it’s complicated
Stories on the sometimes frustrating, sometimes confusing, always engrossing subject of modern relationships.
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I make my husband breakfast every morning. Even worse: I bring it to him. And when he’s working from home, lunch too. Maybe an afternoon snack. I don’t just do it — I insist upon it. If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d one day take full responsibility for feeding an adult man, I would have gagged, possibly cried, and reaffirmed my commitment to never getting married.
It all started two years ago when we moved in together. He wanted to break his habit of eating bagels most mornings. I was making myself breakfast anyway, so I offered to prepare whatever I was having. Usually, fruit and yogurt or an almond-butter sandwich. Occasionally, an omelet.
Around the same time, I became addicted to tradwife TikTok content. Even before I started watching and following, I’d seen enough think pieces to know they were problematic: Many openly promote a glossy, Instagrammable return to the 1950s, a time in which most women had to get married, stay home, and submit to their husbands. So I pretended to like them ironically. In truth, I found their content comforting: the sweet relief of watching hot women clean. The more tradwife videos I watched, it seemed, the more satisfaction I got from bringing my husband breakfast.
My favorites became Estee Williams and Hannah Neeleman, a.k.a. of Ballerina Farm. Neeleman appealed to my desire to get out of the city: She makes farm life glamorous, even with eight kids. Williams is stylish; she somehow finds reasons to dress up just for spending the day at home, whereas I am often too tired to put mascara on before going out on Saturday night. They spoke directly to the voids in my own life: the exhaustion with my loud city, my overcrowded apartment, my overfilled schedule. I knew, deep down, that it was only “content,” not real life. I was seeing well-edited glimpses at a time; who knows if they’re actually happy, or what kind of help they’re getting behind-the-scenes to give them the time to apply a full face of makeup before baking bread. Neeleman’s husband, for example, is the son of the founder of JetBlue. That would make having eight kids a bit easier. Still, I couldn’t stop.
I’d always believed traditional gender roles were something to avoid. I grew up in New York City with a working mom and a stay-at-home dad. I graduated college the same year that Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In came out. I took a well-paying job in Silicon Valley, rented my own apartment, and began adulthood as an Independent Woman™. And I was grateful. The last thing I wanted was a man depending on me to bring him yogurt.
And yet, ten years later, my breakfast habit was spiraling. I started to put more effort into the aesthetics of the meal; I’d cut a banana and place the slices in a perfect circle around the yogurt. I’d adorn maple syrup in the shape of a heart in his oatmeal. I’m not a talented cook per se, so what I lacked in skill, I made up for in style. I started buying purple sweet potatoes, because purple looks nice. Soon, purple sweet potatoes were not enough: I needed the whole rainbow. I imagined making a video of myself explaining the choices: orange slices in one corner, eggs in another, avocado in a third. I wanted to do it like the tradwives did.
My husband expressed a lot of gratitude. Once, a friend of ours said he’d heard about my beautiful breakfasts, and I felt an unfamiliar pride. After a few months, his bagel-habit had been broken, and he’d come to recognize the value in starting his day with protein and fiber. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. We moved, and I purchased a small countertop dishwasher for our new apartment. The dishwasher could only hold about ten dishes, and I obsessed over packing it as strategically as possible. Instead of simply bringing my husband breakfast, I would return to collect his dishes afterward. He assured me many times I didn’t have to (and asked me to mention it in this essay), but I wanted to. I couldn’t stop.
Eventually, I felt compelled to interrogate my own behavior — the type of woman I’d imagined myself to be didn’t exactly take this much pride in her breakfast skills — and I developed theories for what was happening. Some are relatively innocuous: when you live together, you divide the labor. I manage more of the day-to-day tasks; he manages the car (alternate-side parking, in our case, which he has to do most days) and all of the construction and repairs. He’s incredibly handy; before I met him, I duct-taped my curtains to the wall. And making him breakfast is literally good for him — since I started taking overbearing steps to control his diet, his cholesterol has dropped significantly (one of the many reasons I believe marriage is far better for men than women). And maybe I just like the break in my morning: I have deadlines at 10 a.m. and noon every day. If I didn’t break to make breakfast, I might go six hours without standing up.
Or perhaps it was the maternal element: There’s something protective about it, like the only way to make sure he eats a healthy breakfast is to do it myself. The last man I dated before my husband was six years younger than me. Sometimes, I would cut up grapes for him because we (I?) thought it was funny. Sometimes, I bring my husband sliced apples and peanut butter. As though he is seven.
One theory though began to connect the others: The tradwives had simply wormed their way into my brain. The implicit messaging that women are most satisfied within the domestic realm, with reminders that their lifestyles are “natural.” That it’s actually sad that so many women think working outside the home is better, with their own stories of leaving the workforce and watching their dopamine levels rise. That I am biologically predestined to cut up my husband’s apples; I’ve been fighting my own wiring for years, which is surely why I’ve been in therapy since I was 17. It’s the wrong lesson to take from the most famous tradwives, since no one acquires millions of followers without a vast effort, and they’re likely making thousands of dollars (or more) from their videos. But they wouldn’t have gotten that platform if they didn’t know how to sell themselves.
One problem with tradwives is that they’re not Ben Shapiro; they don’t make zero good points. There is a lot expected of the modern woman, so I can’t blame anyone for feeling burnt out. And the work that these tradwives promote and perform is valuable: just because capitalism systematically undervalues the labor women do at home doesn’t mean the rest of us should. Even if the most successful tradwives can hire help, there aren’t plenty of stay-at-home moms who can’t. I’m a freelancer with seven different jobs at a time, and while I take pride in my career, I’d be hard-pressed to argue that some of my work – writing X posts for corporations, for example (no offense) – has more intrinsic value than preparing a healthy breakfast for my life partner. Plus, unlike the rest of my work, I will not be judged by how well I make my husband breakfast; he will eat anything, including a cauliflower soup I can only describe as “vinegar-flavored.”
There’s nothing wrong with getting enjoyment from domestic work, or choosing to do it full-time, if it’s an option. But the tradwives glorify a time in which women didn’t have a choice. I have not stopped making my husband breakfast. But I don’t want to take for granted that it’s something I choose, something I could choose to stop. He would be fine if I did. This morning, I made him a smoothie that he described as “chewy” (I needed to get rid of the green beans), so to be honest, he might even prefer it.
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