Maybe the Trad Wife Has a Better Deal Than You

Chloe Lei

10 hours ago

4 min read

Make no mistake. The Convenient Wife is much more sinister than the Trad Wife.

In your late twenties to early thirties, you will encounter a very specific species of married woman. She might be your best friend from high school, your neighbour, your coworker or your sister. She has a high-paying job and a fancy title, a $79-a-week reformer Pilates membership and a husband everyone describes as “a great guy”. She pays half the mortgage on their house in Toorak. She has her own group of friends, her own ambitions and her own Amex. She wears Scanlan Theodore to work. She buys the Christmas presents for his family because she knows what everybody likes.

And when her husband sidles up to her sheepishly, sometime around lunchtime on her birthday, and admits that he has forgotten to buy her a present, no, actually, “Sorry, I just didn’t know what to get you”, she smiles in her usual chagrined manner and says: “It’s okay, honey. You didn’t need to get me anything.”

There are millions of women who look like this. If you look closely, you might recognise her, because ten years ago, you knew her as someone else. The Cool Girl.

Gillian Flynn gave her a name in Gone Girl, in what has since become one of the most recognisable dissections of heterosexual dating culture: “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl.”

The Cool Girl is “hot and understanding”, the sort of woman who can drink cheap beer, eat hamburgers, laugh at dirty jokes and somehow remain a size zero.

The Cool Girl is easy to be at 23 because she is young, and youth tends to do something funny to you: it makes a bad bargain look like a temporary arrangement.

At 23, there is always another Friday night, another boyfriend, another apartment, another job around the corner, another city. Your life still feels infinitely rearrangeable and spattered with possibility.

You are hot, thin, young and convinced you have all the time in the world, so you accept what you are given.

Of course you’ll split the dinner. No worries, you’ll chip in for the engagement ring. You won’t go on that university exchange to Vienna because he’s right, long-distance relationships never work out. You don't want him to think you're one of those girls. You know the type.

The girl with the Pinterest board of her dream engagement ring and the Notes app filled with potential baby names for children she hasn't had yet. How embarrassing, to want things. How deeply uncool, to expect them.

So then, eventually, she gets exactly what she wanted. The wedding bells ring. The honeymoon ends. The moving boxes are unpacked. They settle into the humdrum of married life.

And the girl who spent her twenties making herself easy to love wakes up at 35 and realises she made herself exceptionally easy to marry. She wakes up as the Convenient Wife.

The tragedy of the Convenient Wife is not that she made one terrible decision. It is that she made a thousand perfectly reasonable ones while she still believed she could change her mind at any time.

It's not necessarily that he refused to help. It's not even that he's a bad guy. Maybe, in the beginning, he tried. She just knew the better restaurant. She could find the cheaper flight. She remembered his mother preferred gold jewellery. She could do it faster herself.

So she did. And slowly, over time, he let her.

At 23, being the woman who needs nothing can feel like power because you still have everything: time, possibility, beauty, mobility, the intoxicating conviction that if this man disappoints you, there will simply be another one.

But make no mistake. The Convenient Wife is much more sinister than the Trad Wife.

The Trad Wife, for all the discourse she generates online, at least knows what she signed up for. Her bargain is explicit, contractual: you provide, I make the home. She may cook the dinner, remember the birthdays, raise the children, but nobody is pretending that this labour simply materialises because she happens to be “better at planning”. It is her role. She chose it. It’s in the job description.

The Convenient Wife never remembers agreeing to any such terms.

Power begins to look suspiciously like labour. Perhaps, if I could sit down at a wine bar with the Cool Girl now, while she is still 22 and deciding whether to stay home with her boyfriend or go on the university exchange to Vienna, this is what I would tell her.

Keep the beer. Keep the career. Split the bill if you want to. But don't confuse asking for less with being liberated. Have expectations. Get annoyed when he's thirty minutes late. Refuse to get in the car until he opens the door. Tell him you want the flowers.

Make him come to the family dinner and endure the dreaded small talk with your father. Take your time getting ready. Put on your makeup. Let him wait. Be inconvenient.

Because perhaps somehow, we became so terrified of being the demanding woman, the difficult girlfriend, the nagging wife, that we forgot there are worse things a woman can be than inconvenient.