I'm not sure if this is the place for this so please move it if it needs to be moved.

I've been married for 33 years and until recently I thought my wife was a class A b$&@ and a short tempered lunatic on top of it.  That may be a slight exaggeration but it was in my mind a lot.  A few months before I started HRT things had deteriorated so far that one day I angrily told her that if she hated me so much to walk out and get a divorce.

Now after a year on HRT I have discovered something.  We get along pretty well and like each other.  We have had fewer disagreements in the past 12 months than we used to have every week.  We both seem happy again like when we first met.

So I think that all along the class A b$&@ and short tempered lunatic was actually me.  We were connected, almost like a mind meld, and what I felt she felt and what she felt I felt so my emotional state kept us both on edge and feeding off each other often spiraled out of control.  Now the reverse seems to be true.

I hope this continues as I progress because there is no way I can ever return to what was before.


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Interesting revelation, Deborah.

I wouldn't call my wife a b$&@, but she does have a deep-seated and barely concealed hatred of men.  I wonder...  Maybe there's hope.

 

Can we stay away from the b word please, it's not appropriate.

Sorry.


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Deborah,
It takes a lot of self-awareness and guts to say this - so glad to hear you have been able to get to such a point. I know I had to go through a similar process (of getting pass the point of laying the blame elsewhere and instead looking inward) to get pass that kind of cycle in my marriage. I am finding my trans awareness and acknowledgment is already helping me mellow out and not going ballistic when something from someone gets under my skin.

Here's to many mellow and happy years ahead for you and your wife!

Cheers,
Denali

congrats

I must admit that being on Spiro now for 3 months, I've lost some of my edge.  Glad it's working out for you Deborah.
Paige

I can relate to this with my fiancé. After hormones we get along so much better. She told me the other day, "I've always liked living with you....but now I enjoy it". I didn't think much of it but the more I thought about it I've realized I was the one making everything difficult. It's like that T chemical blinds you to how things really are but you have no idea you're even blind.

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Congratulations Deborah!

Deborah, that is awesome that you have realized this and communicated this. A crucial component for any marriage to work is communication. True love and understanding is not about who's right or wrong in a relationship and should not be about keeping score, otherwise it just turns into a toxic relationship. Congrats on getting past all of that. Once you realize that your partner in life is really on your side, it's easier to love and rid of the toxic actions we have all done at one time or another.

I think it's wonderful that the two of you can get along. Too many relationships hit a low point and never recover. But, I think that just because the two of you can now get along, it doesn't mean that you (or your male side) were the problem the whole time. If she would have changed, rather than you, things would probably be just as good as they are now. It sounds like what needed to happen was for one of you to change, and one of you did, so now things are better.

Either way, I'm happy for you!

Maybe I wasn't the whole problem but I was a lot of it.  This one I feel particularly bad about.  My wife has English as a second language so sometimes she has difficulty finding the right word for something.  Now I actually did understand almost all the time but because I was feeling bad so much I would intentionally misunderstand and come across as sarcastic mocking.  That nearly always quickly devolved into a fight.  I'm not really sure why I did it either, maybe somewhere in my mind was the feeling that since I felt bad she should be punished.  Yeah, I was an a••.

And she didn't deserve it either.  At one point a while ago she did used to fly into rages when she found I had been CDing.  She even told my kids that I was all sorts of bad things.  Finally, in despair, about 10 years ago I told her I was trans as best I could across the languages.  Once she understood she seemed to quickly accept it and all the anger and recrimination was gone.  So, there she was a saint and may have saved my life because I was seriously considering ending everything then.

But still the dysphoria was eating at me and over time I began to repay her understanding with meanness.  The only way I have been able to get beyond that is taking action to deal with the dysphoria directly which for the time being is HRT and growing my hair.

So I do accept responsibility for the majority of the past difficulties even if the real root cause was beyond my control at the time.

My wife is pretty "alpha" and so am I although in my case I'm not sure if it's real or something I created.  Probably it doesn't matter because even if it's created it became real over time.  But I don't think that was ever a real part of the problem.  One thing though, don't ever believe that Asians are meek and submissive like in the movies.  LOL. Iron willed and full of fire is more accurate.

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It takes big... um... lack of cojones to admit that you're wrong.  Especially once you've gotten so entrenched.  Brava!

Just want to add my admiration for your honest self appraisal and humility.