Lauren and Eric Eberspacher met during college. Eric was a year younger than Lauren, but she didn’t mind – and Eric just knew she was the one: Lauren was bubbly, a cute blonde with an infectious smile. At college, she was studying nursing. “And I was there to find a wife,” says Eric.
One of the first things Eric asked Lauren when they started dating was whether she had a “relationship with the Lord”. She did, she was the daughter of a pastor. Their “values” aligned, and “our personalities matched up well, too”, he adds. Despite doing her nurse training, Lauren would happily become a traditional wife, she told Eric, who is now 37. And so when they got married at 22 and 23, her life changed.
Rather than go out to work as an oncology nurse, Lauren would raise their children, bake from scratch – which “takes a lot of sacrifice”, she says – and manage the home. In her words, she would become her “husband’s helpmate”. Eric, meanwhile, would make the decisions, provide financially, and protect the home they keep.
The Eberspachers live an idyllic “traditional” marriage style, they tell me from their home in Nebraska, one that has been attracting a lot of attention of late.
Thanks to TikTok tradwife influencers like 22-year-old mum of three Nara Aziza Smith – described by GQ as “an avatar for a corner of social media that glorifies old-fashioned family structures and the wholesome, quasi-religious aesthetics of housewifery” – who has more than 9 million followers, and Estee Williams – a high-pitched housewife who’s rarely seen out of a pink cardigan – tradwives have never been so popular, or intriguing, or divisive.
But behind every “good” tradwife is a trad-husband – or, as some are calling them, the trad-dads. In these highly gendered marriages, it’s the men who supposedly rule the roost. So who are they? And, if making cola from scratch because your husband fancies a glass constitutes a good tradwife, what does it mean to be a poster-boy trad-husband?
Lucky Blue Smith, Nara’s husband and the centre of her social media empire, plays the role well. Lucky, 26, was famously plucked from obscurity – or a large Mormon family in Utah – aged 10 to be signed by an international modelling agency. He became intensely popular among teen girls who called themselves the Lucky Charms, and followed his every move on Tumblr and, later, Instagram.
Now, he has four children under four – the first with his model ex-girlfriend Stormi Bree, born when he was just 19 years old, and three with Nara (Whimsy Lou, Rumble Honey and Slim Easy) and born in quick succession since they married in 2020.
In Nara’s videos, Lucky is often visible in his “wifebeater” vest, high-cut Levis and wide-lapel shirts, chewing on a toothpick with his trad-boy Fifties style cow lick hairstyle, placing a suggestive hand around her waist as she cooks.
While she spends her time “realising” they have run out of toothpaste or ketchup and whips up a homemade batch of whatever her husband needs, he stands looking adoringly at his wonderful tradwife.
The wannabe James Dean’s own TikTok account has a paltry 457k followers to Nara’s millions – in public view at least, it’s his tradwife in the driving seat. In fact, in one recent video Nara makes clear that, while Lucky offers to help her film her content, she prefers to do it alone. She’s very specific about what she wants, she explains. Nara might be a tradwife in one sense, but she’s in control in every other way. And that probably includes being the higher earner too.
Like the majority of trad couples, Lucky’s life centres around his religious roots in Mormonism – in one uncharacteristic post last year, cracks in the trad couple’s glossy exterior appeared as he opened up about suffering from depression after “smoking” every day and struggling to give it up.
“But all I can tell you is God is with you,” he says. Despite this, and the performative “purity” of their trad brand, there’s a consistent, jarring sexual undertone to their content. Under Lucky’s latest video, in which he appears as his wife cooks in a black beaded gown, the first comment from Nara reads, “Daddy.”
But while Lucky and Nara hard sell the aesthetics of domesticity, a darker shadow has been cast on other trad couples. Recently Megan Agnew’s profile of “Queen of trad wives” Hannah Neeleman, or @BallerinaFarm, raised a few pertinent questions about trad-husbands in particular.
Neeleman, a Julliard-trained ballerina who gave up her career to live in Utah with her husband Daniel and raise their eight children, was ostensibly the focus of The Times interview.
But the subtext was obvious all along: why was the husband hovering at the end of every sentence she uttered? Was this really the utopia they’re selling she’s selling to her 10 million followers – or is there something at play behind the scenes?
After the world leapt to conclusions and concern about Neeleman, she later leapt to her husband’s defence. In the week following the release of the article, she posted that the couple had thought the “interview went really well”, but that they were taken aback upon reading the final account. It “shocked us and shocked the world,” Neelman said, “by being an attack on our family and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit.”
The Eberspachers live a pretty similar lifestyle to the Neelemans. Their four children – Nora, 11, Andi, 9, Decon, 7, and Sybil, 4 – are growing up on the farm that Eric took over from four previous generations of men in his family, the youngest two home-schooled while the older kids now attend classes.
On a typical day, Eric is out working the fields all morning while Lauren, 38, is “cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, wiping up spills, calming down tantrums”, she says. “He brings the bacon home and I fry it up and cook it.”
Is she oppressed? “No, I think [our lifestyle] has been painted in a way that feels oppressive, like the husband is very oppressive of the woman,” Lauren says. “As though he’s making her do all these things, forcing her to, and she’s miserable.” Rather, they find contentment in their roles, Lauren says.
Eric brings up “the whole tradwife, Red Pill movement”. The Red Pill forum was set up in 2013, and encouraged women to behave as tradwives, idealising modest dressing, and spousal servitude (domestically and sexually). “Thinking about that whole movement … I just think in the last generation it seems like we lost something. In the sense of masculinity and femininity.
“It’s not really been on the radar for a lot of people. Maybe the tradwife Red Pill movement is kind of an overreaction. But you can’t deny that actually there’s a problem in that realm.”
His thoughts echo those of Conner Williams, husband of Estee Williams, who was studying meteorology at university before she became a wife. She now delivers TikTok explainers “Biblically submissive wives” and how to make potpourri from scratch.
Conner appeared alongside Estee to speak on the American talk show Dr Phil, where he also took issue with feminism. “I think it hurts our masculinity,” Conner told the host. “ … I think it hurts masculinity because the woman is more the leader than the man. Men are born to be leaders,” he continues.
But herein lies a problem. While many of these men are purportedly head of the household – the decision makers, as Conner believes, and the breadwinners – it’s the tradwives on social media who are likely bringing home a lot more bacon.
Avid sleuth TikTokkers have made modest estimations that Nara Smith earns more than £200,000 per month for her softly spoken “cult-like” cooking videos.
Estee Williams, deemed a modern-day Stepford wife, will likely be earning thousands, too. The sleuths note that the figure doesn’t include brand deals – as well as earning from TikTok views, Nara and Lucky have partnered with Calvin Klein and K18 in the past.
Lauren posts about her life with Eric and her children on Instagram, where she has 13k followers, and on her blog – From Blacktop to Dirt Road – and has written a book, Midnight Lullabies, for new mothers.
Her Facebook page has more than 250,000 followers and at one point she was travelling around doing about 20 events per year giving talks. But she says monetising being a tradwife is not the aim. She and Eric decided that her work wasn’t fitting the “mission” for their family.
“Things were kind of starting to fall off the wheels a little bit, and I wasn't able to keep up and do all the things that I felt like God was calling me to do as a wife and a mom at home,” she explains. “And so I stepped away.”
Would it disrupt the power dynamic in the house if she were to start earning more than Eric? “Yes,” Lauren says. “For us, I think it would.”
Eric explains that this is because they go by the scriptures, and what God says about men and women. “They’re of the same value, but they’re different. They’re just different,” he says. “I know some people will gasp when I say men and women are different. God made man a certain way and made woman a certain way and gave them a blueprint of how to act within their nature.”
This really came into play when Lauren experienced a difficult time early on in their marriage, she says. “I was a rage monster. I was not fun to be around, I wasn’t a good friend, I wasn’t a great wife… [Anger] was just really consuming me, and Eric stood up and he said, ‘Lauren, this is not right. This is ruining your life. You’re living in sin, you’re not honouring God, and you’re not enjoying the life that you’re supposed to enjoy.’”
Lauren is grateful to Eric now for “stepping in” and “leading me out of this really dark season in my life”. They are happy – Eric, who sits at the kitchen table with her as we chat over Zoom, feels their marriage is strong, and fun. They are clear that this is the life they’ve chosen for themselves – they’re not preaching to others to do the same.
Still, they are keen to talk about it, as is everyone else in recent months. There seems to be little sign of the tradwife era coming to an end anytime soon at this point, especially with populist politics on both sides of the Atlantic having sought to validate conservatism on the Christian right for some time.
Will trad-husbands, particularly those benefiting from the (baking-from-scratch) breadwinners at their sides, be now subjected to the same scrutiny? Probably not. That would be something called gender equality.
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