How to Find a Traditional Wife
How to Find a Traditional Wife
Cutting through the nonsense on finding a 'TradWife'
The world was on fire; no one could save me but you.
This one is for the young men of Becoming Noble. You want to find a good woman: young, beautiful, chaste, family-focused, wholesome.
This is possible. Unfortunately, most discussion on the topic you find online is pure fantasy, and lacks any substantive guidance on how to achieve this ideal. Instead, the discourse is dominated by role playing and bad advice from men that have no clue what they’re talking about (and by unwarranted blackpilling).
This guide aims to correct that: to provide a realistic and actionable playbook that will allow you to find a good wife. I have been greatly blessed with a wonderful woman, and can help you find the same.
— Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Reader
Good women require good men
The first step on this quest is to ensure that you’re worthy of it. Trad wives deserve trad husbands: fit, well groomed, well dressed, socially capable, able to provide a good life for a family on a single income.
You don’t need to be perfect from the outset - just as you shouldn’t expect to immediately find the fully-formed, perfect wife - but you do need to be underway on a journey towards this ideal. I’ll write future articles on how to make yourself worthy, but you can imagine the basics.
Being a trad wife, though healthy, is hard work - pregnancy can be painful and frightening, raising children can be exhausting, and forgoing the creature comforts that modern women enjoy requires sacrifice. You must have something of equal or greater value to offer in return.
You need to be brutally honest with yourself about what your value is: your looks, your wealth, your social skills, your age, your prospects. Adjust expectations about your desired wife accordingly.
By exclusively pursuing women with traditional instincts, you’re radically diminishing your dating pool. There are still exceptional women in this pool, but they are relatively few in number and will have high standards. But don’t despair either - very beautiful and kind women choose and love imperfect men.
The subtle art of identifying a trad-wife-to-be
Beware women that explicitly identify as trad wives. This is suggestive of being terminally online, performatively seeking to impress marginal online communities of men (femcel behavior), and striving to be assertive and non-conformist (qualities that are positive in men but antithetical to classic femininity). It’s not necessarily catastrophic, but it is a red flag.
Instead your task is to identify normal women that don’t explicitly identify as belonging to this contrived identity, but nonetheless have the potential to embody it well. You must use proxy indicators. Below I list some strategies to find potential matches, based on what has worked for me and what I’ve seen work well in practice, as opposed to online LARPing.
You won’t be able to take advantage of all of these at once; choose from the below based on your particular interests, skills, location, and the options available to you.
The Church Option
I’m discussing this first as it’s a common recommendation. It can work, but it’s harder than it’s commonly made out to be. In my experience, most churches have a serious lack or total dearth of attractive, intelligent young and single women.
They do exist, but you’ll have to put in work. This means visiting a lot of different communities until you find one that actually has suitable candidates. You should look up youth services (typically 18 - 35) and attend those. Trad Catholics - you might have to relax and attend some Novus Ordo masses (you can teach her Latin later). My friend met his wonderful girlfriend when attending a Ukrainian Catholic church out of curiosity. Attend any after-service food and drinks, and don’t be shy; they typically welcome newcomers, and the fact that you’re alone won’t be unusual.
Don’t just attend services, but also conferences, meet-ups, larger gatherings, etc. These will vary widely in their composition, depending on denomination, location, ethnicity, etc. Some will have good numbers of attractive young people, while some will be dominated by old ladies.
Try to cycle through them in a non-mercenary manner. You may have to visit quite a few to find a wife, but do so respectfully, gracefully, and seriously, and make sure you’re nurturing your faith in the process. Be grateful to the churches that host you even when the visit was fruitless in terms of potential dates.
— Andrew Loomis, Mother and Children in Church
The Online Option
Normie dating apps, when used cautiously and strategically, can still yield good women. As this pool of women skews towards being promiscuous, you need to take steps to filter out women who have had an endless string of relationships.
The dating app strategy is one which I would only suggest for my younger readers. Older women on hookup apps do not make for good trad wife material, so I recommend setting your dating app age preferences between 18 and 21. If you’re much older than that yourself, this becomes unrealistic. If you’re older, be aware that women will (rightly) have greater expectations with regards to your presentation, resources, lifestyle, etc.
Trust your gut on potential matches; do a vibe check, disregard anyone that has overt progressive political messaging or otherwise crass content, etc. You should look for other subtle indicators of being traditionally feminine like what she’s wearing, if she has a cross on her neck, etc.
Likewise, if you come across someone that you find attractive on conventional social media, don't be afraid to DM them.
You’ll want to present the best version of yourself: good, well lit photos, well dressed, with friends, etc. This strategy is best suited to conventionally attractive people - you know who you are.
As men age out of this age bracket, I would suggest turning increasingly towards serious / religious dating websites, and putting in the hours as soon as possible.
The Hobby Option
Certain pastimes attract feminine young women, particularly classical dance styles: ballet, ballroom, latin. If you think you would enjoy trying these out, I’d encourage you to do so.
If that’s not an option then you can experiment with other vaguely traditional hobbies: cooking, animal charities, choirs… The concentration of the kind of women you’re looking for here will be lower, so you’ll need to cycle though these experiments faster. Do some research as to what the options are in your area.
If you’re at college I’d also check out societies related to the classical arts, equestrian sports, and religion.
— Detail from Andrew Loomis, The Wedding
Normal Life
They may not be particularly ‘trad’, but there are a lot of smart, beautiful women who work at normal companies. Of these women, there are a small but not insignificant number that I’m confident could be great traditional wives if you married while they’re still at the beginning of their careers, before they’ve had too many relationships and before their career is ‘too good to give up’.
Keep an open mind as you meet normie women in normie environments. Many of these women are naturally inclined in a healthy direction but have been swept along by the tide of modernity. You can save them! In many ways, these women are actually ideal partners, because they’re just normal, and not inclined to fringe communities. Being a ‘trad wife’ is a historical norm, so the right kind of normal is to be desired.
However - be aware that in order to tempt a woman of this kind away from her career and towards a more traditional existence, you will likely have to have a career and income prospects that are double or more of hers. This means that she will sense that by giving up her career to be with you she will still be confident that she’s upgrading her material prospects (a crass but natural calculation).
Some of this will come naturally with time, so don’t despair. When I was at a more senior level at my former employer, new-hire women took a far more blatant interest in me than they did when I was also new, even though I’m openly religious and conservative and they are not. As long as you have the qualities listed above (fit, well adjusted, well dressed, etc.) this will happen to you too.
Beware of easy fixes
A lot of advice you receive online about how to find a good woman is hopelessly naive. She’s likely not just sitting there waiting for you at your local church. Likewise, rural areas in red states are not a panacea; many of the most promising women from these areas will have gone off to college and the cities.
Finding the right wife takes work and time. Don’t rush, don’t be blackpilled.
If you have great chemistry with someone but they’re imperfect - don’t despair - you can probably fix them. Don’t purity spiral.
Be the best possible trad husband you can be and lead them in the right direction. If they’re the right wife they will follow.
If you have had or observed success with other means of meeting good women, please do leave a comment below.
Good luck out there.
Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Commenting because:
Very very important to find a perfect-for-you-spouse.
My marriage has worked out well.
My story:
At the end of a failed 3 year relationship with a man I truly had loved, I cried out (screamed at) God to send me a man I could trust.
The very next day, as my sister and I were driving down a busy street, in a city of millions, we pulled up next to an attractive man in a nice car. He turned and caught us both staring at him.
He waived and we waived. At the next light we turned and he went straight. The end? No.
Three hours later he pulled up next to my sister, on the same street. This time he followed her and got our phone number (we lived together).
He called and sat up a week night meeting. The year was 1976.
He was perfect (for me) but far from perfect. He would say the same about me.
Moral of our story:
If you want a good (for you) spouse, scream at God about it.
Your Maker is a great match-maker. He knows you both better than you will ever know…
He can make good things happen.
They aren't mutually exclusive and yet any woman of substance attending church will see right through you if you are there only to seek a wife. They will also ignore you if you are not serious in your pursuit of God. No, you shouldn't just sit around waiting but actively building yourself is not waiting. My point was that you need some amount of substance to be of interest to any woman worth the effort and you need to put in the effort to gain substance.