AITA for walking away from my marriage? We have been married for less than a year
I am completely lost, deeply confused, and need some outside perspective on my husband’s behavior. I don’t know how to read the signs anymore, and I’m constantly questioning whether I am overreacting or if I am looking at a partner who is deeply in the closet about being transgender.
To give context, my husband (35M) and I (33F0 have been married for less than a year.
He is highly invested in his public image. He treats his friends and family beautifully. But behind closed doors, there is a secret side to him that has completely upended our marriage.
A while ago, I caught him on a kink website dressed as a woman and sexting other people online to meet up on the weekend. When caught, he played it off as “just a kink” and claimed he didn’t actually want to meet up, he insisted the sexting was just part of the fantasy. After that initial discovery, I was so confused at the time and didn’t quite know how to handle it, but I chose to accept his kink and try to get into it too so he didn’t feel rejected or ashamed. I didn't actually realise at the time that that was cheating as I was overwhelmed with confusion and empathy for his situation. Pretty much every time since then, whenever we use party substances on special occasions or if he is drunk, he wants to do the kink. We even jointly hired a trans escort once, where he engaged in both oral and anal sex.
Things escalated massively over New Year’s while we were away in a foreign country. We went out, and used substances. We got back to the hotel around 2–3 AM, and he asked if he could wear some of my clothes (part of his kink). I said yes and we (or so I thought) both went to sleep. However, when I woke up at 9 AM, he was completely gone. I checked his location on Life360 and saw he was far away from the hotel.
I tried calling his phone and he didn’t answer until he was already in transport coming back. My major concern is that he cheated on me and was actively escaping the scene before finally answering his phone. When he got back to the hotel, he tried playing it down and we ended up in a massive fight. Mind you, this happened less than a month after us getting married, and it was meant to be a family holiday leading right into our honeymoon.
His story is that he put my clothes under his, went downstairs of the hotel to drink where he met two guys, threw my clothes away whilst down there, and then set off fireworks with them all night. My problem with that story is when he got home, he was in his normal clothes and my bikini and favourite gym pants had been thrown into a public restroom trash bin downstairs by the hotel bar. When I demanded he go get them, only the bikini was left and the gym pants were completely gone.
To make it worse, when we first started fighting about it, he actively started rummaging through my suitcase, pretending to search for the clothes he knew he had already thrown away downstairs, which made me feel completely crazy.
When the confrontation reached a boiling point and I threatened divorce, he locked himself in the bathroom, watched porn, and masturbated. He later blamed the whole night on the substances he took hours earlier.
He has explicitly confessed to me that he fantasises about being a trans girl, wants to go overseas to live normally as a woman ("just short term becasue it'd be fun'). He likes to keep stick-on nails on, and loves putting on a chastity cage and a butt plug to dance like a woman in the mirror. He also only really watches trans porn where he says he fantasises about being the trans girl getting f****d by the other trans or the men.
The confusing part is that whenever he is sober, he firmly flips back. He insists “I love being a dude” and claims it’s all just “c**aine talk” and that the feeling completely goes away after he gets a sexual release.
He also tells me that he can simply “turn it off” and that he “doesn’t have to do the kink.” But I struggle with that explanation because, from everything I’ve seen and everything he has told me, it feels like this may be more than just a sexual kink and could be a part of who he is. At the same time, I know I can’t determine someone’s gender identity for them, and that’s part of why I’m so confused.
But the way he handles it when sober is cold and dismissive. He completely brushes it under the rug. If I bring up the sexting, the disappearance in the foreign country, or my concerns he may be trans, because I’m still trying to process the confusion, he stonewalls me with “we’ve talked about it” and “stop bringing up stuff from the past.” He plays it off like I'm being silly or dramatic.
It seems impossible to communicate my feelings because its just followed with cruel, passive-aggressive remarks about his job, implying I don’t know what hard work is like. Recently, when I was sitting on my laptop crying and researching divorce, he just responded with, “Can you shut your laptop, I’m trying to sleep, some of us have to work.”
Whenever I tell him I want a divorce, he flatly says, “We’re not getting a divorce,” as if that's something that could just never happen. He says "You're a quitter" when I bring up divorce.
I am trapped in a chronic state of confusion. I feel like he’s using me as a cover. I’d be more open to accepting it as a kink, but I feel like he’s cheated and is covering it up with “it’s the kink.” I have severe trust issues now because he can so easily hide massive things from me.
He has organised counselling in a months time but only after I begged and begged and threatened divorce again. Even to the counselling he comments "we dont need it because I know what they're going to say and we can work on it ourselves".
I feel these issues could be related to him being secretly trans and he does seem to improve on some things like booking the counselling. I do still love him but I feel like we're just going in circles.
Would I be the AH if I divorced him even though we haven't even been married for a year?