Daniel and Brianna Bell met as college students near Toronto. Brianna, especially, had embraced traditionalist messages about family from her conservative Christian church. So when they married, Daniel became a pastor and Brianna became a stay-at-home mom.

Brianna lived what was essentially a “tradwife” lifestyle — the trend popularized by online influencers in which women embrace conservative gender roles in their families. For her, that meant making her own laundry detergent, being gentle and meek, and prioritizing her husband, kids, and God over herself at every turn, she told me. For Daniel, the traditional life was a little more complicated.

On the one hand, “I felt like I never had to cook,” he told me. “I barely had to clean.”

On the other, he was faced with the task of providing for his entire household on a pastor’s salary, sometimes as low as $9,000 a year. He described the intense pressure of “feeling like I want to give my family the life they desire” but knowing that was “impossible on one income in the world that we lived in.”

The financial struggles were just one aspect of trad life that began to chafe at the Bells over time. “A big perspective of that subculture is that men have the final say and the authority,” Bell said. “I never really felt like that was practical.”

Bell’s experience reveals some of the contradictions inherent in being a “trad husband” — a role that receives little public discussion despite the visibility of online tradwives. The idea of the tradwife doesn’t exist without a husband; he’s the head of the household, the one to whom everyone else is supposed to submit. Yet the husbands of popular tradwife influencers typically trail their wives in popularity, and almost all discourse around “traditional” gender roles focuses on the decisions and activities of women. “Trad husbands” are so invisible that even the term demands quotation marks. In interviews for this story, I often had to explain what I meant by it.

The invisibility of the trad husband reflects a larger vacuum when it comes to men’s roles in debates about family policy and culture. In an era of declining birth rates, conservative politicians and activists (most of them male) have put a lot of energy into influencing women’s behavior. It’s less clear, however, what these new traditionalists believe men are supposed to do — especially in an era when being a sole breadwinner is more difficult than ever. In 2025, do young men even want to be trad husbands? And if not, what do they want to do instead?

Where are the trad husbands?

Tradwife content is often ostensibly aimed at women, with some influencers offering explicit tips for life as a stay-at-home wife and mother. Indeed, it’s hard to exist as a woman on the internet without being served a tradwife video at some point, and the footage of relaxed moms and cute children performing photogenic chores in beautiful, curated spaces can draw in even the least trad-aligned viewer.

These videos make an implicit promise to the women watching them — a promise that a life of calm and beauty is available to them, if they only make the right choices. Marriage is part of that promise. One message of tradwife content is, “if you look a certain way, if you prioritize domesticity, children, and traditional feminine pursuits, you will be gifted a supportive husband who provides for........

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