The 2% Rule

The 2% Rule
by Raven Usher

Only 2% of marriages that encounter a transsexual transition by one of the partners remains in tact.

OK, so it is more of a statistic than a rule. But that does not change the ominous meaning of it. 2%. That is even lower than the survival rate of straight Christian vanilla marriages.

On the surface the reason for that divorce rate seems kind of obvious. The husband wants to be the wife. (Or vice versa.) How could a marriage possibly survive with two wives? How could any relationship endure that kind of monumental change?

Much like the right-wing anti-gay-marriage movement, the people who ask those type of questions have obviously lost all sight of what marriage is truly suppose to be about. Almost all the marriage vows that you will hear have something along the lines of “for richer, for poorer, for better or for worse” in them. What does that mean?

It means unconditional love. The kind of love that expects the hard times and the poor times. It is the love that realizes that life is like riding the bus… it requires change.

Now granted that a wife being told that her husband wants to be a woman is way out of the realm of even the most liberal definition of “normal.” It still falls under the heading of those marriage vows. Once all the parties involved understand that, once all the difficult adjustments are made, overall life with the couple will get better. When one member of a couple is unhappy the couple is unhappy. To make the couple happy the individuals need to find their paths to happiness and the partners need to find a way to support that path. I am not trying to play down the huge impact that a transsexual transition has on a marriage and a family. The point is that a real marriage can survive anything.

Usually in order to survive a TS change it takes some self-realization on the part of the one not making the change. A wife has to come to know and believe that her husband wanting to become a woman IS NOT a failure in any way on her part. It is not because she was not enough of a woman or a lover. It is not because she is lacking any amount of femininity. It is not because she did not love or give enough.

It is quite the opposite. It is because the wife is such a strong and dependable image of womanhood, that her femininity is so well defined, because she loves and gives of herself so completely. That is why the husband is able to show her the overwhelming amount of trust it takes for him to open his heart and confess the desire that is eating him away from inside. It is why he is able to lay his entire life at her feet and ask her to make a sacrifice worthy of the most sacred martyr.

Only in the unconditional love of a true marriage can such a thing happen. And if only the partners who are asked to make that sacrifice could understand that it is their strength that makes it possible to even consider asking for such support, far more than 2% of those loving and well rooted marriages would survive.

It is not insurmountable. The partnership, the family and the marriage can endure. All you have to do is hold tight to the unconditional love that made it possible for you, as a couple, to reach a place where you can face obstacles together and, in union, overcome that which neither one could conquer alone.

Blessed Be