the thing that should scare you more than being single
on financial dependence, the trad wife trap, and building your own floor | fhg #85
Happy Sunday financial hotties!
I watched Louise Theroux’s ‘Inside the Manosphere’ and in it, a man I’ve never seen before takes Theroux up to an apartment rooftop and gestures across the skyline. He asks Louis, “Name one thing here a woman has ever made.”
Meanwhile, this man’s partner Kristen, is at home. She left her career, she’s raising his children, she’s also pregnant with his third. And as Theroux eventually discovers, they are not legally married — because of, as the man puts it, “the financial side.”
Kristen’s response when asked if that worries her is: “It does seem more risky for me, but I don’t feel like I’m at risk.”
And almost like I myself were in a movie, everything sort of fell into place. I realised that the manosphere, the rise of the tradwife, and the problems with female ambition all had one thing in common. And it’s something we should all be more scared of than being single.
𝜗ৎ In this issue:
What the manosphere actually is
What the tradwife actually is
So what’s the bottom line, and why is this important?
What the manosphere actually is
Let’s be clear on one thing: the patriarchy benefits a very small number of men enormously, and sells the rest of them the idea that women are the reason why they're losing — not the patriarchy itself.
The manosphere has built an entire ideology around this — the idea that women are a financial risk to men. That marriage is a trap. That feminism has made women undateable.
This is the thing that gets young men riled up, keeps them subscribed to expensive pyramid schemes, and makes a very small number of men at the top of a particular pyramid spectacularly wealthy.
But we know by now that the real group of people who are at risk here are women, and the data backs that up.
Wives are more likely to be in a vulnerable financial position at the point of divorce1
Among women in paid work, mothers were far more likely than working women without children to have a net monthly take-home pay of less than £1,0002
For cohabitating couples, there is no automatic right for one partner to claim financial support from the other, particularly grim if one partner has taken time away from work to raise children, caretake in some way or support the household3
Cohabiting couples are also not automatically entitled to pension rights, even after years together
Kristen [partner of the man in Theroux’ documentary] is the logical conclusion of an ideology that has convinced women that financial dependence is femininity, while at the exact same time — convincing men that legal commitment is a trap. Both of those ideas benefit the same person. And by the way it is not Kristen.
What the tradwife actually is
The manosphere is loud and very ugly about something, and the tradwife4 trend is soft and aesthetic about the same thing. That thing is a lack of independence as a woman. And the underlying message is also the same: your ambition is the problem, dependence is the solution, and the right man will take care of everything.
Hannah Neeleman, of Ballerina Farm — the most famous face of tradwife content — fought her way into Juilliard on scholarship and is co-CEO of a multi-million dollar brand. And, her husband is the son of a billionaire.
The version of tradwife that she shares (and that is being consumed by young women who do not have a billionaire father-in-law) is not obvious at all about the fact that her ‘femininity’ is propped up by an emergency fund likely 50x the amount of the average viewer’s lifetime earnings.
Online, you just see the linen aprons and the golden hour family photos and you’re expected to fill in the blanks. Femininity is not something that should cost you your future.
So what’s the bottom line, and why is this important?
Guess what! The bottom line is money. It’s always money.
And by money, I mean your own income, maintained and grown. Pension contributions in your name. An understanding of what you own, what you’re entitled to, and what you would be left with if everything changed tomorrow. And if you are in a relationship — married or not — a clear, honest conversation about how money works between you both, before it becomes a crisis.
The women most at risk financially are the ones who were told that settling down meant handing over their financial independence along with their heart. The Kristen’s of the world who stay in their own ‘lanes’, but without guardrails — without security. Those are two completely separate things. You can have both, or neither — but conflating them is where the real danger lives.
Physical, mental and financial independence is not a threat to your femininity, nor is it a threat to masculinity. It’s simply the protective mechanism from the very system that guides the manosphere to point at women (and immigrants) as the problem.
You should be far more scared of being financially exposed at 50 than of being unmarried at 30. One of those things is recoverable. The other, if you haven’t been building financial independence, really isn’t.
Finally, my parting words to you this week are: understand the system so you stop internalising it as personal failure. The manosphere, to me, is unequivocal evidence that the financial guilt women carry around is not theirs to carry. It is the result of structural and historical gaps built to disadvantage women, and they are not evidence of ‘bad decisions’, ‘being stupid’ or ‘not trying hard enough’.
If this resonated with you, please send it to someone who needs to read it. This is, and will be, my life’s work. Independence, especially with money, is the single greatest thing you can build as a woman.
— Dev, xo
This Fair Shares study reports that 28% of wives had take‑home pay under £1,000 per month compared with 10% of husbands, and commentary from the Women’s Budget Group explicitly concludes that wives are more likely to be in a vulnerable financial position at divorce (nothing new but the facts help give colour here).
Same study as above. Where the underlying data show that a much higher share of mothers fall below the £1,000 net monthly threshold compared with child‑free women, reflecting the motherhood penalty in earnings.
In many worldwide systems (I’ve researched UK, US, Australia and continental Europe) there is no automatic right to financial support for couples that cohabitate, and this is particularly harsh for partners (disproportionately women) who stepped back from paid work, but a minority of jurisdictions do provide marriage‑like remedies to long‑term de facto partners
While writing this I found out that the Cambridge Dictionary added tradwife to the dictionary last year [2025]. Shocked.