Trad wife or rad wife?
Determining the exact time and place in history upon which to model your spousal relationship can be a tricky proposition.
There are lots of popular ways to outsource one's thinking. A few examples:
Appeal to authority: the leader says it's true, therefore I'll do it and think the same way.
Appeal to popularity: lots of other people are doing it, therefore I'll do it and think the same way.
Appeal to tradition: my ancestors did it, therefore I'll do it and think the same way.
We could take deep dives into any one of these fallacious modes of outsourced thinking, but today I'd like to focus on one that combines all three: traditional wives, aka "trad wives," a phenomenon which is apparently gaining in popularity.
What is a trad wife or a trad life?
While there isn't a single, clear definition of what it means to be a trad wife (for reasons I’ll detail below, there can't be), the general idea is that:
1. A married couple organizes themselves hierarchically, with the male as the primary authority and the female in the subservient role.
2. The couple arranges their functions and responsibilities based on their primary sex characteristics. For instance, if you have male genitalia, you'd be the designated primary breadwinner. If you have female genitalia, you'd be the designated primary parent and meal preparer (exceptions might be made for cooking animal meat over fire, which requires male anatomy).
What is traditional?
The primary problem with trying to base your life or mode of thinking on "tradition" is that you have to then try to arbitrarily peg your notions of what is traditional to a specific time and place — one that is also fundamentally different from the time and place you currently live in. 1950s southern America? First century CE Roman empire? Clovis culture? Blombos cave?
How far back in time do you go to find the correct tradition to live by for today? Where on the globe do you go? Why then? Why there?
Even if you’re able to pin down those two factors and visit there in a time machine for marital lessons, would you find cultural homogeneity or a more dynamic culture that varied from house-to-house, village-to-village? And would you transport all the traditions you found in that halcyon time and place back to the 21st century as a collective whole or sift and sort desirable traditions through your modern construct?
The ancient tradition of female hunters and alloparenting
Ever since finding my first *projectile point as a kid and wondering about the people who made it, I've had a keen interest in the indigenous peoples of the Americas. (*For reference, projectile points refer to an older technology used on spears and atlatls starting around 15,000 years ago. Bow and arrow technology was first used around 6,000 BCE in Alaska, and wasn't fully adopted across the continent until around 500 AD.)
I really admire Paleolithic cultures such as the Clovis culture, which was at its apex around 13,000 years ago. These were highly nomadic groups who used specialized stone tools (such as the characteristic fluted Clovis point) to hunt megafauna as large as mastodons and mammoths.
Based on archaeological evidence from various burial sites, women in these cultures hunted right alongside men — by necessity it was all hands on deck if you were able-bodied. Children not of hunting age would have stayed behind and been cared for by others in the group, such as siblings, grandparents, etc. This form of group parenting is referred to as "alloparenting," and it’s likely so ancient that it predates anthropologically modern humans.
In 2024, would it make sense for my wife and I to peg our relationship dynamics and parenting style to an ancient Paleolithic tradition? We could craft our own Clovis blades and go out in search of mammoths after trying to recruit our busy neighbors, friends, or parents to watch our son.
Obviously, this scenario is absurd. However, equally absurd is arbitrarily outsourcing how we relate and function as a married couple to any other specific time and place. If there is one takeaway you get from studying human populations throughout history it is that we are a highly dynamic and adaptable species — that's one major reason we haven't gone extinct. Yes, we are shaped by our past, but we are also constantly adapting and optimizing to our present environmental contexts — and in the modern era, ideally that process happens with a healthy dose of scientific rationalism mixed in.
Optimizing as husband and wife in the present context
Yes, I am biologically different from my wife. For instance, the hormones that masculinized me gave me greater physical strength. However, possessing greater physical strength does not then necessitate that I dominate, rule, or subjugate my wife. Doing so would not just diminish her, it would diminish me. It would also establish a suboptimal spousal relationship model for our son which would then damage him and his future relationships.
My wife is a brilliant and thoughtful person with unique skills and types of intelligence which I do not possess. She is my partner in life. She is my equal. We are a team. Thus through a collaborative co-equal relationship dynamic, we achieve better ideas and outcomes than we would if we were operating in a strictly hierarchical model where my ideas, beliefs, and desires dominated. Our two brains are better than one.
Does my wife defer to me on certain things in which I am more skilled, experienced, or well-suited — and vice versa? Yes. For instance, I tend to operate the chainsaw when a tree falls, and I also do the final editing on our writing projects. Likewise, I defer to her on design aesthetics and many social functions. But without fail, we are improved by working collaboratively as equals.
Rad wife versus trad wife
If you want to outsource your thinking and way of life to a romanticized notion of a prior time and place in history, then you obviously have the legal and moral authority to do so. It's your life. But recognize that being a trad wife or husband as commonly practiced is an inherently arbitrary aim that's likely to diminish rather than enhance the people and lives involved.
I can also say from experience that it makes life much easier when both parents are competent across a broad range of core, shared responsibilities — it’s better to be a Swiss army knife than a scalpel. I can just as easily prepare a healthy, made-from-scratch meal if my wife isn't available or able to, but most nights we work together in the kitchen to produce the best meals and reduce the workload on each other. Likewise, I don't think possessing male genitalia inhibits my ability to vacuum or clean the house when needed.
So rather than being "trad," I'd encourage you to consider being a "rad" wife or husband instead. Think about all the rad and amazing things you and your spouse have to offer each other and the world — so long as the relationship model optimizes both the individual and collective potential of both parties.
Another benefit? A coequal relationship model doesn’t just benefit the family, it benefits the society at large. If you’re only tapping into the potential of 50% of your population, you’re leaving a lot on the table.
Parenting is critically important work that, unfortunately, doesn’t pay very well. Since the emergence of modern humans about 300,000 years ago, the function of “parent” was distributed across the entire kin group/village via alloparenting, not just left up to the chronically exhausted biological parents. Whether we like it or not, that traditional model no longer works in a world of hyper-individualism, geographically fragmented families, and highly specialized economies where we have to leave our families for large chunks of the day (or night) in order to earn the capital we need to buy products and services for our family.
This is a new world; a new way of being that has never existed. Cultural software that might have performed adequately well for some people in another place in the distant past isn’t likely to provide optimal results today.
So what are we to do? The only thing we can: use our minds and reasoning abilities to come up with the best possible solution(s) for our unique circumstances. When doing so, two brains is likely to produce better results than one. That’s why I’m very thankful to be married to a rad wife.