Broken marriage and betrayal is one of the biggest issues we face in this ministry. Many wives come to us because they have just found out about their husband’s trans porn, crossdressing, or feminine alter identity. Usually they have found out not because their husbands have confessed to them, but because their husbands were caught in the act. They are shocked by the sexual betrayal and the years of secrets and deception. The whole relationship seems to be a lie. Everything is questioned. It is the breakdown of the wife’s world. The marriage relationship is broken whether or not they proceed to divorce. To rebuild the trust in the relationship takes a long time and a load of hard work. The image for this post captures just a small percentage of the swirling emotions a wife feels when first finding out, a feeling of deep pain, betrayal, wanting to run away, and anger.
I write this post for both husbands and wives. To the husbands, whether crossdressers or ex-crossdressers, I write to challenge you to be honest with your wives and find the courage to share regardless of the consequences that come. To the wives, I write to help you understand some of the reasons your husbands delayed to tell you about their secret crossdressing lives. I am not writing to excuse their behavior, not in the least! As I will explain, there is no good excuse! But I do hope to help you better understand your husbands in their weaknesses and fears, and therefore perhaps to help you to be able to move a little closer towards forgiveness, mercy, and rebuilding the relationship.
The Reasons
1. A husband may be refusing to tell his wife because he still wants to continue in his behavior. He enjoys his sin. It feels good. This point is not going to comfort any wives who are reading, but it is the reality that some of the husbands do not tell their wives for this reason. Husbands, examines yourselves. You may say you are trying to get help and overcome the addiction, but could it be that you have become content within yourself of the rinse and repeat cycle of half-heartedly trying to quit, while regularly plunging into crossdressing or online content when you are stressed and want to indulge? Could it be that you haven’t told your wife because part of you wants to be able to continue to get those dopamine hits occasionally?
Make the choice to get help, and to repent of your sin! Read these posts and come into the light!
Telling the Truth
Summary of Reasons Crossdressing is Sinful and Harmful
Fool! You will be Caught!
2. Some husbands refuse to tell their wives because they are terrified of the consequences. They know they need to tell their wives in order to get it out into the light to be able to overcome it, and so that they can get the help they need, from a counselor, from a recovery group, and from their wives in order to heal from all of this. They think that they cannot join a group or get an internet filter or see a counselor without telling their wives because she will wonder what is going on. The logic here kills me. If you can’t see a counselor or join a recovery group for fear of your wife finding out, how can you keep indulging in your sin without your wife finding out? This is a terrible excuse. That aside, the point is that these husbands know what they need to do, but are utterly afraid of the consequences. So they keep quiet and do not tell, and do not get the help that they need.
What are they afraid of? They are afraid of totally crushing their wives with the weight of their sexual sin. They fear it will destroy the marriage permanently, causing a divorce. Or they quite literally fear the wrath of their wives, experiencing their anger against their sexual betrayals. They actually do value their marriages more than their sexual sin. Although it is completely the wrong choice to stay stuck in addiction in secret, they feel like they cannot risk destroying the marriage. They cannot bear the thought of losing their wives. They do not want to lose what they feel is a generally good relationship (aside from the secret sexual sins). They have not yet admitted to themselves that much of the relationship is a farce. Further, they do not want to lose the trust of their wives. They know full well the depth of the deceit and secrecy and know that there is no way to confess what they’ve been doing without damaging that trust, perhaps irrevocably.
But men you have to tell. Your wife will find out eventually. Every day and year that goes by will make the shock and the betrayal worse. Don’t delay. Someday you will be caught. Someday she will find a bit of evidence that she will question you about or someone else will tell her. Telling her yourself puts you in a far more healthy and honest position, rather than her finding out on her own. Imagine the damage it would cause for your relationship for her to find out what you’ve been doing on her own, rather than you being the one to share it. Imagine the even worse damage if she catches you in the act itself. Crossdressing husbands always think they won’t get caught, but they get caught all the time. I hear from wives as they join our wives group. Telling her will be hard, but it must be done. Being the one to broach the subject yourself takes courage and vulnerability, but your wife can also appreciate that courage even in the midst of her hurt and shock. The hurt is magnified by a factor of a hundred times if she finds out on her own rather than you choosing to be honest with her. Being honest with her is a move towards her, a move towards intimacy, it’s a move of repentance and confession. It also allows you to control the location and timing of your confession, and allows you to put in place information and people to help you both in the hard conversations that will come. You can even have a friend, pastor, or counselor lined up to help you process the revelation together.
Also, please realize that even if your wife does not yet know about the crossdressing, it is already affecting the relationship negatively. It causes you to not act as yourself fully, to not be fully present. It is always there in your mind, you know it is something you are hiding from her. It causes secrets, awkwardness and tension. As a friend said – “I think that most of our wives will already know that something is wrong in our relationship and they would rather know the truth than have to imagine what is going on.” Your wives can pick up on there being something not right, something that is in the way of the relationship. They may not have discovered what exactly the issue is yet, but they can sense there is an issue. There is something preventing full oneness and intimacy. Tell her now so that you can begin to repair the relationship that is already being damaged in a dozen hidden ways.
3. A lot of men do not share about their crossdressing with their wife or anyone else because of the deep shame they feel. They literally hate themselves much of the time. They may have even prayed and asked God why they couldn’t struggle with something simple like pornography instead of crossdressing. They have prayed for years begging God to take away these desires. They feel like the worst people. They feel perverted and disgusting. They loathe themselves. Just the thought of someone else knowing, especially his own wife, brings crushing shame. Actually experiencing that moment and the greater shame it would bring feels like it would destroy him. I encourage both husbands and wives to read this post by Nick, our executive director – Exiting the Shame Cycle. It is unhealthy shame to feel like we are worse than other people because we struggle with a different type of unusual sin compared to other people. We are not loathsome. We are made in the image of God, and God loves us enough that he sent his son to die for our salvation.
It is important to differentiate unhealthy and healthy shame. A husband should indeed feel guilt about his sin, against his wife and against God. But there can be good and bad kinds of shame. Shame is about how we relate to people, how we feel before people because of our actions or what has happened to us. It is right and healthy to feel shame before others because of the wrong things we have done, particularly within a deep and intimate relationship such as marriage. But it is not helpful or healthy to feel shame in the sense of feeling like a worse person than other people simply for having proclivities and temptations that other people do not have, and that we wished we didn’t have. One is about desires; the other is about the actions that we take as a result of those desires. We need to reject unhealthy shame at having desires that we do not want and did not consciously choose, but embrace the healthy shame of knowing how our actions have hurt our wives and our relationships with them.
Wives, you have every right to feel hurt and confused when your husband reveals his crossdressing desires and history. But please make sure to help him fight his sin and live for Christ rather than heaping more shame on him. Crossdressing and autogynephilia do not define who he is, his identity. He is more than his sexual struggles he wrestles with. Hopefully he knows the Lord Jesus and is a child of God. That is his real identity. He should feel guilt if he has sinned against you and lied to you. But please take care to not make his unhealthy shame worse. Love and affirm him as your husband, a man made in the image of God, but along with him, help him to see the sinfulness and futility of crossdressing, and together work to overcome it.
4. Husbands also do not tell their wives because they do not want to hurt them. Most husbands who have wrestled with crossdressing actually deeply love their wives and want to do most anything not to hurt them. People are complex. It’s possible for a husband to have one part of him acting deeply unloving and sinfully towards his wife by acting out his crossdressing life in secret, while another part of him deeply loves his wife and doesn’t want to see her hurt. Part of him could be ready to give up his life to protect his wife and keep her from hurt, while another part of him rationalizes the very activity he is doing in secret that he knows is a deep betrayal of his spouse and would deeply wound her if she knew. I view this similarly to how a drug addict may actually break into his parent’s home to steal money from them. He truly loves his parents but has become a slave to his addiction.
This is not a good reason to refrain from telling your wife. The longer you delay telling her, the more the hurt builds. And someday she will find out. Besides, it is also hurtful when your spouse is holding back a huge part of their life and not telling you about it. You can tell there is something they are holding back. You cannot fully trust them. That is hurtful too. Just exchange crossdressing with any other sexual sin. If you committed adultery, would you think it’s okay to never tell your spouse because you don’t want to hurt them? If it was you, would you want your spouse to keep something like that a secret? Ignorance is not actually bliss. The secret festers and affects the relationship in countless subtle ways. And the secret can still come out in an explosion later. It is far better to repent and confess to your spouse now so that there can be forgiveness and restoration.
5. Some husbands do not tell their wives because they think it would not be beneficial. Many men have already successfully stopped crossdressing completely, and many others have already begun the recovery process and are already getting help from others. They view their crossdressing as a “past” struggle. They are not keeping the crossdressing in secrecy and darkness, at least from others. Why bring such hurt into the marriage by sharing now? Why cause so much hurt and pain? They cannot see any positive reason to share. And they can think of reasons not to share. “If she knew about this she would lose attraction to me as her husband. Marital intimacy would never be the same again. She will never look at me the same again. She would lose trust in me. She would not be as happy as she is now, and we have a good marriage.” “What she doesn’t know about my past won’t hurt her.”
To these men, I would say: Wake up! Your crossdressing and autogynephilia is not only a thing of the past. It has affected multiple areas of your life, up to your daily life today. In fact, you might be in a recovery group to stay vigilant against the temptations that you regularly face. Your sinful indulging of autogynephilia may be a thing totally in the past. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an affect on your life today, and on your marriage. I would say the same things I said in #4 above. You are holding back a part of your life. How can you live as one flesh with her not knowing this part of yourself? How can you live in unity and intimacy when you hold back such a secret? How can your wife help you avoid triggers and make sure not to cause you to stumble in this area if she doesn’t know? How can she understand your need for an internet filter and a recovery group (so you don’t fall back into addiction), if she doesn’t know? I know there is a part of you that already feels guilty by the huge omission. You may not have directly lied to her, but you have deceived your wife by not telling her the truth about yourself, and I believe from experience in talking to others, that you are being convicted even right now by the Holy Spirit as you read this.
6. Not necessarily unrelated to the above reasons, a husband might feel he has waited too long to tell. He has lied by omission for years. He knows he should have told his wife right away, even before marriage, but he didn’t. But now, years keep going by. It never seemed like the right time. So much time has gone by that he feels there is no way to tell her without her wondering why it took him so many years to do so. It’s one thing to confess, and it’s another thing to confess after 30 years of marriage. Some husbands think it is too late to share. “Sharing now will make her think our whole life together has been a lie, yet it hasn’t.”
If you have not told your wife yet, well, better late than never. Finally telling the truth will be hard. Now you feel stuck. You know the truth will shock her and she will feel betrayed. Trust will then take time to be rebuilt, even if you haven’t been giving in. Men, this is hard, but doing the right thing late is still far better than not doing the right thing at all. Find a good time, and have the talk. Share this key aspect of yourself. This is a key area where you have experienced God’s grace. How could you possibly keep that from your wife? Then you are not truly known. You are hiding a big part of yourself, and a big part of what God has done and is doing in your life. Tear off the band aid. It hurts, but it is necessary. You guys, please, you have got to tell your wives. Let your wife love you while knowing the real you. You can share about yourself, and furthermore, explain why it took you so long to tell, while also repenting for taking so long.
7. Many husbands are worried that they will be misunderstood and their wives will make unhelpful assumptions about them. A husband might be worried his wife will think, in the words of a friend – “you are gay, you want to live as a woman, you want to transition, you are a pedophile, you could be a serial killer. If I walked in and told my wife I was having a problem with alcohol I don’t think I would have gotten these same accusations.” The reality is that crossdressing and gender dysphoria are greatly misunderstood, even in our modern culture which has popularized trans ideology. Confessing something you know your spouse can understand is a lot easier. But confessing something that will take five hours of discussion to answer every question and explain what you really experience is something else entirely.
But again, like the others, this is not a real excuse. It simply means you set aside time, and tell your wife in advance that you have something to talk about and you need to set aside some hours just in case it takes a long time to have the conversation. Schedule for it, and then give the conversation the time it needs so that you can thoroughly explain yourself and take away some of your wife’s fears and assumptions.
8. This last one is a bit different. Some husbands do not tell their wives because they know that their wives lack grace for other people. The reality is that some wives (just like some husbands) live like self-righteous pharisees. They are harsh and demanding. They believe themselves to be almost perfect, and they think the same about most people at church. They don’t have friends with serious sin struggles, not because those friends don’t struggle with sin, but because those friends would never tell such a self-righteous legalistic woman. Some of these women have their heads in the sand, living a fairy tale dream life, not realizing the brokenness of the world, and the sins people struggle with even in the church. Some of these wives have never been open about their own struggles and sins, sometimes a wife may not even be honest with herself. Some of these wives are slow to forgive and judgmental against others. More specifically, some view people who struggle with LGBT issues to be “other people out there” rather than people in the Church. Maybe such a wife is especially disgusted with LGBT issues and lacks empathy towards people who struggle with different sins than her, sexual desires they did not consciously choose. Understandably, this would make it hard for a husband to be open with his wife, even if he is now victorious over his struggle with crossdressing.
Men, this is a situation that truly sucks. It is added suffering in your life to live with a woman like this. However, it is for you to do your part and follow Christ. You cannot control your wife. She will be accountable before God for her sins and her attitude. Your job is to follow Christ and surrender all to him, obeying his commands and being willing to suffer for him. You before God still have to do the right thing of sharing about yourself with your wife. But let me encourage you. It could actually be you sharing with your wife that crashes her fairy tale world apart. It might be you sharing your story that unlocks your wife’s ability to show empathy to others. It might be you sharing that helps your wife to finally understand the difficulty of forgiveness, and the amazing reality of God’s grace and mercy to each of us, including to her. Maybe she will finally embrace the messiness of life, and be able to meet other people in that mess, and be able to see God’s grace at work in all of our situations and brokenness.
Wives, if you are convicted that this might describe you, then be encouraged. God is already at work in your heart. There is nothing I can do to change your heart. Only God can. But you can read his Word and let him transform your heart through his Word and through his grace. Please reflect on the great mercies of God in Matthew 18:21-35, and in Luke 15:11-32. I very much highly recommend reading the short book, Prodigal God, by Tim Keller. You will be amazed at God’s love and grace.
To the Husbands
James 5:16 – “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”
Men, come into the light. Confess your sins so that you can be forgiven, both by the Lord, and by your wife. For your physical, spiritual, and relational healing, confession is necessary.
Ephesians 5:11 – “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.”
Proverbs 28:13 – “Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.”
Colossians 3:9-10 – “Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.”
Men, let this verse sink in. Do not continue lying to your wife. It’s time to come clean. Be a man of integrity, a godly man, a Christlike man.
Hear the words of one of our brothers – “In my case, and I think in many others, the biggest issue for my wife was not the cross dressing or the porn use or the masturbating (though those were certainly important), but it was the lying and hiding and the lack of connection.” He hid the truth from his wife for decades. He thought “that the truth would be too painful for her but the best day of my life was the day I came clean to her. It was difficult for both of us and there have been many tears since but whatever sobriety and recovery I have achieved now would not have happened without that disclosure. It has been hard work to begin to earn back my wife’s trust but absolutely worth doing. I hate the pain that I have put her through but I think she would say that it has been worth it. Of course there is no guarantee of how things will turn out. The future is in God’s hands but now I feel that I am working with God in my recovery.”
This might be the hardest conversation you will ever have. But it could also transform your marriage to a deeper level of trust and relationship (after time passes for the trust to be rebuilt). It can strengthen commitment, forgiveness, and love for each other. Whenever Christians come together in giving and receiving confessions, grace, and forgiveness, it is a powerful spiritual moment of connection. It may encourage your wife to also open up more with you about her own struggles.
Before you share, consider finding a marriage counselor or pastor in advance who can be ready to meet with you both the next day or the next week. When you share with your wife, give her space to be shocked and hurt. Don’t try to take the hurt away. Give her space to feel hurt, even for months. Give her time. Don’t rush the grieving process. After you share, she might experience real trauma from any sexual betrayal. Be sincere and humble in your repentance. And assure her of your commitment to get help from other people in your fight against crossdressing. Don’t defend yourself if she lashes out. Allow her to express her pain. Expect there to be consequences after you share. Trust can be rebuilt and there can be healing and restoration. But give it time.
For more guidance on this, please see this post – How do I tell my wife, a friend, or a pastor about my crossdressing?
And The role of a wife in your recovery. These two posts will go a long way in helping you with the actual specific things you should share in the conversation.
To the Wives
1 Peter 3:8 – “Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.”
Ephesians 4:32 – “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”
Matthew 18:21-22 – “21 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” 22 Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
If your husband does tell you, please realize it might have been the hardest thing he has ever done in his life, something that took him great courage, something that he might have been thinking about every day for the last 10 years. You are allowed to feel shocked, confused, or hurt. But if you are reading this post after the fact, please reflect on how hard it was for your husband to share with you. Try to imagine being in his place, and try to cultivate empathy towards him.
These two posts will help you a lot in dealing with a husband who has just told you his secret.
Giving Pastoral Care to a Crossdresser or Person with Gender Dysphoria
The role of a wife in your recovery
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