> A good example of what you're talking about is a wife quitting her job and staying home with the kids, even though she knows that it would make her miserable.

> A good example of what you're talking about is a wife quitting her job and staying home with the kids, even though she knows that it would make her miserable. > To you, that's a curtailment of ambition, compromise, and selflessness. To me, that's the beginning of the end. She will make herself miserable and then, she will make everyone else miserable around her. Adding to this, I'm transgender, and my experiences with talking to other members of the trans community line up with this perfectly. A lot of trans people are in similar situations. A good many of us don't realize it until later in life -- or if we do realize it earlier, we run headfirst into denial and don't accept it until later in life. As such, many trans people are already married when they accept being trans. Sadly, one of the most common responses to this acceptance is to say "well, I'm already married and my spouse is straight, so I'll just keep it a secret and resign myself to living with the dysphoria and never transitioning". Or they do try to come out, but their spouse reacts poorly, so they back up and lie through their teeth, saying "sorry, it was just a phase, it's passed now", and they go right back in the closet. It doesn't work. Ever. What happens is that a) the dysphoria not only doesn't go away but often gets worse, and b) they come to resent their spouse for keeping them in the closet and preventing them from transitioning. So their marriage completely deteriorates over time, and they wind up coming out and transitioning years afterwards anyway. That's a good way to guarantee not just a divorce but a very bitter, resentful divorce that will guarantee no chance of them even remaining friends afterwards. Expect lots of recriminations of "What do you mean you've been keeping this secret from me all these years?" vs. "I sacrificed everything to make you happy!". Both parties will ultimately walk away from the marriage knowing that they wasted years, if not decades, of their lives. And this is why the trans community has such a high suicide rate (well, half of it: the other half is that the people who did know young often have parents who are unsupportive to the point of abusiveness). If they refused to sublimate their ambitions and make themselves miserable for their spouse's sake, things would have never gotten that bad. Maybe they'd somehow stay together after transition, or maybe they'd realize their goals are incompatible and amicably split up before they could waste too much time in an unhappy situation.