“Good Luck Finding Your Traditional Wife”: Woman Refuses To Change For Her Boyfriend

Raising a family takes a combination of time and money, so some couples opt to split the difference and focus on one thing each. One person works, the other is a stay-at-home-parent. But recently, there has been an increase in couples where this concept is taken to the extreme.

A woman was shocked to learn that her boyfriend had suddenly decided that what he wanted more than anything was for her to be a “tradwife,” meaning she would forgo her career to just stay at home and raise their hypothetical family. We reached out to the woman in the story and will update the article when she gets back to us.

While the idea of a stay-at-home-parent has been around forever, there is a growing trend online where younger women decided to forgo any career and, instead, become a sort of mishmash of misimagined 1950s homemaker cliches. What sets “tradwives” (and it really is only wives, there isn’t some male alternative) apart, is that they seem to take the worst parts of women’s exclusion from the labor market, without any of the prerequisite skills.

For example, it’s not that uncommon for one parent, often the mother, to take time off work to raise the children for a while. But tradwives take this even further, purposefully self-sabotaging their careers and “submitting” to their husbands. The assumption is that their relationship will simply last forever and not end when the husband, who now has 100% of the power, decides that he wants to be with someone else.

Even if the husband is completely loyal and unshakable, there is a reason “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” remains an age-old saying. A good tradwife should be aware of that, seeing as they are trying to replicate a lifestyle from a time when egg-transportation was a major concern. As far as bad decisions are concerned, this one is really, really up there, as everyone from a poultry farmer to a financial adviser can attest to.

For example, what exactly happens if the husband, who makes the vast majority of the household’s resources, gets injured? Or gets fired? Perhaps he doesn’t like his job or has a toxic boss. Like someone on a work visa, there are now a lot more strings attached to his job, so leaving or changing it is problematic.

This is assuming there aren’t other, larger issues in the relationship. Domestic abuse, for example, or perhaps the realization that you just married the wrong person. As a tradwife, you are effectively stuck, you have no resources and you have spent years or even decades outside of the job market. It’s a lot harder to find a job when you haven’t held one in awhile.

What also makes this “movement” insidious is that it is by-and-large a social media construct. While there are now all sorts of tradwife content creators online, it’s important to realize that these are still influencers, who maintain a brand and actively make money through their posts and videos.

The idea of a tradwife they present is an anachronistic and simplified image of a housewife from the 50s. However, with a few rare exceptions, most of these online tradwives seem to think that it boils down to never arguing with your husband, babysitting your kids and baking a handful of cupcakes.

They sell this lifestyle and aesthetic to impressionable young girls, while actually maintaining a degree of independence. Even worse, at some point, they will simply decide to move on to the next trend, while their most impressionable viewers will have locked themselves into a lifestyle that is by no means easy to escape. Ultimately, if this is what both parties want, then more power to them, but as this story shows, you can’t exactly make your partner, much less girlfriend or boyfriend do something against their will.