The Trad Wife Trap

How women get stuck with men that suck

There’s a bent and faded photo tucked inside the cover of an old diary in my closet. In the picture, a twenty year old version of myself sits on the edge of the bed of my glossy red pickup truck, toes pointed, one leg raised sexily in the air like I was posing for a poster at the Moulin Rouge. Platinum bangs frame a face engulfed in happiness, lips pulled wide in a satisfied smile. I peer at this girl in picture from time to time and can’t help but shiver as I observe her excitement, her sass. This is a girl who thought she had the world by the tail, thought she was the master of her future. This girl did not see the trap she was stepping into.

This picture is one of the last snapshots taken of me as a single girl. The next morning I would kneel at an altar in the Mormon temple across from a man who had been a missionary just a few months before, and would covenant on my life to spend eternity by his side. Helpmeet. Eternal companion. Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh was I to him from then on. I pledged to walk through this lone and dreary world with him, and I did for 22 years.

Then one cold evening, I would hear my husband speak the most impactful sentence I’ve ever heard in my life, words buzzing in my ear as he confessed a double life through my Bluetooth speaker as he drove across the country on a work trip. “I’ve been having sex with other women,” my eternal companion told me that night, and within days I would uncover a secret world that had existed just behind the curtains of our marriage. Girls in our own bed for paid orgies, while I was away at my parents’ home recovering from an ovarian tumor. Prostitutes on road trips with him for weeks, which hadn't stopped him from calling home at night to tell the kids he loved them. Once the cat was out of the bag and his double life was exposed, he seemed to get some sort of relief from confession, so for the next week or so, he would keep me on the phone all day and all night spilling his own tea, detailing affairs he had carried on for decades. I took notes, took voice recordings. I was stunned, shocked, betrayed, heartbroken, and utterly alone. On the third day of his confessions, I began having nightmares about him having sex with other women, and I stopped eating and being able to focus, the stress and trauma of it all taking a toll on me physically and mentally.

As the weeks wore on, I began to think about what this discovery meant to me. My abusive, horrible, monster of a husband had also been a whore. I never wanted to see him again. It was over, I was done, I would have to end it. I found a family law attorney online and made an appointment, sat and talked with him in a dreary outdated office about how to divorce. He told me it would cost $350 dollars to file the papers, plus a couple thousand for his retainer, then trial fees, and more. I hadn't had a job since I was 20, didn't have an income at all, wasn't even on my husband’s bank account. Me and the kids would frequently run out of groceries or gas or both while he was away on road trips, there was no way I could afford to file for divorce. I asked how I would live until the court ordered some type of spousal maintenance, and he told me it would be rough for sure. “Could you move in with your mom and dad or something?”, he asked. I was 42 years old, had 4 kids who loved their home, their friends, their schools. My parents were thousands of miles away. I was still recovering from the tumor, was still receiving medical care, and couldn’t leave my doctors and insurance. There was no way for me to divorce him.

I drove home from the attorney’s office sobbing, feeling hopeless and alone. “What if I just change the locks and tell HIM to file for divorce when he comes home and wait for eventual child support and alimony?”, I thought to myself as I pulled off my shoes and laid down on my bed, crying uncontrollably. I stared at the ceiling through the tears for a long time that afternoon, thinking through every possibility, realizing that I was trapped. In the end, it was my bed that would guide my steps the next few weeks and months. As I finally stood up to get some water and use the bathroom, I turned to look at the bed I’d been crying on for the past hour or so. It was a beautiful bed, elegant and luxurious. We had brought it up from Scottsdale when we moved to Utah. The expensive mattress was wrapped in extraordinary sheets, then topped with a down duvet. I loved this bed. I had nursed my last baby in this bed, had recovered from surgery in it, had watched the sun set over the mountains as I counted the days until my son came home from his Mormon mission from this bed. My daughter had lost a first tooth in the blankets. I had learned of my grandmothers’s death late in the night from this bed. And this bed did not belong to me, but to him. As did the pillows, the dresser, the small bench at the foot of the bed, my toothbrush, the towels, the shoes in the closet the I wore. I had been a stay at home mom my entire adult life, and I had neither education, job skills, or any income of my own. Without my husband, I had nothing. I knew in that moment that to choose to leave the man would mean to choose also to leave my bed, the dresser, the pots and pans in the cabinets, the couches in the living room, the Mercedes in the garage. Leaving him wouldn’t just be the end of the relationship. As a financial dependent on my spouse, the end of the marriage would be the end of my life as I knew it.

I called a locksmith that evening and made an appointment anyway, but cancelled it the next day. I would drive to the mall instead, buy bags full of lingerie at Victoria's Secret, something I had never done before, had my teeth bleached and my hair trimmed so I could be ready for him to come home from his road trip. A little before midnight the next day, one of my daughters would walk sleepily into the bathroom, having heard my blow dryer from her room. When she saw me peering into the mirror in a black negligee, my face gleaming with freshly applied glam makeup, round brush blowing out my curls, her eyes widened. She asked why I looked like that, why the makeup bag was on my counter at midnight, why I had a diamond necklace around my throat in lace underwear and high heels. She had never seen me wear any underwear but my Mormon garments. I shooed her back to bed and finished up, drenching myself in vanilla sugar perfume just as I heard the front door open.

My husband walked tentatively around the corner of the hallway and into our bedroom, shocked I think to see me still there. He was probably also shocked to see I hadn't skipped town and cleared out the condo. He may have expected to find me standing behind the door with a baseball bat. Instead, as our eyes locked briefly before he looked me up and down, I managed to make myself say, “I missed you sweetheart, I love you, we will get through this together,” before bursting out in tears.

We fell asleep a while later, tangled up in the sheets together. He whispered into my hair as he dozed, “I thought you would leave me!”

I would have. I hated him like I never had before. But I couldn’t leave. That night, my career as wife ended, and I became the next in a string of sugar babies, using him for his money. My children needed a roof over their heads, food to eat. As I slipped into dreamland that night, I whispered “I love you”, but it was directed at my bed, not the man beside me. This, this was a now a job, and I would have to do it well.

(Three years later I would have to run for my life. I would indeed lose everything, leaving 24 years of trad wife life with only a few Rubbermaid boxes, some pots and pans, and a couple hundred dollars.)