The best of times

Dressing up as Arianwen (I wasn't using a female name at this time) in private, was starting to be something I would do on a regular basis.  Since I couldn't always indulge in the full experience, what I would normally do would be to wear a pair of panties and sometimes even pantyhose under my male clothing (even though I would have preferred to be using a garter belt and stockings).  There was safety from discovery here, for me, since I was working for smaller organizations, with bathroom accommodations which were private, so no fear of anyone seeing the female clothing from under the privacy partitions.

If I am being totally honest, here, there were two competing feelings going through me when I first started: one was a sort of comfort or rightness in wearing the articles of female clothing I had on at the time (whether it was just underthings truly under things or as close to a full outfit as I could piece together at the time); the other was a sexual thrill, which would sometimes elicit a bashful or shameful response afterwards.  Over time, though, the former became much more prevalent (which is still the case today).

As I was becoming more familiar with this aspect of my life, I started dating a woman with whom I felt a very strong bond.  We initially connected via an on-line matching website, and quickly moved our communications off the site and directly through our respective e-mail accounts.  After a short while, the relationship added the physical dimension to the electronic, and then not too much time after that, we added the co-habitative dimension.  In short, we met on-line, learned to like one another, and then I moved in with her.

Before I had the advantage of gaining advice from others similar to me on the internet, I was forced to confront the first hurdle in a relationship with a special person like myself -- how/when to introduce the fact that I have a certain "hobby" which does no one any harm, but is disdained and/or shunned by western society.  In my case, this other person (who is now my wife) and I were on parallel thinking paths.  I knew that my "hobby" would potentially cause some problems and would need to be brought up before things got much further with her, and she had a minor suspicion that I was keeping something from her.

I had a feeling (dare I call it female intuition?) that this initial hurdle would be encountered not too long after I moved in with "W" (for wife), so I bagged up my meager collection of women's clothing and stashed them in the trunk/boot of my car.  Several days after doing this, on a Friday when we had her home to ourselves, W asked me if there was something I needed to tell her, as she had a feeling that I was hiding something from her. Since honesty and trust (which are important in any long-term relationship) were extremely hot-button issues for her, almost without thinking I calmly mentioned that I had a "hobby" of wearing women's clothes.  While I didn't know what to expect when envisioning this conversation, nowhere in my imaginings did I foresee the possibility of her response -- she said something to the effect of, "is that all?  I thought that you were seeing someone else on the side."

I assured her that it was only my "hobby" I was keeping secret from her, and to prove it to her, I went out to my car and retrieved the clothing I had placed there.  Now that I am recounting this event, I am very happy to report (for myself, that is) that there is no photographic evidence of this introduction of Arianwen to W, as it would have made quite an awful sight.  The bra I was wearing was way too big in the cup size, and stuffing a few pairs of panties and hose into the cups did not make for a smooth appearance in the bust area.  While the matching panty did fit, the black pantyhose on top of them along with the "silk" pajamas on top of the underthings didn't make a very good ensemble.

Fortunately, over time, W came to accept Arianwen into her life as a somewhat separate entity, and I was able to build a much more respectable collection of clothing.