No One Is “Normal”

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.)