Emotional Blackmail

Image from Callum
Skelton on UnSplash

Emotional blackmail is another of those terms or labels which is difficult to describe or understand.

The way I look at it is, the blackmail describes the portion of my life I lived with my second wife when we constantly battled over my increasingly feminine gender identity. In fact, now, in hindsight I look at the time when two strong women were clashing with each other. My wife and the other was me. Every time I was successful when I went out as a transgender woman, the bigger our fights became. Examples included the time when I went to a transvestite or cross dresser mixer when we lived in New York. The gatekeepers who were placed to keep cis-women out made me show my identification to prove I really was a guy. The entire incident put me on cloud nine for days following but on the other hand, made me very difficult to live with. Predictably, my wife and I clashed and my inner woman felt who was my wife anyway. 

As life went on, the emotional blackmail continued and even worsened. Our sex life worsened because I insisted on making love as two women. She hated the idea and all activity ground to a halt until she passed away. It was during this time also when I was sneaking out more behind her back and meeting new people for the first time. Ironically, I was approached by way more women than men and primarily became friends with lesbians for some reason. Whatever the reason was, I was enjoying the new company I had found and was able to learn so many things from them. One night on one of my gender parties I went to I ended up leaving with a single lesbian woman and going to a dance club in Columbus, Ohio. Nothing physical happened so I considered it another case of emotional cheating I was doing to my wife of twenty five years.

Sometimes I wondered if the emotional blackmail I was subjecting my wife to was worse than any other form of abuse. Sadly or not, I couldn't do anything about my quest to understand and be a better woman. Probably, what was left of my old male self who loved my wife dearly and on occasion had enjoyed our life together was the biggest obstacle to changing it all and coming out fulltime. He kept screaming at me to not give up and the ripping and tearing of living between two genders nearly killed me. Plus, after or during one of our biggest fights, my wife told me something to the tune of why didn't I be enough of a man to be a woman. It would have certainly have been the best way out of the torment if I had only listened. Of course I didn't. 

I was one of the fortunate transgender women as I found a soft landing spot with plenty of assistance when I transitioned. I learned to rely on my feminine instincts which had been ignored for so long as my new life began to take shape. And most importantly emotional blackmail faded into my past as something which never really happened. We all know it did. It wasn't right and I wasn't a strong enough person to do anything about it.