‘I dress up as a woman in secret. Should I leave my wife?’
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Dear Rachel,
I’m a 66-year-old married man, my wife is 67 and we have not had sex for well over 10 years now. In fact even if I try to cuddle her she pushes me away. When I was younger I often dressed as a woman in secret; it’s something I tried to stop many times but never could. For the past two years, I’ve been going away for the odd night alone and dressing completely as a woman in public.
At first I kept myself to myself, but the last couple of times I’ve become friendly with a man I met in a bar. He’s fully aware of my situation and is happy to treat me as a woman, in fact on the last time we met we spent the night together in his hotel and we made love. My dilemma is I think I’m falling in love with him and he’s asked me to live with him but I don’t want to hurt my wife. My choice is a loveless marriage or being with someone who really likes me. Please help.
– Anon
Dear Anon
The utter bliss of doing this column is you discover the deep truth of the old Yorkshire saying that there’s nowt so queer as folk. Esteemed Telegraph readers turn out to be anything but Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells! If you strip it down, what you’re asking is for permission to leave your wife. The primary issue for me here is not your cross-dressing or possibly late-onset bisexuality. It’s your anxiety about dumping your long-term partner for a man. Essentially, it comes down to your obligations to yourself – your self-care, as we say now – and your marriage vows and duty to your wife. All you are asking is how to resolve the dilemma that can strike at any time in any committed relationship, something that demands sacrifice and compromise of both parties.
Tessa Grazzini, a couples counsellor, says this: “Ultimately, your decision should reflect your true self and what you believe will bring you the most peace and fulfilment in the long run. You deserve happiness and to be the best version of yourself. It is important to make choices that align with your own values and understanding of yourself. People who love you will support you in this. Every step in this process is potentially challenging and may evoke a wide range of emotions, but you deserve to live authentically and be content with your life choices.”
Well yes. I agree with Tessa. But the reason you have written is because breaking up is hard to do. It breaks something and can break someone irrevocably. Marian O’Connor, also a counsellor, says your letter raises lots of questions. “Changing what you wear does not usually change your sexuality,” she points out. “Have you been sexually attracted to men all your life, or were these feelings repressed before this meeting in a bar? Secondly, what do you mean by falling in love? It seems you hardly know the man. Are you just reeling from the heady feeling of finally being ‘known’? You have been able to be open and honest about your cross-dressing, something you have never been able to do with your wife.
“Thirdly, your marriage. Before you make any decision to leave, you need to be open and honest with your wife about your cross-dressing, about your frustration at being sexually rejected for so long. You tiptoe around, full of secret resentments and rather than attempting to have a difficult conversation, it seems you would rather run away into the arms of another man. A stark abandonment is cowardly and will hurt your wife much more than an honest if painful conversation.”
My own advice would be to do what you do next for yourself because it’s right for you, not for a random man you met in a bar, and it’s time you put you and your wife out of your misery. Do let me know. And remember this, as some sage once said to me, “the longer a bad marriage goes on, the harder it is to end”.
Dear Rachel,
I’m a 41-year-old single female who lives alone. I’m the only single one in my friendship group. I find I am left out of lots of social events by my coupled friends. After one recent event was discussed in front of me without an invitation or any apparent understanding of how hurtful that was for me, I challenged my friends and tried to explain that I feel forgotten, especially having celebrated the weddings and the babies. I asked my friends to be more mindful in future. Instead I’ve been accused of turning one social event into a negative about myself and of harbouring negative thoughts about my friends and their families. Am I being unreasonable to feel even more hurt by this lack of understanding?
– Single Female
Dear Single Female,
For selfish reasons, I’m thrilled you have “reached out” to me. Your question will resonate far beyond singledom. The fact that you’ve raised a painful area around your “friendship group” (another expression that post-dates my formative years), a problem that concerns relationships rather than sex, is, I confess, welcome as I can sometimes tire of the sniggers from folk about my “sex column” and even Private Eye has called me a “sexpert” which my husband finds hilarious. So thank you and I hope more readers send in relationship questions in the wake of this one. Our day-to-day relationships with our friends, family and work colleagues in my view occupy much more headspace and time than our sex lives and I would like this column to reflect that.
Right. I’ve cleared my throat, and this is what I think in response. First, I totally get it. Like you, the end of my pointy nose twitches with displeasure if I find out I’m not asked to something I think I “should” be invited to. However much you tell yourself, “not everybody can be asked to everything”, some small, insecure part of you does mind. You have the opposite reaction of Liz Truss when the late Queen died on her watch, which is “Why not me? Why not now?” if you are overlooked for some occasion. That’s natural.
This feeling of being left out is one of our earliest experiences of rejection, which is why teachers beg parents to ask the whole class to birthday parties. The cruelty of consoling a child who’s been “left out” is unbearable (I become actually murderous if one of my own children was ever slighted) but as we get older, we have to learn to deal with constant rejection on all fronts (there’s even a podcast called My Therapist Ghosted Me).
It sounds like you have got yourself into a vicious cycle. Your friends are aware of your need to be included, and instead of this making them want to see you, it’s done the opposite, because you are coming across as needy and whingey. My approach would be to step away for a bit, then see them one by one for coffee – and don’t raise it. Talk about them, and not you. See what happens. It’s always lovely to be asked, but think of the present-buying, the dressing-up, the travel – isn’t the invitation itself sometimes the best bit?
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