Charli, thank you for your compassionate response. I agree that we are needlessly a binary culture. Orb, so wonderful you rose above and became better. It is inspiring to all of us.
I eventually did get the bra talk, but it was about five years ago LOL from my then GF who is my now BFF.
After my breasts practically exploded into a B cup as a young teen, they stayed the same size for decades. I denied and “hid” them until middle-age, when Rx regimens and aging and weight gain started my breasts growing again. As at puberty, my growth was again explosive and it seemed I was a D cup in the blink of an eye.
My then GF had the bra talk she had been trying to initiate much of our long term relationship when I was a “mere” B cup, and deluding myself I was successfully camouflaging them. Now that I could no longer deny I had full and heavy female breasts or camouflage them as they provocatively swayed and jiggled on my chest with my nipples suggestively poking through my tops, I was finally open to the bra talk I should have had as a teenager decades ago and that my then GF had wanted to give me throughout the about 15 years we had been together.
I had always admitted to myself I had breasts like a woman, and deep inside recognized that all along I should have been wearing a bra like a woman. But the embarrassment I had experienced perpetuated that same old denial I had when my breasts started growing. Back then I ignored that I was developing breasts like the girls in my class and afterwards when the growth stopped, I told myself they were small and lied to myself I could hide them.
Now, I not only had breasts like a woman, but my breasts were bigger than the average woman’s. The uncomfortable movement, sore breast tissue, chapped nipples, and back pain associated with unsupported breasts told me I physically needed to start wearing a bra. And when I looked in the mirror, and could see the outline shape and size of my breasts and areolae clearly showing through my tops and my nipples poking through like little hard erasers, I knew I needed to wear a bra for modesty as well as comfort.
So, when my then GF next tried to have the bra talk with me, I approached it from the perspective of somebody knowing they would be wearing a bra like a woman for the rest of their lives.
More another time about my then GF and now BFF, bra wearing, and slow steady progression from D to DD to DDD, and, yes, the fitter who has known me since just about the start, at my recent bra fitting brought me some G cups to try. Thankfully, they were just a little too big, and I could almost see her relief, as she said, you know we top off at a G cup, so if you get any bigger than that, you won’t be able to get your bras here anymore. She did say she saw a G cup in my future, as I seem to be still growing, albeit more slowly. She said let’s just hope you stop at a G cup.
But I digress.
My point is that because we have breasts like women, we do need to wear bras like women, and we do need the bra talk, may be at different times and variations. But the bra talk is just that, it’s a talk between two people, so much depends on how and when the talk is given and received. I should’ve gotten the talk as a teenager and I’m pretty sure I would’ve been receptive to it then, and I should’ve been receptive to the talk earlier as an adult. I think things might’ve been quite different if that had been the case.
