the toxic culture behind being a high value woman

The rich husband of your dreams won't save you.

I am so excited to introduce my Substack friend Emma as my first guest writer on my newsletter! We both write articles covering feminism and South Asian culture, so it only made sense my first collaboration would be with her. Be sure to check out her amazing newsletter called trauma & co!

Emma’s contributions to this essay are italicized. I wanted to make sure her work was recognized while maintaining the reading flow.

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Imagine a world in which you wake up at 8 am to freshen up and go through your 10-step Korean skincare routine before heading out for your weekly pilates class. You grab a green smoothie to reward yourself on the way home. When you make it back, you meditate for 30 minutes and write an entry about how you met your husband in your gratitude journal.

You reflect on how the both of you met on a dating app five years ago. How he didn’t take you on a low effort coffee date but rather invited you out for a five-course meal and presented you with a bouquet of peonies on your first date. After a few months of passionate romance, he made a grand proposal to you in Paris. 

You genuinely love your life. He says there’s no need for you to work because he believes it is his duty to provide for you. All he expects is a hot meal every evening, the house to be sparkling clean, for you to never turn him down, and to give birth to exactly three children. If you can accomplish all of this, you get to have four vacations a year and a few luxury gifts of your choice. 

Sounds amazing, doesn’t it? 

This is the traditional wife (long for trad wife) fantasy sold to many girls and women alike on social media. Why suffer in the trenches of achieving financial independence alone when someone else can provide it for you? According to many female love gurus, as long as you correctly tap into your “feminine energy”, you can manipulate any man on earth to fall in love with you and put a ring on your finger. If you present yourself as high value to a man, his commitment issues will erode away and he will do anything to keep you around. 

Or so they say. Try telling this to the generations of women in your family who, despite doing everything right on paper, could not get their husbands to truly love and respect them. Try convincing women who come from patriarchal cultures that marriage always means a life of comfort and protection from the ills of society. 

Modern feminism has been challenged by the popularization of trad wife culture. A trad wife is a married woman who embraces traditional gender roles while her husband is the primary breadwinner. In an ideal world where women are respected for being homemakers and treated well by the men they love, this is a dream come true. However, the real world does not operate like this.

I first learned of The New Trophy Wife a couple of months ago when a video of hers popped up on my YouTube homepage, aptly titled “I married a MONSTER.”¹ Needless to say, I was curious; little did I know, I was witnessing the beginning of the end. Rewinding back to the first video she ever posted, titled something along the lines of “from single mom to married in a week,” I got to learn more about Isis, aka The New Trophy Wife. As far as she was concerned, she was selling the dream every woman wanted to buy. After meeting her significantly older husband online, she agreed to marry him within a week in a rushed attempt to escape living with an ex-boyfriend.

Despite her attempt at normalizing, and even glamorizing, her situation, I couldn’t help but find this dichotomy strange. On one hand, she was flaunting her ability as a “high value woman” to accomplish such a feat; on the other, the nature of this courtship seemed blatantly transactional—he got an attractive young wife, she got “stable” living conditions for her kids. More than anything, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that she was openly admitting to being a trophy wife. It’s one thing to genuinely fall in love with someone several decades older, it’s another to promote the practice for materialistic purposes.

Everything was seemingly fine until she posted that last video: the one that introduced me to her in the first place. In this last video, she talks about leaving her husband after learning that he had been abusing her children. It was then that she decided to call off the trophy wife charade once and for all.

While it’s not to say all outcomes end up as bad as what happened to The New Trophy Wife, it is a terrifying example of one of the possible worst-case scenarios. I’m sure you can think of other women you have encountered who were left with nothing when their husbands died, or who were trapped in abusive relationships with their spouses. Having little to no financial cushion in these cases exposes you to greater harm. Upwards social mobility and creating a safe environment for any children takes longer when you don’t have an emergency fund, degrees, or investments to fall back on. 

However, in many cultures around the world, it can be a source of pride to take part in domestic duties and traditional gender roles. In Asian cultures, the material benefits you get from marrying well are considered to outweigh the negatives aspects of a marriage. There is greater pressure to buy the expensive car, luxury penthouse, and designer goods in societies where the income inequality between the lower and upper class is staggering. You see girls born into working class families idealizing the day they get married to a doctor or entrepreneur - especially in countries that don’t value educating women. 

The pressure to be a “high value woman” may be as insidious as being expected to conform to gender roles within the confines of marriage. The term “high value” seems positive at first glance until you realize it’s used to assess how “worthy” of marriage a heterosexual woman is. Women like Mina Irfan (aka The Universe Guru) profit off of teaching women like The New Trophy Wife tactics on how to attract and keep a man by channeling their feminine energy.

Five years ago, I would have been genuinely surprised to hear about what happened to The New Trophy Wife, but now, thanks to social media, the “trophy wife aesthetic” is all too familiar in our cultural lexicon. Even unmarried women are guilty of perpetuating the standard through their promotion of the quasi trophy wife (i.e., dedicating significant portions of your day to maintaining aesthetics, reveling in your man’s ability to finance your lifestyle).

When did it stop being feminist to pay your half of the bill? Please tell me because I never got the message, and I need to figure out how much my husband owes me. Tell me, would you walk away from the love of your life because he can’t afford to keep you at home? I don’t know about you but I revel in the knowledge that I am not a financial burden on anyone. I’ll admit, working isn’t all that glamorous, but there’s no feeling like financial independence.

A lot of my friends have gotten engaged in the last year and I can’t help but fixate on the size of the rings I’m seeing. It’s not that I feel insecure over my smaller rock; I’m just struggling to understand why. A bigger rock doesn’t say anything about your relationship. Are you really in love, or are you trying to keep up appearances? Or are you compensating for something we should know about?

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The purpose of this essay isn’t to shame women who marry for money, but rather to shed light on the fact that someone else’s money does not guarantee you a promising future. Without at least some modest savings in the bank, your entire lifestyle can be uprooted the second things go wrong in your marriage. You are not a free agent but rather at the mercy of a human whose emotions about you can change at any time. There is no purpose in being “high value” if you are reliant on male validation instead of honoring your own existence.

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1. The New Trophy Wife has removed this video from her YouTube channel, but if you dig through the platform, you can find reaction videos with clips of the original. The video was about her (rich) ex-husband sexually assaulting her daughters, and how she left him over his heinous behavior.