The matchmaker Blaine Anderson, who runs the high-end dating service Dating by Blaine, receives a lot of hyper-specific requests from her wealthy male clients, many of which she documents on her popular social media accounts.
But no one was more difficult than the man she refers to as Daniel. (Anderson uses pseudonyms when discussing her clients to protect their privacy.)
Daniel was in his early forties and had never been married, but was looking to start a family, according to Anderson. Like most of her clients, he’s fabulously wealthy, a successful tech founder who’d sold his company a few years prior. (Anderson, who works exclusively with men, charges anywhere between $30,000 to $50,000 for her services; she says she charged this particular client $49,000.)
But Daniel had, as Anderson recounts, “very, very, very specific requests.” He wanted to date a younger woman who prioritized getting married and having children. He wanted a woman from the Midwest (even though he, himself, did not live in the Midwest) and who worked in a caregiving profession—but she couldn’t be a doctor, “because that would mean she was too focused on her career,” Anderson says. And he wanted someone conventionally beautiful, even specifying the degree to which her eyes sloped, or how many centimeters her nose should be from her upper lip.
Needless to say, Anderson says, Daniel did not end up finding a match. But although he was a singular case, the qualities he was looking for in an ideal partner were not singular at all.
Anderson and other professional matchmakers tell WIRED that the men they work with are increasingly asking to be set up with traditional religious conservative women—regardless of whether they themselves self-identify as traditional, religious, or conservative.
“They’ll say things like, ‘I want a Christian woman,’ or ‘I want someone who has the values of a wife and mother,’” says Anderson, who noted on X in February that she has been seeing an increase in “matchmaking applications from non-religious men” looking for such women. “In a lot of these cases what they’re trying to get at is they want a trad wife.”
Since Trump’s reelection, much has been made of the rise of the trad wife, an aesthetic that celebrates stay-at-home motherhood, 1950s femininity, and a shift toward traditional gender roles. Popularized by creators such as Hannah Neeleman (also known as Ballerina Farm) and the model Nara Smith, the trad wife ideology urges women to ditch hustle culture in favor of a softer, gentler domestic lifestyle.
In popular culture, such as the breakout novel Yesteryear, the trad wife has been lampooned as insidious right-wing propaganda, intended to erase decades of feminist progress. Yet the aesthetic undeniably holds allure—not just for the women who consume Smith and Neeleman’s bucolic, softly lit content, but for men who desire a more submissive partner.
In the dating sphere, young, upwardly mobile men are increasingly asking to be matched with women who prioritize stay-at-home motherhood over a career, says Erika Kaplan, the vice president of membership at the national matchmaking service Three Day Rule, which charges anywhere between $25,000 to $100,000 for its VIP package. “I am hearing a lot of words thrown around like ‘faith’ or ‘traditional’ or ‘family-oriented’ to kind of signal the kind of life these men envision with a partner,” she says.
Interestingly, Kaplan says, this trend is not limited to red states, where men would perhaps be more likely to seek out a woman with conservative values. In New York, for instance, she says she’s increasingly seeing “high-achieving” men, particularly in the finance sector, ask to be matched with traditional women. In light of the current political climate, she says, young men feel “more comfortable” explicitly asking “for more politically aligned matches, or faith-based matches,” because they want their children “raised in a certain type of household.”
Julie Ferman, a personal matchmaker and dating coach, also says she is increasingly seeing “more and more” men asking to be set up with women “who are feminine by nature.” Although they’re not necessarily explicitly asking for trad wives, the men she works with, who she says by and large skew liberal, “are not asking me for a bossy bitch lady,” she says. “They want a woman who knows how to respect and look up to and honor a man.”
This trend tracks with a recent survey from Kings College London, which found that Gen Z men are twice as likely as their boomer male counterparts to prefer a more traditional partner. According to the survey, which polled 23,000 people worldwide, nearly 31 percent of young men agreed with the statement that a wife should obey her husband, and 33 percent agreed that she should trust him to make important household decisions.
And while there’s nothing inherently problematic about some men preferring a stay-at-home wife and mother to a more career-driven woman, there’s also data to suggest that the trend may be more insidious: A study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly in March found that men who prefer a stay-at-home partner are more likely to exhibit “hostile sexism,” or general feelings of resentment toward women, than those who do not.
Kaplan says it is far more common for men who self-identify as conservative to ask to be matched with conservative women (and conservative women, in turn, tend to make similar requests). But Anderson says that is not necessarily the case. She told me that last winter, she had an Austin-based client who was “very open” about the fact that he wanted to be set up with a “beautiful, Christian” trad wife, though she felt this preference wasn’t entirely rooted in his own ideology.
“I try to ask these guys what, specifically, they’re looking for other than religion or traditional values,” she says. “Because there’s gonna be plenty of Christian women who aren't looking for a relationship that has traditional gender roles, and there'll be plenty of women who aren't Christian who do want that.”
Indeed, according to the matchmakers, there seems to be a disconnect between some of these men and the women themselves, who are often either already partnered or uninterested in the driven, sometimes socially awkward men who want to date them. For instance, when Anderson did finally manage to find a woman who fit her Austin-based client’s criteria, he alienated her almost instantly with his self-deprecating humor and boorish table manners, she says. “It’s like, you need to get your manners together, or we need to set you up with the type of woman who is not going to care that you're slurping pork belly juice.”
More to the point, the image of the flawlessly appointed submissive housewife many of these men have built up in their minds is usually neither the best-suited match for them nor what they really want, Anderson adds. One of her clients, a Dallas businessman in his early forties, went on several fruitless dates with a string of women, all of whom were, per his request, young, conservative, and Christian. But they never quite clicked, until she matched him with someone who was none of the above. They hit it off, and they’re currently still dating.
“It was a real full-circle moment,” she says. “Someone may come to you wanting one thing and then realize the things they thought mattered weren't the most important things to be seeking after all.”
