Confessions of a Former #TradWife

A man is not the plan!

Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash

Quick highlights from this powerful and thought-provoking piece:

• My role as a traditional wife and mom was just to disappear and blend into the background.

• My needs were not expressed. I didn't recognize my own needs

• My role was to keep the household running and basically give him the life that he wanted. He could come and go as he pleased.

• He got to mold me and shape me into the woman that he wanted. He realized that by keeping me uneducated and out of the workforce with no experience, I was stuck. 

• He would remind me that I was uneducated and unqualified. And he would tell me, “you would be lucky if you could get a part time job at a fast food restaurant.” 

• I wish that I had maintained some sort of career path or job. It would have changed the game

• When he realized that I was seriously leaving, that our marriage was seriously ending he drained all of our accounts.

Ever since I began writing about the social media virality of #tradwife posts on Instagram and TikTok I have gotten a lot of feedback. Some of you were worried that I wasn’t giving voice to the reality of women who choose to have traditional gender roles in their marriage. We did a great episode of Under the Influence and a substack about whether trad wives are happier and more content in their marriages.

Throughout all these conversations I want to keep maintaining that I truly believe that women should have agency over their decisions, their finances and their education and ability to work no matter what role they take on in the partnership or in parenting.

I have also heard from dozens of former traditional wives, wives who completely submitted to their husbands, who allowed their husbands to control their finances, who gave up careers in order to care completely for their husband and home. These are the women who are now on the other side of their traditional marriage. The women who have gone through a nasty divorce and have had to start their education or their careers at age forty.

Today's episode of Under the Influence features one interview with a former trad wife, a woman who wrote to me and said she wanted to share her perspective and warnings from the other side.

This is what she told me in her original message:

I am a former #TradWife.  I was raised in a conservative Christian community, and the messaging that I got was that to be a wife and a mother was the ultimate fulfillment of my life as a woman. My ex-husband (spoiler alert!) and I started dating when I was 17 and he was 27. I was engaged by the time I was 19 and we got married when I was 20 and he was almost 30.  I intended on getting a college education, but dropped out during my first semester after multiple conversations that I had with him where he told me I wasn’t going to need a college education to raise babies and I was accruing student loans and debt for no reason.

My ex-husband and I fell into the very traditional roles. He didn’t get up with our babies (no, not once. Not when I was recovering from a C-section or had raging mastitis) because he “had to get a good night sleep because he brings in the money.”