I was watching Dr. Phil on television the other day with my wife. He was talking to a woman who discovered, after marrying her husband, that he was a cross-dresser, or at least had cross-dressing tendencies. Dr. Phil counseled the woman to leave the man because of his “perversion” and told her that no one could ever be sexually satisfied with a cross-dresser for a husband because he would always be masturbating while wearing her underwear, and so on, instead of sexually pleasing her. Mind you, the woman had three kids with this guy, so obviously they got it on occasionally, and she didn’t actually say that they didn’t have sex, only that he had brought up the idea of wearing her clothes and that she was repulsed. Then Dr. Phil got the husband on the phone and yelled at him for being dishonest.

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As the mental image of a cross-dressed Dr. Phil is too horrible to contemplate, let’s assume he isn’t projecting. Besides, it’s more likely he’s simply doing what daytime TV talk show hosts are paid the big bucks to do: tell women in the audience exactly what they want to hear. In this case, he’s telling the wife of a cross-dresser and, by extension, all the wives of cross-dressers watching at home that their husbands are dishonest perverts, that they are wronged innocents, and that their husbands’ ho-hum sexual fetish is grounds for divorce.

Yes, yes: in an ideal world people would make a full disclosure of their secret sexual fetishes before getting married and making babies. But most straight people deny and suppress their fetishes for years in what almost always proves to be a futile attempt to live “normal” lives. (Out gay people, as a rule, don’t suppress their kinks. Compared to a desire for same-sex love, leather, dress socks, stuffed animals, spankings, piss, Ashton Kutcher, etc just aren’t that scary.) Eventually most straight guys with fetishes realize it’s impossible to suppress them, and they make the difficult decision to tell the wife.

So tell your husband that nothing is expected of him over the next few months but that you do need to be held. He may not want to have sex for the remainder of your pregnancy, but it’s cruel to deny you any physical intimacy. Once he feels like you’re not trying to initiate sex every time you come near him, perhaps he’ll start coming to bed before you go to sleep and lingering a bit longer in the morning.