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.”
