25 years married 31 together..

This weekend we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary.

Friends, family, buffet, dancing, disco classics, karaoke and laughter from beginning to end.

Exactly how it should be.

Twenty five years married.

Thirty one years together.

When you say those numbers out loud, people always ask the same question:

“What’s the secret?”

The truth is there isn’t one magical answer.

Long marriages aren’t built on grand gestures every day, they’re built on ordinary moments repeated thousands of times over years.

Friendship. Patience. Humour. Loyalty, Love.. even when life gets stressful, exhausting, messy, or difficult.

And laughing. A lot of laughing.

if you can survive flat-pack furniture, money worries, raising children, arguments over what to watch on TV, you can survive most things.

But hidden quietly within our marriage has been something deeply personal too.

Something that, in many ways, became one of the greatest examples of trust and acceptance I could ever imagine.

Davina.

Davina began around seven years into our relationship, shortly after we got married.

My wife asked one day if she could dress me as a woman “for a laugh.” At least that’s how it started.

What she didn’t tell me at the time was that she genuinely wanted to see if her alpha husband would actually let her do it.

Turns out I did.

And what neither of us fully realised in that moment was that it wouldn’t just be a one-off joke or silly experiment. It became something bigger.

Something real.

Davina is never halfway.

Not a quick joke outfit or something done badly for comedy.

Davina must exist fully. Wig. Makeup. Lingerie. Hosiery. Heels. Dresses. Jewellery. Perfume. The full transformation every single time.

All or nothing.

Over time, Davina simply became another part of our relationship. Not the whole relationship. Not something that defined us. Just another piece of who I am and who we are together.

And here’s the important part:

My wife accepted that completely although would probably prefer me not to be a Crossdresser.

That level of acceptance changes a marriage in a subtle way.

Real love isn’t loving only the polished, simple, socially acceptable parts of someone. Real love is when somebody sees the parts you’re nervous to show, the things that make you different, vulnerable, unusual, or misunderstood and they stay anyway.

Twenty years of Davina existing within our marriage has taught me something important: the strongest relationships are the ones where both people are safe to be fully themselves.

No pretending. No masks. No fear.

Just trust.

That’s probably the real secret after all these years.

Not perfection. Not never arguing. Not romance every second of every day.

It’s being able to grow together without fear of losing each other.

And somehow, through all of life’s chaos, still being best friends at the end of it.

Although after 31 years together, my wife has also mastered another important relationship skill…

Allowing me to think I’m always right.

Which, to be fair, is probably the biggest sacrifice of all.

Davina