Forty-three and only just admitting this to myself

Question

Hello. I am forty three, married fifteen years, and I have known since I was a boy that feet were a thing for me. I have never once said it out loud, not to my wife, not to a friend, not to anyone.

What has changed is nothing dramatic. I read something, then I read more, then I ended up here reading for a fortnight and realising that half of what people describe is my exact experience. It is a strange feeling to be this old and find out you have been a category all along.

I am not in crisis about it. Mostly I want to say hello and hear from anyone else who arrived at this late. Did it change anything for you? And how, if at all, did you raise it with a partner after that many years of not mentioning it?

marcus_reads · Accepted Answer

You are in decent company. I was thirty nine when I stopped calling it a habit and called it a preference, and the thing that changed was not the feeling, it was that I finally had a word for it that did not sound like an accusation. Nothing about you is different this week from last week. You just stopped translating.

sandy_soles · Answer

Welcome. The late arrivals are some of the most thoughtful people on this board, probably because you have had twenty years of quietly turning it over instead of blurting it out at nineteen.

mara_k · Answer

On telling your wife after fifteen years, the fear is usually that she will hear it as a complaint about the last fifteen years. So put that at the front. Something like, nothing is wrong, this is not about anything missing, I have just realised something about myself and I would rather you knew it. That framing does most of the work.

late_starter_lionel · Answer

That is exactly the fear, put better than I managed. She has never given me a single reason to think she would take it badly. The worry is entirely mine and it is about the length of time, not about her.

origin_ollie · Answer

For what it is worth, when I finally said it after eleven years the first thing my wife said was that she had wondered. Not accusingly, just as a fact. People notice more than we think and mostly do not mind. Your fifteen years of silence has probably been less airtight than it felt from the inside.

low_key_luca · Answer

Take the pressure off the conversation by not making it a conversation. Mine came out sideways during an ordinary evening and was over in about ninety seconds. I had been rehearsing a speech for a year.

natural_nate · Answer

Welcome. The one thing I would push back on in this thread is the idea that fifteen years of silence needs explaining or apologising for. It does not. You did not know how to say it, and now you do. That is the whole story and it is not a debt.

Forty-three and only just admitting this to myself

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