'Dead inside': Tradwives realize their horrible mistake too late

A new report reveals that tradwives — or women who willingly dedicate their entire lives to serving their husbands, usually for religious and political reasons — are starting to regret their decision.

Enitza Templeton, a former tradwife, is urging other tradwives to protect themselves from potential abuse, exploitation and depression by choosing that lifestyle without fully understanding the implications, reported The New York Post’s Asia Grace on Tuesday. “By 36, the mother of four found herself feeling like “a prisoner” in her marriage, ultimately leading to a divorce.

Grace added, “And Templeton shared that her biggest challenge post-divorce was navigating life without a solid education, professional résumé or real-world experiences.”

Templeton told Grace about feeling “dead inside” as a result of a life that entirely revolved around catering to her husband’s wants and needs, with the New Jersey native claiming that one rarely sees tradwives over the age of 35 talking publicly about how much they love their marriages because they are often deeply unhappy. Instead they are “keeping their heads down, gritting their teeth and waiting to die because that’s all there is left for them. That’s their only escape.”

Templeton told Grace, “At a certain age, I got to a point in the marriage where I was like, ‘Oh my god, is this really what I want to do with my life? What comes after this?”

Similar to Templeton is Christine, a 40-year-old ex-tradwife in the southeast who said that she had been “taught to submit to my husband no matter what, and if there was infidelity in the marriage, it was probably because of something I’d done wrong. But if I prayed harder, and contorted myself to his will, he’d become a true man of God.”

She added, “If there was cheating, I justified it by saying, ‘Well, it’s just sex. I have the ring. He comes home to me. He takes care of me and our kids.' He became my identity. I was solely an extension of him.”

Eventually Christine decided she needed to leave the marriage because, after being diagnosed with Lyme disease, her husband refused to alleviate any of her marital and motherly duties such as solely raising the children, cleaning the home, cooking the meals and “enthusiastically” being available for sex at any time. When she began saying “No” to his demands, it led to “severe tension,” as well as Christine regularly praying “God, if you want this marriage to work, then please change his heart,” by her own account.

Grace also spoke with a 36-year-old former tradwife, Sansa, from Columbus, Ohio, who said she gave up a college scholarship to get married in her late teens.

“My marriage wasn’t some lovey-dovey partnership,” Sansa told Grace. “The house and kids were my responsibilities. I had to have dinner waiting on the table every night, I had to dress modestly outside of the house so that I didn’t draw attention to myself, but dress sexy for him when he came home from work.”

The New York Post’s story is not alone in profiling tradwives who abandon the lifestyle. In August The New York Times reported that Lauren Southern, a prominent tradwife influencer, had also left the fold.

“Being an antifeminist, it turns out, is no shield against abusive male power,” columnist Michelle Goldberg explained, citing Southern’s new self-published memoir “This Is Not Real Life.” Describing it as a lesson of “conservative ideology colliding with reality,” Goldberg detailed Southern’s “painful attempts to contort herself into an archetypical tradwife” until she became suicidal.

“Her story should be a cautionary tale for the young women who aspire to the domestic life she once evangelized for,” Goldberg wrote.

Meanwhile in 2024, Salon's Amanda Marcotte covered how the tradwife movement is linked to Christian nationalism, and specifically the desire to remove women from public life. Explaining that the online tradewife content is "often interwoven with fundamentalist Christianity," she noted that it contradicts most women’s lived experiences — as well as ongoing trends toward women’s emancipation.

"The ubiquity of this content, especially on TikTok, has created widespread anxiety that this is a real-life trend of everyday women rejecting feminism for 'happy housewife' fantasies," Marcotte wrote. "In the real world, however, women are not turning their backs on decades of women's progress. The data shows the opposite."

She added, "More women than ever are embracing financial independence, delaying motherhood, and choosing single life over unsatisfactory relationships. Tradwives are a silly online fantasy, and in many cases, overt propaganda." Indeed, a 2023 study from Pew Research found wives make as much money or more than their husbands in 45 percent of marriages.

"About half of women are unmarried, which is a record high,” Marcotte said, citing data from the Pew study and the Census Bureau. “Single women are more likely than single men to own their home. Single women without children have as much wealth on average as their male counterparts."

She concluded, "Young women complete college at higher rates than young men, with 47 percent of women ages 25 to 34 having a bachelor's degree, compared to 37 percent of men that age. The birth rate has hit a record low, largely driven by the collapse in teen pregnancy rates. There's no real-world tradwife trend. It's better understood as an online fantasy, which attracts so much attention precisely because it's so foreign to people's lived experiences."