I caught my husband IN MY UNDERWEAR

After 25 years of marriage, one woman tells us how her husband's secret destroyed their family

- DAILY MAIL

I don’t know when, or even if, my ex-husband was ever planning to tell me. In the event, I found out by mistake when I discovered him, at home, wearing the red camisole and knickers from La Perla that he had given me for Christmas.

He’d thought I was out. Our three teenage children were downstairs, watching a film together in the den. It was, of course, the most enormous shock. Time froze for a few seconds as I took in this surreal sight. Was that red lipstick he was wearing? To be fair, he was terribly embarrassed. We had been married for 25 years and together since our early 20s. Two years older than me, he seemed so together. I loved him.

We were a very happy family – or so it seemed to me. I didn’t tell anyone what I had seen. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. We went to couples counselling and he assured me that it was ‘just’ a bit of crossdressing. I knew he was a good person, that he loved me and the children and I understood that he had grown up in a very traditional middle-class family, where something like this would have been totally unacceptable. I decided that I could live with it.

Yet deep down I must have known he wasn’t telling me the whole truth for, one day, when everyone was out, I went up into the attic, which he always organised, for a look around – and there I found it. A suitcase I didn’t recognise containing size nine heels, fishnet tights, make-up, negligees and a long, auburn wig.

At couples counselling, my husband continued to underplay it. He insisted he was not gay. He said it was a reaction to the lack of regular sex in our marriage which, like many long-term relationships, had suffered a dip in intimacy. So it was partly my fault.

Holding it together