Jennie supported Philippa through the sex change but found it hard. She was continuing to spend time with other men and explore the submissive side of herself, and Philippa accepted this now that Jennie had come clean about it. The transition was obviously the right thing for Philippa to be doing, but as she took hormones and underwent surgery, Jennie became reluctant to share a bed with her.

After a trip away visiting a lover, Jennie decided they would have to get a divorce. But deep down she still loved Philippa and knew she was the same person she had married, and shared her life with all this time. Together they applied for the first stages of a divorce, and Philippa moved out to stay on a friend’s sofa. It was ironic, says Philippa:

Our wedding anniversary consisted of putting in the divorce petition, and then she came over and we actually went for a meal together.

After a few months, during which they had met regularly and found they still enjoyed each other’s company, Philippa found herself with nowhere to live. To Jennie the obvious solution seemed to be for Philippa to move back in with her and the teenage children.

I thought, we have so many life values and interests in common, we’d only end up creating two separate homes with very similar sorts of feels, and why would we want to do that, if at the end of the day we could still be best friends, even if we weren’t going to be sexual partners?

At first, Philippa stayed in the spare room. They talked a lot over the weeks and months, and eventually Jennie invited Philippa back into her bed. Through gentle exploration, they found a new joy in sex now that Philippa’s body was how she had always wanted it to be. They decided not to complete the divorce.

Life transitions, marriage and staying together

Many marriages might have been broken by the wish of one spouse to transition to another gender, the gender they feel is their true one. In fact many marriages might have foundered after the discovery of infidelity. This was a difficult time for Jennie and Philippa, and they did nearly divorce. It is a tribute to the strength of their love that they didn’t take the final step of the divorce but had another go at staying together.

What made it possible for them to get through this time? The fact that Jennie was able to get sexual fulfilment elsewhere probably made it easier for her to contemplate living as ‘best friends’ rather than as sexual partners. And for Philippa, who was only just getting used to having a female body, the trust the two of them had built up over the years probably meant she had a safe space once she was ready to start exploring sex as a woman, without having to go out alone and meet someone new who might not understand the process she had been through.

But overall I think it was the love they had built up over their years together, their respect for each other and their willingness to work things through that saved their marriage.

So, for a while they had a good arrangement, living together as a committed couple, but with Jennie seeing other men now and then. But, as you’ll read in the next post, they then took a step further and sought out a third person for a loving three-way relationship.

Jennie and Philip met at university and got married the year they graduated. They were open to each other about their feelings, and quite early on, Philip told Jennie that being a man was something he found difficult. When they made love, he never wanted to be the active partner as he felt expected to be. Neither of the couple were very happy with their sex life, but they were happy to be together. As time went on, they had two children.

Several times in the first ten years of their marriage, Jennie found herself getting infatuated with someone else, and she told Philip about these feelings. Philip was not a jealous person and told Jennie that the marriage could be open if she wanted; Philip didn’t want another lover himself, partly because he was unsure of his own sexual identity. None of Jennie’s early romantic attachments led to any sex, and she was open about all of them. Later, however, she had several affairs that involved sex, and at that point she felt it would be fairest on Philip not to tell him. In one of these Jennie explored a side to her sexuality that she hadn’t explored before – her desire to be submissive to a dominant lover.

Why didn’t she tell Philip earlier, given that he had said he wouldn’t mind?

It’s traditionally seen as a betrayal when you’re sexually active with somebody else and you don’t tell your partner about it, but in a strange sort of a way, I felt very strongly at the time that it was helping me to keep the marriage together. I wouldn’t do it now, but it seemed to make sense at the time.

The affairs had been going on for over 15 years when Jennie finally decided to tell Philip. He seemed, from little teasing comments he made now and again, to have already guessed.

It was almost as if there was a challenge there to say ‘Come clean, I’m ready to hear it now’.

His response was a surprise: he was relieved. Philippa (as she is now called) says

She said she wasn’t seeing me as a man, and that she needed a man, and I said ‘Well in that case, I might as well stop trying to fake it.

Philip explained his wish to live as a woman.

To tell or not to tell?

The fact that Jennie decided not to tell Philippa about her affairs shows that, even with the best of intentions, it isn’t easy to be open to your partner about your interest in someone else. (Note that I will call Philippa by that name from here onwards, to respect her female identity; also, all names have been changed.) Philippa had already told Jennie that the marriage could be open, and yet Jennie felt it wouldn’t be right to tell Philippa about her affairs. When Jennie looks back, she clearly finds it hard to remember how she came to this decision at the time and, as she said, she wouldn’t do the same now.

Jennie’s silence makes some sense to me, though, given that there is strong pressure from society to keep affairs secret, stronger perhaps than the pressure not to have affairs in the first place. However idealistic you might be, the assumptions of the wider society can get into your head and lead you to conform, even when you have good reasons not to.

The complications in Jennie and Philippa’s relationship – Philippa’s difficulties with living as a man and Jennie’s new-found desire for a dominant lover – might have made talking about the affairs harder. Eventually they did talk, though, and talking about one issue seems to have made it easier to talk about other issues. It must have been hard for Jennie to finally admit her affairs, but she doesn’t regret doing it for a moment.

Did Jennie’s affairs help them to stay together? I think they probably did. She wasn’t happy with their sex life, so when someone offered her a kind of sex she preferred, it gave her a way to be sexually fulfilled while staying with the partner she loved. Despite her lack of honesty about her affairs, they don’t seem to have hurt Philippa and they gave Jennie an outlet for her sexual feelings. I wouldn’t recommend keeping an affair a secret, but in this situation, who am I to say it was wrong?

Helen didn’t feel guilty about spending time with Julie – how could such bliss be wrong? She introduced Julie to Georgina, who guessed that this was more than a friendship and said she thought David was beginning to guess that something was going on, not least because Helen was obviously deliriously happy. So with Georgina’s encouragement she chose a moment when she and David were both relaxed at home and told him everything. She also reassured him of her deep and enduring love for him, and that she would never leave him.

To her surprise, his reaction was cautiously positive. David wasn’t surprised but was pleased that Helen had told him. He greed that she could go ahead and continue to see Julie and become more sexually intimate with her. He made no conditions, but Helen promised that she would be completely above board with him and that she wouldn’t tell anyone else without his agreement.

In fact, it was worth it for David. The affair actually improved their life together. Helen’s passion for Julie spilled over into their marriage and rejuvenated it. She was more relaxed, more tolerant of little habits of his that used to irritate her, because of her overwhelming gratitude to David for his understanding of her feelings. Because she couldn’t see Julie very often, David got the benefit of Helen ‘firing on all cylinders’. And Helen came to see that she could love both David and Julie at the same time.

Loving the one didn’t diminish my love for the other. They met different needs and were in separate compartments. The one was a deep and enduring love – the anchor of my existence. The other was a life-giving and all-demanding passion, riding the crest of a wave.

Options for David

What would you have done in David’s situation? Some men might not have been as accepting as he was. Someone in this situation could have been afraid that his wife might leave him, or doubted his wife’s love for him. These are all natural reactions, especially when our culture assumes that they are the only reasonable ones. But David’s experience shows that there are other ways to react, and that they can bring benefits.

In fact, David is someone who doesn’t get jealous easily. Yes, there are people like him! Others might have needed more reassurance that the relationship was strong and that they were loved and valued. Some might not have been able to cope with the situation at all and might have preferred to impose restrictions on their partner or end the marriage. But what a shame to take such drastic action, when accepting the situation might have brought such a rejuvenation to the relationship?

In this blog I aim to give alternatives and show that they can work. Helen and David are far being from the only couple who’ve experienced this rejuvenation after opening up their relationship. You’ll hear about others in future posts, and I’ll also tell you later what happened next for Helen, David, Julie and Miriam.

I can honestly say that I was never tempted to look elsewhere, with or without David’s knowledge.

Then one day Helen was persuaded by friends to take part in a week-long historical pageant, in which a 17th century village would be reconstructed. There she got to know Julie and Miriam, who had been partners for five years. Miriam was in her sixties but Julie was about the same age as Helen’s daughter Georgina. They all hit it off and had some hilarious, and also thoughtful, times.

When the project ended, although she liked them as friends, Helen didn’t expect to see Julie and Miriam very often. But to her surprise, Julie kept on seeking her out, sending her little notes, inviting her on walks, for coffee, all without Miriam or David. Julie was vivacious and bubbly and Helen began to realise that she found her very attractive. Then one morning she awoke after dreaming about Julie in an undeniably sexual way. She realised that she was falling in love with Julie. She says:

My eyes had been opened. From then on I was like a love-struck teenager! I realised I loved Julie, but I could hardly believe it myself and didn’t dare express my feelings even to her, let alone tell David. It seemed impossible that she could love me.

Then one evening, over a meal that Julie had arranged, their feelings for each other spilled out. Julie said “I’ve loved you since that first week”. Then, as Helen puts it:

Everything went off with a bang. For three weeks we were in a crazy and intoxicating world, in a complete spin. We loved being together, it was effortless and we wanted to know everything the other had ever done. We felt we had always known each other.

Options for Helen

Helen had several things to cope with. First, the fact that this was all happening while she was married, when she had intended to be faithful to David all her life. These feelings must have been quite a shock for her.

Then there was the fact that it was a woman that she was falling for, when she had not been interested in women before. She was suddenly faced with her own bisexuality. Many women in their late 60s would find this particularly difficult, as homosexuality is only just becoming widely accepted in the UK, and bisexuality is still not often talked about in heterosexual circles. Helen was lucky, however: her daughter Georgina had previously come out as a lesbian, so Helen had worked through for her difficulties with the idea of women loving women several years earlier. But she had still never applied these ideas to herself.

Then there was the question of what, if anything, to tell her husband David. How to explain this double whammy – that you have fallen in love with someone else, and that it is a much younger woman? And to cap it all, Julie was in a long-term relationship with someone else, Miriam. Miriam was Helen’s age and Helen knew and liked her. She knew Julie was committed to Miriam, just as she was to David. She had no wish to hurt Miriam.

So, what would you do in Helen’s situation?

She could have insisted that they stop seeing each other straight away, to stop the incipient affair in its tracks. For those who believe that monogamy is the only ethical option, there would be no other choice. They would have gone home, concentrated on their marriage/partnership, and tried to forget each other and get on with their lives. Sometimes this can work, eventually, and in some similar situations this could have been the best solution.

Should she tell David? If Helen had put off seeing Julie before it had started, many would argue that she hadn’t been unfaithful and that there was therefore no need to tell her husband. No need according to a strict interpretation of fidelity as monogamy, perhaps, but in Helen’s heart there would still have been an important secret that she was keeping from David. If a relationship is to help each person to grow and be their full self, it is better to share this kind of discovery with each other, even if ‘nothing has happened’. In fact especially then, because it will be easier to confess to feelings for someone else that you haven’t acted on than it will be to confess to breaking a promise of monogamy.

If Helen didn’t break off contact with Julie, what else could she have done? She could have had an affair with Julie and kept it a secret from David and Miriam. I’ve posted already about the problems with this approach. Or she could have left David for Julie. In this case this would have involved a very sudden change of life, giving up her home (or perhaps forcing David to give up his), probably a drastic reduction in income, the disapproval of family and friends, and not least loss of the man she loved and had shared decades of her life with. If their marriage had been unhappy and she had been considering a divorce anyway, that would have been different. But Helen and David were happy together.

Helen’s story illustrates an important fact: people who fall for someone else while in a relationship aren’t always having problems with their relationship. Some people would have you believe that an affair is always a sign of something having gone wrong, perhaps a sign that the ‘faithful’ spouse needs to try harder to keep the ‘straying’ spouse. My research that shows that this just isn’t true: like many others, Helen fell in love with Julie even though her marriage to David was loving and stable.

I’ll tell you what she did in the next post.