Should I become a stay-at-home girlfriend?
On tradwives and lobotomies.
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In 2020, I fell down a rabbit hole. As my career and social life were upended by the pandemic, and I was confined to the insides of my parents' then-home in Philadelphia, I turned to a particular corner of the internet for solace. There was a community of people for whom, despite raging disease and despair, life had not changed. They were called, according to the internet: tradwives.
They wouldn’t call themselves tradwives. These various creators across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok prefer to refer to themselves as “homesteaders,” and have voluntarily removed themselves from modern life to live the way our ancestors did before novel concepts like electricity and “gender equality” became a thing. But the term, meaning “traditional wife,” is apt for these women, who are, ironically, using social media to share and promote their traditionally subservient, wifely lifestyle.
I knew I didn’t agree with much of their politics, but watching their lives through a screen as I remote-worked from a cold, gray city filled with buildings that were all shut down made me dream of the wide open spaces of a backyard farm of my own. The relentless stream of bad news, of social and political upheaval, and my own insecurity with my career had me longing to similarly shut myself away in the country and instead fill my life with the simple pleasures of a home filled with cooking, crafts, and children.
Throughout the years of 2020, 2021, and 2022, I was given a crash course in real life. No longer protected by my early-20s naivety, I faced hard decisions and made sacrifices and tortured myself over my ambition, wondering if my hopes of being a writer meant I’d always be working towards something impossible, leaving me perpetually unhappy. I’d often think fondly of what I’d then come to see as the only alternative.
“I just wish I was living in a remote cabin,” I’d tell my therapist. “I wish I could be free from social media and rejection, and that my life was just cooking, cleaning, parenting, sleep, and repeat.”
Tradwives are my fantasy, but other women have their own preferred dissociations. Across TikTok, “stay-at-home-girlfriend” content fills the feeds of viewers for whom ultimate freedom means no longer making their own money, and instead living their days in service of their partner. Last year, “lobotomy-chic” had a moment, with women joking-but-not-really that they wanted their brains unwired in exchange for the privilege of not thinking the difficult thoughts modern womanhood can provoke.
I know I won’t be happy in a life where I’m anything other than extraordinary, and rather learning to be satisfied with whatever life it is I’m lucky enough to build, what if there was a way to take it out of my own hands? To have someone knock me over the head in my apartment in Brooklyn, only for me to wake up a couple hundred miles north in an apron? What if some force out of my control took the ambition away from me by dropping me into a life in which I could never be more than functional?
“It’s interesting,” my therapist said in response to that admittedly unnerving sentence, “that freedom for you means giving up your autonomy.”
I am a feminist. I was parented by a working mother and a stay-at-home dad. For most of my life, I didn’t even realize there was gender inequality because I was raised in an environment that left no question that women were equal to men. But as I reached adulthood, the forces of sexism made themselves known in subtle, sinister ways. I started wearing headphones whenever I was in public so I could pretend I didn’t hear the things men were saying to me on the street. I got an IUD inserted, got it removed, and then got a new one, all without any adequate option for pain management. I had a job offer rescinded when I attempted to negotiate it. Insurance didn’t cover the medicine for my chronic bacterial vaginosis, because it wasn’t deemed technically medically necessary. And as I turned 30, the right to my own body was taken away from me, in supposed protection of a child the world would provide no support for once it was out of my uterus.
And in that moment in therapy, I realized, this is what living in patriarchy does. The road to the extraordinary is filled with purposefully-placed roadblocks. The journey wears you down and exhausts you until things like forced motherhood, no independent income, and a severed prefrontal cortex somehow feel like freedom.
Motherhood is not a prison, but it is work, often embarked upon by women in conjunction with a career of their own. Trading in a professional career for a role as homemaker is a valid and important life choice—provided it's one the mother wants, and not one she is resigned to. It’s certainly not a solution to an identity crisis. If I don’t know who I am or what I want, then the last thing I should do is create more of me.
Like most obsessions, my tradwife aspirations eventually passed. I try to think about how I can incorporate the things I covet of that life—the peace, the simplicity, the quiet—into the one I have filled with so many things I’d be silly to throw away: my creativity, my drive, and not to mention, my new high-tech espresso maker. It’s a privilege to have an identity crisis surrounded by these things, than to be trapped in a forced identity with none of them.
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Oh I feel this so deeply. This desire to be taken care of I think exists in us all. Freedom means suffering as much as happiness, and that can be scary, especially as a woman in the patriarchy, as you point out.
I’ve been thinking about this post since I read it yesterday, especially about your therapist’s comment about freedom meaning a restriction of autonomy. I grew up with my own trad wife (my mom), and the tenets of this ideology definitely took a toll on my psyche + our relationship. Definitely not a fun thing to be/live up to in real life! I can definitely see the allure, though - so much of life is chaotic and uncontrollable, it would be nice to tune out sometimes and just bake. Or clean. Or whatever. Then again, I feel like the trad wife life would be a lot less enticing if we all just got more sleep lol!