It's not in the manual

The best way to know how each of us needs to live authentically as a transgender person is to experience being unencumbered. For me that meant entering retirement without a partner to properly figure it out. When we are not fully out, are working and married, there is no way to know what our magic formula is because there are barriers there which work in two ways: they stop us from going further but also protect us from it. So we may daydream about something we have no experience with.

The starve and feed cycle of those who live part time can be frustrating to some but can work well presuming the level of dysphoria (assuming it exists) is manageable and the spouse is in agreement with an existing formula. In other words, there is a balance there which is agreeable to both people even if neither is overjoyed by it. This type of living is of course very much a boomer and genX phenomenon as millenials and certainly GenZ have tended to come out early to partners who generally know what they are in for from the outset.

What I can attest to is that once the novelty wears off, you could find that what you envisioned as your ideal may not be what you want and instead gleefully settle for slightly more expanded expression than you currently have. For me it turned out that much more was needed to reach authenticity than I had dared permit myself.

In any event, we humans tend to always imagine the grass being greener somewhere else until we have had the chance to fully see otherwise. Too bad that nowhere in the life manual did it say things were going to be optimal.