|
Dear Sasha, I’m a successful businessman with a highly profitable retail business, a big house and a beautiful, loving girlfriend. Life is just perfect. I do, however, have a secret life. I’m a straight man but I love being a woman. My girlfriend is very conservative, so I know that she wouldn’t understand. It’s a secret I’ve kept from her during our entire four years together.
At the store, I wear women’s lingerie and stockings underneath my clothes, and I have a stash of women’s outfits, cosmetics and wigs in my back office. Recently, I’ve met a woman who knows about my secret life as Christine, and she respects it. We’ve developed a great friendship, and she will even role-play with me, coming into the store when no one’s around, uncovering my secret Christine identity, and then taking me to the back office to punish me for being such a bad girl. No sex is involved, just a lot of play.
I really love my dual life. Both worlds are fulfilling to me. Is it wrong to keep this second life from my girlfriend?
—Christine
Dear Christine,
The way you establish what you consider right and wrong within the context of an intimate relationship is by saying, “I think this is wrong. Do you think that’s wrong too?” or “I think this is right. Do you think this is right too?” or, “I have ambivalent feelings about this issue. What are your feelings?”
If you define wrong as carrying on with someone in a way that you know would send your very conservative girlfriend over the edge (both because of the content and the intimacy), then you’ve got a divisive issue on your hands. Now, if your girlfriend couldn’t give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut what you do when you’re not with her, then by all means, put on a wig and have an ’80s dance party with your new friend. But see, you’ll never know what your girlfriend thinks about this because you’re not giving her the option to tell you what she would or wouldn’t think. This is what is called lying by omission. “Among other common lies,” writes Mark Twain in his essay “On the Decay of the Art of Lying,” “we have the silent lie—the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.”
I’ll guess that cross-dressing was part of your life before you got involved with your very conservative girlfriend. I’ll guess this isn’t the first time you’ve kept this from a partner and it likely won’t be the last. It looks like you’ve spent some time preparing yourself for an inevitable confrontation by trotting out shop-worn technicalities like, “no sex is involved, just play.” Nice try, Clinton, but when we have to spend time mulling over loopholes for our behaviour, well, there’s some indication that we know we are on controversial terrain. In its most basic implication, this kind of deception is not only an abuse of your girlfriend’s right to self-determination but it further marginalizes what is a very common proclivity.
People keep these kinds of double lives from their partners for decades, occasionally lifetimes. They rationalize their secrecy by telling themselves that it would destroy their partner to know and that they actually require keeping this secret because the thing that is holding their relationship together is the fact that they can live this out every once in a while. Interesting, isn’t it? If you look at this compulsion in a broader sense, what you are saying is that you need to keep a part of yourself just for you. What I’m suggesting is this: even if you had the option to tell a partner, would you want to?
Got any questions for Sasha? E-MAIL: POULEDELUXE@YAHOO.COM
|
