I Became a 'Tradwife' At 19. The Decision Still Haunts Me.

In 2008, a chance Google search changed the trajectory of my life. I had just moved from Texas to New York City for college, andI found myself wrestling with separating my own political and religious beliefs from my parents’. After being homeschooled in a conservative Christian family, I relished the experience of learning diverse viewpoints in a secular environment, one that seemed to assume “feminist” as a default state for all women. But after a semester of reading Judith Butler and Betty Friedan, I started to wonder about women who rejected the concept of gender equality – women like the ones I knew growing up. 

While procrastinating on a midterm paper for my women’s studies class, I typed “anti-feminist woman” into the search bar. The search brought me to page after page of blogs promoting “traditional womanhood,” the belief that women and girls belonged under the authority of men.  A decade before the “tradwives” of TikTok, these writers used platforms like Wordpress and Blogspot to promote their (mostly) fundamentalist Christian ideology. I clicked through a few, seeing familiar Bible verses like Ephesians 5:25 (“Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord”) and pictures of smiling, tow-headed kids eating home-cooked meals at spotlessly clean kitchen tables. Several blogs were written by girls my age who were self-professed “stay-at-home daughters”—adult women who believe in living at home under their father’s “authority” until marriage rather than pursuing work or higher education. 

At first, I read out of pure fascination. It felt like a peek into what my life would have been like if I were raised in an even more conservative household. My parents were Reagan Republicans who listened to Rush Limbaugh and watched Fox News, but they’d always encouraged me to get an education and think for myself. I was taught it was a sin to have sex outside of a heterosexual marriage, but I was allowed to date as a teenager and wear whatever I wanted. 

The girls whose blogs hooked me wore long denim skirts and spent their days caring for younger siblings, baking bread, and volunteering at church. They didn’t date; they “courted” men selected for them by their fathers. They saved their first kisses for their wedding days.

I pretended to love the chance to garden, hang laundry outside, and breathe the fresh air—but I hated it.

I kept reading these blogs and discovering new ones as my freshman year came to a close. College felt more and more like an echo chamber of progressivism; I was getting defensive and frustrated by what I felt was a mischaracterization of conservative beliefs by everyone around me. I retreated to the world of these proto-tradwives. I sympathized with them. I understood them. Before long, I started to agree with them. 

I swapped my skinny jeans for long, flowing skirts. I grew my hair long and carried a Bible with me everywhere. I stayed enrolled in college but kept myself isolated socially out of a desire to stay “pure” and “set apart for the Lord.” I didn’t have to work too hard at that part; artsy NYC college kids weren’t lining up to hang out with a girl who spent her Friday nights listening to hymns and memorizing entire chapters of the New Testament. 

Except one. 

Over the summer, I met Matthew through mutual friends on social media. We shared a sense of humor, a love of reading, and a religious belief system. We fell in love – the reckless, giddy kind of teenage love that replaces all the reasoning cells in your brain with glittering infatuation confetti. The career goals and ambition that brought me to New York no longer seemed important. All I wanted now was to be Matt’s wife. 

We got engaged on my 19th birthday, six weeks after meeting in person for the first time. I spent my sophomore year planning our wedding and deflecting the concerns of friends and professors who encouraged me to “wait a few years.”  Because we believed pre-marital sex was a sin, we were eager to marry as soon as possible. In an outdoor ceremony next to Matt’s childhood church the next summer, I vowed to be an “obedient, faithful, and submissive wife.” Matt pledged to “have authority over me” as my headship. 

At the start of our marriage, I tried desperately to follow a traditional path. Matt worked a minimum-wage job as a barista. I did the housework, managed his schedule, and cooked cheap meals of dollar-store beans and rice. At school, I enjoyed that my marriage and my extreme beliefs made me “different.”

Matt hated New York City so, the second I handed in my graduation capstone assignment, we moved to a rural farming community upstate. Our new town was full of conservative Christians, homeschoolers, and homesteaders. It couldn’t have been more different than the city. I pretended to love the chance to garden, hang laundry outside, and breathe the fresh air—but I hated it.

The harder I worked at being a good wife, the more distant Matt became. He started spending all of his time playing video games and watching YouTube. He missed hours and days of work and struggled to keep a job. Via social media, I watched my friends from New York start their post-college careers, adopt dogs, and go out to brunch. Meanwhile, I got pregnant and hoped that motherhood would fix me. After our son’s birth, Matt became even more distant. Postpartum depression consumed me as I attempted to care for not only an infant on my own, but my checked-out husband, too.

Motherhood didn’t fix me, but it did snap me back to reality.

Motherhood didn’t fix me, but it did snap me back to reality. One bleary-eyed midnight, I nursed the baby back to sleep, listening to the click-click of Matt’s mouse at the desktop in the corner. I wondered what happened to the ambitious, driven girl I used to be. I wondered if she’d ever get the chance to live again. 

I started untangling myself from the cult of traditional womanhood during that sleepless first year of my son’s life. I opened up my own business, started wearing pants in public again (oh leggings, how I’d missed you) and embraced the reality that I don’t have the patience or dirt tolerance to grow my own vegetables. Soon after, Matt and I began distancing ourselves from  evangelical Christianity. Eventually, we left the church altogether. I thought maybe leaving our traditional beliefs behind would mean a magical transformation of our relationship. The reality was much grimmer. Matt’s emotional neglect and irresponsibility spiraled downward; my bitterness and frustration increased.

It took a few more years before I’d work up the nerve to walk away from my marriage. The beliefs I’d clung to during those formative years of early adulthood made me believe divorce would be the ultimate shame. Instead, divorce turned out to be my ticket to a second chance. 

Now in my mid-30s, I’m happy with the life I’ve built in spite of my early poor decisions. My son is the greatest gift I could imagine and I’d do it all over again just to have him. Yet, I’m still haunted with regret. Friends tell stories about their adventures in their early 20s, their bad boyfriends and career mishaps and spontaneous backpacking trips. I jumped right into marriage and motherhood without ever getting a chance to experience adulthood on my own terms. 

I wonder what would have happened if I’d never fallen down the rabbit hole of those blogs, if I’d listened to everyone who told me to delay getting married. Now, with the growing popularity of tradwife accounts on social media, I worry about the power they have to affect teen girls like me. If a self-identified “feminist” with access to resources and an education could be persuaded by them, how much more powerful could their message be for girls in other circumstances? Tradwife content isn’t harmless. It has the power to derail your life.