January 21, 2008 8:36:24 PM GMT
Anne, I think the question of why I separated from my wife (I have only just started divorce proceedings) has merit in a thread concerning 'hiding' one's shaved legs. I can't speak for any beyond my own experience but my reasons for separation were many, protracted and multi-layered.
From the moment of marriage, I knew that I held -- or believed that I held -- a 'deal-breaker' to our marriage, that being my gender dysphoria. It would -- like a cancer -- grow to kill our relationship. So, at the very root -- the essence -- the beginning of the end of our relationship, started at the very beginning of our marriage.
As much as we grew together -- and we did, sharing wonderful moments together -- coming to many intimate insights into each other, we equally build little private worlds. I believe that emotional intimacy equals physical intimacy in a relationship and -- rightly or wrongly -- I felt that I didn't have that and I felt that I could not press her for it because, I feared, she would want the same from me -- and therein lay my 'secret'. Over time, those little private worlds expand and to include more such as shaving our legs, which to be accomodated must extend our privacy, or worse, create lies to hide what we are really doing. All of this is solvent to the bonds of love. Little by little the love is washed away and one day -- acknowledged or not, aware or not -- too much is gone to sustain the relationship. I guess that in my case, that awareness came much later than the reality that we were living in separate worlds.
In her eyes we lived together for 16 years as mane and wife. She would come to call that a lie and a deception on my part. I couldn't undo the pain of that, not even when I promised and tried to only be Michael.
Our separation -- for what it's worth -- was acknowledged silently. It happened without discussion, agreement or acrimony, I just simply one day rose from my separate bed, packed a few things and left.
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