now I understand that you feel betrayed. This is a common feeling among the wives of crossdressers who’ve hidden their crossdressing. It is especially common when they discover that said husband didn’t come to them first but went to someone else. In your case it has to be especially galling when that someone else is not only a friend he hasn’t spoken to in seven or eight years but one he also briefly swapped germs with. I get that. However your immediate response was not mature. It came off sounding mature, sure. There was no name calling. There was no cursing. But your immediate rejection of everything he is was not mature. Cutting him off from people who DO accept him – warts, crossdressing, and all – was not mature. And “accidentally” deleting me from his account. WAY WAY not mature.
Finally – and here’s the important part – crossdressing is NOT a mental illness. It is NOT because he’s in a war zone. It is NOT because he’s away from you and your supposedly “I am Helen of Troy, no man will ever CONSIDER being anything less than 100% manly around me” crotch and all the nookie you two have together. It is not because he’s away from you and your kids. It really, really isn’t. This, as much as I’m sure it galls you to hear this, has NOTHING to do with you. The ONLY place you have in this whole situation is the place AT HIS SIDE, either helping him or hindering him, as he walks this road. And Mary, let me tell you this very important fact, whether or not you support him… he will STILL CROSSDRESS. I’ve heard this story A LOT over the years. Wife thinks it’s a mental illness. Wife thinks he’s a freak. Wife thinks this, wife thinks that. Well you know what happens to those wives?
They get left, Mary.
They end up divorced.
OR, if they DON’T end up divorced, they end up LIED to. FOR YEARS.
Because crossdressing isn’t something you DO, Mary, it’s who you ARE.
So it’s your choice, Mary. Yours and yours alone.
You can support him and help him through this. Or you can fool yourself into thinking that he isn’t going to do it because he said he wasn’t. And Jay’s a nice guy. He might NOT do it. At least… not at first. He might hold off a few years. One crossdresser I recently met has been “mostly holding off” for TWENTY YEARS. The FIRST thing he did when they separated? Started dressing out full time to make up for the years he lost while with his wife.
So yeah, you can make him NOT dress up.
But you know what? He’ll be miserable.
Do you want to be THAT wife? That wife who’s such a bitch she doesn’t care HOW unhappy her husband is so long as her little boat remains unrocked?
The thing that gets me, the thing that just makes me cringe, is that you’re a mom, Mary. I know, I know, being a mother doesn’t make you superhuman, but it does make you a teacher. And I know one of those lessons you’re teaching is LOVE.
But love on what terms, Mary? Because from where I’m sitting it looks like you’re not practicing what you preach. Or are you teaching your kids that it’s great to love someone but the person they love HAS to fit their every expectation? Are you teaching your kids that they can love someone but ONLY if that someone does everything they want them to do? Because maybe my lessons were a little backward (Catholic guilt is a mighty powerful thing, after all) but I was taught that Jesus was all about loving someone no matter what.
Love, real love, doesn’t mean you have to LIKE every part of the person you’re with but it does mean that you should try and accept or compromise with the parts you don’t like.
Don’t believe me? Take Chris Rock’s word on the subject:
And right then,
your relationship’s in trouble. That’s right.
‘Cause if you can’t share what you’re like,
you’ll have problems.
When you love somebody,
you got to love everything about them.
You got to love the crust of a motherfucker.
You can’t just love
the white part of the bread.
You gotta love the crust, the crumbs,
the tiny crumbs at the bottom of the toaster.
That’s what the real motherfucker is.
Whatever you into, your woman
gotta be into, too, and vice versa…
or the shit ain’t gonna work.
lt ain’t gonna work.
That’s right. lf you born-again,
your woman gotta be born-again, too.
lf you a crackhead,
your woman gotta be a crackhead, too…
or the shit won’t work.
You can’t be like, ”l’m going to church,
where you going?” ”Hit the pipe!”
That relationship ain’t going nowhere.
Two crackheads can stay together forever.
Finally – and here’s the important part – we’re going to have a little hypothetical conversation here. Let’s put you firmly in Jay’s shoes, okay?
One day you go to your husband and you say to him, “Darling, I want to go to school. I want to be a doctor. We have the money, I have the time set aside, I’ll even do it under another name so no one around us knows. I need to do this, for me, to feel good about myself and what I can accomplish. I think being a doctor will make me a better person. At the very least it will make me FEEL like a better person. It will make me FEEL like a COMPLETE person.”
And your husband says to you, “Doctor? That’s crazy-talk! You’ve got some sort of mental illness! Don’t worry, honey, we’ll get you help! All you need is your family beside you and to be in the kitchen barefoot, making babies, and cooking me dinner and all those insane doctor-thoughts will go away! And, if worse comes to worse and you just can’t get those thoughts out of your head, well, we’ll use pills! Or shock treatment! You’ll be cured! I promise it! Now go back into that kitchen and bring me a beer.”
Sound a little overboard? A hundred years ago it wouldn’t have been.
One. Hundred. Years.
That’s it. That’s all that stands between us – women who can do anything they set their minds to – and lobotomies and shock therapy for those unhappy few who got uppity and wanted to improve their place. Did it happen to everyone? Nope, but it did happen to several. Back then even the IDEA of the average female being a doctor was crazy talk.
And now even the idea of your husband being a crossdresser is crazy talk too.
So you have a decision to make, Mary. You have a big choice ahead of you. You can either wake up and smell the coffee – the new, open, and understanding life you COULD have with your husband – or you can dig yourself in deep and cling with all your might to all those misconceptions you have about gender relationships and exactly how the human mind and heart works.
It’s okay to be mad. It’s okay to be depressed. It’s okay to be confused, frustrated, and feel a little betrayed that he didn’t come to you first. All those emotions are OKAY. But trying to CHANGE him isn’t okay. You don’t have to LIKE it – hell, you don’t even have to DEAL with it if you don’t want to – but changing him is wrong. If you don’t want to divorce but you don’t want to handle his crossdressing, that’s great, give him an hour a week to lock himself up in the bedroom and dress up. He would probably appreciate it if you were more on board than that, but believe me, even that little bit of compromise is worlds more than some crossdressing husbands get.
The point I’m trying to get at here is just this… it’s okay to be emotional about all this. It’s a shock to your marriage and to your peace of mind and to your own personal self esteem. But let me put it to you like this – it does NOT diminish you to allow him to feel pretty. It doesn’t. He isn’t taking anything away from you. So what does it hurt to allow him to improve his own life? You like feeling pretty too.
Think about it like that.
You like feeling pretty too. Would you stop your daughter, your sister, your mother, or your best friend from feeling pretty? Would you stop a random lady on the street and tell her to “Stop Dressing that Way! You’re Not Allowed To Feel Pretty!”"
Of course not. So why is it okay to stop your husband?
Either way, even though I’m disappointed in you, Mary, I want to let you know that I’m still here if you need to talk. I know you’re confused. I know you’re upset. I’m going to stand by the essence of your request and I’m not going to contact Jay ever again. BUT if he emails ME looking for an ear to listen to him then he has it. He was one of my best friends once upon a time and that isn’t changing. Since I know what you’ve been through and what you’re going through you also have my ear and my shoulder if you need them.
Good luck. I hope you change your mind.
Tags: advice, discussion, family, finding out, rant
I’m sitting at the glass table on our sun porch surrounded by women who I’ve known for some years now. To my right is D1. a former municipal judge, who introduced me to the book circle. She has only ever seen me once as a man…and while she understands that makes me uncomfortable she still wishes she could know that side of me as well. Across the table is L., a woman we knew for years from folkdancing. I came out to her just before I joined the circle…but we’ll get to that. She’s a retired social/psychologist in the public schools as well as an old lefty and voting rights activist. Next to her is N, who is the guest of honor. She’s a well known poet and at our invitation her work is being read tonight. It’s been a dream of mine since I first joined circle to have her present her prose-poems to circle and I’ve read some of her work out loud, when we’ve had sharing circles. She’s also a childhood friend of my spouse’s. My spouse is chatting with other women from circle elsewhere in our house. And while N has known about my second life/alter-ego for a while, this is actually the first time she’s met me, here in the company of these dear friends of mine. To my left is D2, a dumped political wife, for whom the book circle was founded as a support group in the first place. A woman with a remarkable story, and she’s still weaving it. She’s also very wise, as you’ll see a little later. In the adjacent room, E., at 85 an artist who still paints, exhibits and wins awards. I help her with her computer and she drags me along on all kinds of adventures. And with some surprise I note the arrival of S., a woman who was not favorably disposed towards my arrival in circle. Endurance is one way to acceptance I guess. She’s a forceful literary critic, and I’m glad to learn later that N and her poems impressed her. I also learn later from N that in all the time she’s read her poetry to groups, she’s never encountered the intensity and thoughtfulness of our circle.
Our topic at the moment is remarkably, and unusually, me. D1 is reviewing how she met me, years ago. I was a member of the discussion panel for a collection of films on transgender at the Cleveland International Film Festival. Having talked about the problems that people who have trans as part of their lives have I was the target of a question of hers from the audience. What, she asked, can we do to make things better. I remembered something from my college days, and event called “Dinner for 12 Strangers”, and replied that inviting people for dinner would be a good start. We chatted in the lobby afterwards, and I think I even met S., who had been there only to see the Eastern European films. It was years later that I attended a public meeting of two book circles, the one I’m in now, and a lesbian circle which included unbeknownst to me a handful of women I knew from Temple. The meeting was really a presentation by E about ancient Goddess centered (matriarchal) religions and their displacement by patriarchal religions. The topic interested me because of the frequency with which trans women of all stripes appropriate versions of these stories into their own lives. I wanted to hear a natal woman talk about it from her experience. And I ran into D1 again, and this time she invited me to join the circle.
I also ran into L. This was not the first time I had passed her unseen, and I was tired of it. It took her a few moments to grasp what was going on. Her first concern, understandably enough was that I’d had a full transition. It turned out later that there’s a well known post-operative transwoman in the circle. Her second concern was for my spouse, and while I reassured her that we were still together, that this wasn’t a secret from her and that I wasn’t sleeping with men on the side…I don’t think it really took until she ran into us later and she got to talk to my spouse herself.
The reason I felt called to circle came from what happened during the presentation. There were two men there. A., refugee from the Middle East, gave an authoritative declamation about something to do with scripture, both Islamic and Judaic. W., made a provocative declaration that religion itself was the problem, and it must be swept away.
It was interesting to feel these stones cast in the water of these women…the sense of it being easier and habitual to flatter and defer to these two men than engage them. But after simmering a while, D2 spoke up and said “The real problem is this business of sweeping things away, we really need to work on just letting things be”. And that’s when I knew I wanted to be in this circle with these women, to read the same books, to hear their thoughts and feel their lives. And as usual with this story, it was noted how while men aren’t exactly forbidden in the group, they don’t stay…because they just don’t relate, and they just don’t get it.
After hearing this story explained in a dialogue between myself and D1, L remarked, that this was the most I’d ever said about myself, and that she wished that there was more of it. D2, commented that I had read my poetry, which was pretty revealing. I have a post-modern view of these things, and I explained that explaining things didn’t seem to me to be very productive…that the stories we tell are shaped to what we want to accomplish with an audience and the “truth” whatever that is gets distorted. That I didn’t want to tell people how they should experience me, but felt that they should make up their own minds from knowing me. But as to why I, as someone born male, was sitting comfortably appearing reasonably female with friends in my house, who know I was born male, but seem to accept that there is something important about me that works as “woman”, all I could say is that there are large parts of me that don’t fit in “man”, and it nourishes me to express those things in the way that seems to fit best, as the person they have known for years now as Diane.
This is not the first event I’ve had at my house. Some years ago I had bit parts in a local production of “Victor/Victoria”. I auditioned as a woman, had women’s parts, but didn’t use either of the dressing rooms. I showed up to rehearsals, performances and went out after shows without reference to my working life as a man. And at the end, the cast party was in my house. More recently we’ve had Hanukah parties and rehearsals for Purim Spiels with people from my Temple, which has been another of my mainstream routes to self expression. For awhile our group was strictly an LBGT synagogue, but changing times both forced and allowed us to merge with a reform congregation. Through temple I’ve been to weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs, the cycle of life. I’ve carried the female Rabbi’s daughter through a sudden rain, and commiserated with her about spraining an ankle at her dance recital. I’ve been hugged and kissed in front of hundreds by the Rabbis of the merged groups. I was invited to join the temple sisterhood (which I can’t do because it meets during working hours) and a women’s torah study group. I had wanted to accept, but I first asked my Rabbi at the time whether she thought the women there would accept me. A year later, after many instances of showing up for discussion groups at her house, she finally told me that the answer was yes. By that time, my schedule had changed, and I was no longer able to attend.
During all this time I’ve run the website and/or handled outreach for Alpha Omega. One of the hardest parts of the job happened after the woman who handled our spouse support moved out of state, and I had to do something with the email coming in. What I hear, that other trans people rarely do it seems to me, are the horror stories. It’s that he really is sneaking around having sex with men. That he’s transition tracked after saying he wasn’t, or that he only wants to have sex while dressed and won’t do anything to meet her needs and desires. Or worse, that he’s physically abusive. And there was the one case where he was dying of cancer and never made it to 30. I know these stories are only the tip of the iceberg, and yet I also know of so many marriages that like mine work out. You have to expect these sorts of stories on a help-line…and not the stories of TheWife.
When I do outreach, I work to be inclusive, not to deny the people whose similarity to me ends at the word “skirt”. I point out that the person whose trans behavior is limited to a fetish didn’t ask for his/her condition any more than I did…and it is possible for that person to be an honest, contributing, worthy human being none-the-less. I learned over the years a response to Amy Bloom’s take on things, her reaction to the “gleam in the eye”. I tell people that yes, for some people cross dressing can be about sexuality…just as being straight is about sexuality…but not right now, not all the time.
But I also know this, being out in public…that I understand where the people who scream “I’m not like them” are coming from. L’s worries, the change in attitude of women in the circle when my spouse showed up, and showed it wasn’t a matter of me sneaking around, or her being a bullied, abused doormat…that who I was, was something she had some respect for, all reflect the common knowledge, however incorrect, that there’s a lot of bad vibes associated with trans people. It’s a barrier I have to break, time and time and time again. It’s not hard, 5 minutes of normal conversation about the topic at hand (and not about me!) generally sets things right. But it’s tiring, year after year. So I can see why people want to break away, and why to make themselves normal, to have the house with the white picket fence, they’ll throw the others off the sled to the wolves. I can’t do that…but still I know that the story I’m telling here is one that I almost never see anything close to, that I and a very few other middle pathers are always going to be stuck with the presumption of guilt.
There was a time, when I first stopped denying myself that I did many of the typical things. The bars, you know. I had this idea that I was a freak, and it would be place to be, with other freaks. And in fact, I think that’s part of what keeps people stuck in the bars…that feeling that their transness makes them so alien from everyone else that they best stick with their own kind. Birds of a feather. But I learned that wasn’t where I fit. And I left that behind long ago.
This business of birds of a feather flocking together haunts me a little. The central claim for so many, no matter what the label, is that woman is a state to which they are entitled. So considering that birds do flock together, you’d think that they would naturally affiliate with women, make friends with them, socialize with them etc. And yet, and yet what I see is there is this marked preference for associating with other transpeople. And I don’t think it’s about just being freaks among freaks. I’m not the only person to observe this, and I think in the long run we’ll need to revisit what is really going on here.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I have lots of friends who happen to be trans….like I have friends who happen to be gay, or Asian or whatever label you want to use. But their transness isn’t a ticket to instant blood-sisterhood. Trans is not an exception to anything, or a get out of jail free pass, or a ticket to a fun, exclusive club. It just is. And men in dresses don’t bother me either. But my heart is elsewhere as you can tell by who I’ve told you about in my life, and who I haven’t.
And I also haven’t told you all those juicy details that seem to be mandatory, the childhood clothing stash, the first time out. Yes, I know these things help n00bs relate to each other and for people to feel like they’re not alone. Truth be told, I think these things are unimportant. Telling them, rehearsing them gets you stuck. What is important is not what you did as a child, but what you’ve done with it as an adult.
Recently, I was challenged by someone on a another forum to tell my story, share my experience with the people who are wrapped up in fantasy notion of what woman is, the object of their own desires, for example, the hot girl at the bar. I thought that was a fruitless endeavor. The more self-aware know what they’re doing, and the less self-aware can’t hear the message. But I thought TheWife might like a look at someone different, especially since she’s been a web-cam ‘girl’. And I thought I at least ought to stick with my viewpoint and talk about my now, and not what I wore as a child.
But this gets me to another point. When we talk about people coming out as trans, there’s always this dead space about exactly what they came out as. That’s why I commented on Stephanie’s self description that I don’t know what “and everything that goes with it” means. And I think it’s important to get past this assumption that everyone knows what it means, if only so when someone tells a support person/group that they came out, that the support person can know better how to respond.
Finally, I should put a word in about my spouse. I can just see the responses “oh, you’re so luck to have a wife who is so supportive”. Um… try this out: We’re lucky to have each other. When I came to the realization 11 years ago that I could be happier if I expressed rather than sublimated (and yes, she knew long before we were married), her attitude was…”well, now I’m not the only weird one in the family”. So for all you people who think I’m lucky…remember ours is a balanced situation. You get what you pay for. What would you pay? Are you ready to go through what your wife has been going through? Are you really sure I’m so lucky? I am lucky, but not in the way you mean it or understand it. My spouse has been a major force in pushing me out of the closet and into the real world if only because she’s out to the world with her weirdness. It’s been a painful push at times. But we’re here, and together, and actually madly in love with each other still, 33 years and two adult children (who also know and are cool) later.
Tags: family, finding out, interview, love, marriage
While perusing a site I recently found, I discovered this little tidbit.
During one cold November week in 1795, Martha Bullard of Hallowell, Maine, listed among her household chores: brewing beer, nursing a sick cow and scouring 35 skeins of wool in preparation for weaving. “A woman’s work is never done, as the song says,” she wrote in her diary that week. “And happy she whose strength holds out to the end of the days.”
In addition to age-stratification, the only other cultural universal by which social roles are allocated is on the basis of gender. Numerous are the temporal strategies for keeping women in their place. The female role has, across cultures and history, been generally characterized by its greater temporal demands, greater age discriminations, and by having to perform a greater number of rituals of temporal deference (e.g., being typically being younger than one’s spouse).
Gender Age Graph
Which brings me to a thought… how can we ever find true equality if our culture believes this to be true? Furthermore, how does this relate in marriages and family situations that aren’t traditionally standard such as the ones this blog seeks to embrace?
THE DOUBLE STANDARD OF AGING
In the Fall of 1996, “The First Wives Club” was packing women into theaters across the country. The movie pushed a common button: aging males trading in their first wives for younger trophy brides.Why are men allowed to age without penalty while women must look young and lie about their age or risk disqualification from the sexual and marriage markets? Throughout the animal kingdom, the female is the longer-lived sex and yet for years the U.S. Department of Labor labeled women as “old” at age 35 and males “old” at 45?
OK. In American society, strike one against you if you’re old. Strike two if you are female. And what if you a a minority member as well? Enter the so-called “triple- jeopardy” model.
Tags: debate, discussion
Today on Simple Mom there was an article titled Putting First Things First – Where Are You On The List?
No matter what sort of relationship you have – long term, married, or not – the tips and hints listed are important in keeping a sense of perspective and love in your relationship.
I think my favorite part of the entry is simply this:
There’s a popular belief that if you love each other enough, everything will just work out. The cynic Ambrose Bierce defines love as “a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.” The truth is – love is a mechanism that allows marriage to do what it is designed to do. Marriage is designed to grow you up.
The post is written by relationship columnist Corey Allen, author of the Simple Marriage blog.
More below.
When I picture today’s mom, I see a woman juggling while riding a bicycle on a high-wire. Add the role of being a wife, and picture this same image, but with the high-wire suspended over a lion’s cage.
Motherhood today is anything but simple. I doubt I need to tell you that marriage is the same. Marriage will stretch you, test you, and frustrate you at times. It’s also a means to tremendous passion and adventure in life.
Research continually finds that married people live longer, experience more fulfillment, and have a more passionate and satisfying sex life. But all this doesn’t happen by chance.
There’s a popular belief that if you love each other enough, everything will just work out. The cynic Ambrose Bierce defines love as “a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.” The truth is – love is a mechanism that allows marriage to do what it is designed to do. Marriage is designed to grow you up.
Who’s the most important person to you?Let’s switch gears for a moment. When it comes to your life, who is the most important person in the world to you? I ask this question to almost every couple I counsel. The answers I hear vary, and rarely is the answer the one I’m looking for.
Think about your answer for a moment – who comes to mind? Your spouse? One of your children? A parent? You may know where I’m going with this, and it’s fairly easy to say the right answer, but do you live as though it’s true in your life?
The answer – YOU. You are the most important person in the world to you.
Before I move on, let me torpedo a few of your initial rebuttals to this statement:
“If I view myself as the most important person then I’ll be selfish or arrogant.”The simple truth is that nobody can take care of you better than you. Plus, if you don’t love yourself, how can you possibly offer love to anyone else? I assume you’ve heard the safety procedure on an airplane about putting on your own oxygen mask before trying to help others. This advice applies to marriage as well as parenting.
Tags: discussion, links, love, marriage
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