Alas, those satin and lace cravings just wouldn't stay away!

The years of my stint in the military passed by, and I came out to marry the girl I had been dating before I went in. She was quite unaware of my preferences in casual clothing. Because of things in her past, I didn't want to rock her world with this revelation. I would tell her. But later, I told myself.

She had been let down by many guys she had dated, for various reasons, which all boiled down to the fact that they were assholes who didn't appreciate the wonderful person she was. One beat her up, others dumped her, all the usual macho male garbage. The woman was an accessory, something you held up to the light like a bauble or something that slaved away cooking and cleaning.

By this time I couldn't understand the thought processes of my male peers. Though married, they would go out with the guys like when they were single, leaving "the old lady" home either alone or with whatever offspring they had gotten on her. They would spend weekends taking root in their couch watching sports on tv while their slave..... er.... wife waited on them and some of their buddies.

It seems, from a psyche counselor I was talking with, that everyone has a male and female side. I had already encountered the concept of yin and yang in karate, so it was no stretch for me to grasp this concept. The counselor went farther to explain that I had a stronger female side which, she said, was the reason for my being at odds with so many of my friends.

The nurturer, communicator side was both the source of my enjoyment of the softer fabrics that were used to construct female clothes and the reason my wife got along better with me than most of her prior boyfriends. Double edged sword. However, I had such a facade of being "normal" that I was worried about the chance I'd lose my wife. Okay, I was scared shitless. Sue me. I love her.

A few years after I got married, I picked up a pair or high heels somewhere, I don't remember where, but my wife found them and a pair of panties I had hidden away. There was a bit of a scene and, I am ashamed to say, I lied my way out of it, my fear of her reaction to finding out I secretly wore them fueled by her reaction to simply finding them. I think she would have preferred hearing that a girlfriend had left them at the house. I didn't dress for years after that event.

I found that suppressing the urge to dress, or, more properly, denying the occasional expression of my softer side made me more tense and more irritable, almost grumpy. Things set me off much easier, and it wasn't until a lot later that I realized why this was.

Even though I had stopped dressing in the real world, I still did so in my fantasies. My wife was always curious about my fantasies, as I was always willing to indulge hers, but since mine generally were far wilder than any woman I was with, I was reluctant to reveal them for fear of having a lover jump up and run screaming out the door. Also, since they often involved cross dressing and she already had a bad reaction to that concept, I didn't want to reveal anything that would potentially destroy the rest of my marriage life.

However, not giving in to those urges was taking its toll since I was becoming harder to live with and my wife and I were arguing more and more. I was in what appeared to be a no win situation. My life wasn't a happy one at that point and I didn't know why, so I didn't know what I needed to do to fix it. I always wanted to end arguments by fixing whatever was the cause of the argument, but I didn't know what the underlying cause was of my unhappiness, so I was unable to fix it. It was a very frustrating time. Got that? Hold that thought.

One day a friend had made arrangements for me to help him and his roommate load up their moving van. They were moving out of the garden apartment they lived in, and were moving halfway across the state, if I would help them load up their rental truck. Being the helpful sort of person I am, I agreed. Little did I know how fateful that day would be.

As we loaded the truck, my friend's neighbor from the apartment directly across the garden-patio area arrived at home. They whispered to me in a sort of behind-the-back-of-the-hand way that she was a Dominatrix. I watched as she got out of the car and carried in a few bags of groceries to her apartment. I didn't see anything special. She appeared to be a woman in her mid thirties, her black hair in a sort of severe page boy, dressed in shorts and an oversized T-shirt. When she went in the house we went back to carrying their possessions out to the truck.

As usual, when helping friends move, the big wait was for the waterbed mattress to drain. It was while we were assessing the progress of the draining that a female voice called out from the living room "Hey, you boys need some help?"

"In here, Mary." replied my friend as he adjusted the siphon hose.

Of course, it was the neighbor. She pitched in with no reservations about grabbing the end of the couch and helping me carry it to the truck and much more. She worked as hard as any of us and was a lot of fun to work with.

I must confess at this point that I was fascinated by the idea of a Dominant Woman, and had been for a long time. Now I had an expert to talk to about it, but how to bring the topic up in casual conversation? I had no idea at all!

The morning passed with nothing more than casual conversation between us as we filled the truck up. I wanted desperately to delve into this exciting area, but I knew I had to go slow and carefully, since my friends obviously regarded this whole subject as taboo. I certainly didn't want them to know I was as "weird" as Mary was.

We finished loading the truck with no opportunity to broach the subject, and I watched with disappointment as my friends climbed into the cab of the rental truck. I had no more reason to stay and converse with this intelligent, fascinating woman now that our common work had finished. She came to my rescue, however, by asking if I wanted some iced tea, to which I readily agreed.

As we sat in her normal looking apartment (I don't know what I really expected) and talked, I still couldn't find a suitable opening for The Topic. "Hi, do you really whip men and order them about?" "Just how do go about Dominating someone?" What kind of opening could I use to start the conversation, or at least steer it in the direction I wanted it to go?

You see, dear reader, the whole concept of Domination and submission had been introduced to my imagination at a young age by reading the lurid account in the newspaper of a professional Dominatrix who had been arrested for prostitution and since the article was published in a reasonably respectable, non-tabloid newspaper, it only hinted at things dark and exotic that might have gone on, and this had burned in my young imagination with the fire of curiosity and secret longing. I didn't know what the hell they were talking about, but if people were paying the kind of money the newspaper talked about this lady making, it must have been wonderful. Here I was sitting and talking to just such a person as I had been fantasizing about meeting and talking to for years, and with no subtle way to get the conversation to the area I wanted it to get to. I was despairing of ever getting to that point, however, when Mary asked me "Have you been cross dressing long?" I was stunned, and though some small part of my brain congratulated me on not spewing Red Zinger iced tea all over her lace tablecloth, most of my brain was suddenly oatmeal.

Previously my cross dressing had been limited to furtive purchases of pantyhose, or whatever bits of clothing I could borrow from friends and relatives without their knowledge, for minutes at a time in most cases. Was it satisfactory? No, but what options did I have as a cross dressing teenager in the sixties?

The day I meet Mary, she asks me out of the blue, divining that I was a cross dresser based on her life experience and other TV's she had known, how long I had been cross dressing. Totally unlooked for, I suddenly had someone to talk to about this who wasn't going to look at me like some sort of freak. So, I poured out my heart to her; to the first sympathetic ear I had ever found.

What assured me that Mary was a sympathetic ear, was that she had punctuated her question about how long I had been cross dressing with an offer to try on some things she had that she was sure would fit me. After lifting my chin off the floor and re-starting my thought processes, I shakily took her up on her offer.

For someone who had only dressed in the deepest of private places, guarding the secret with all my power, to suddenly share it all with total honesty, and total acceptance, was a heady, freeing experience. I had only feared the day someone would know of my deep secret, hiding it from the world like it was something to be ashamed of, and here was a nice, intelligent lady not only telling me it was all right, but willing to share the experience and to help me do it better with advice, assistance, and the offer of a place to be the second self that was inside. I felt like someone suddenly released from prison, standing confused, unsure, but vaguely happy outside the walls for the first time ever.