The Tradwife In Girlboss Clothing

Anyone who has dated in the real world — or watched a lot of Sex and the City or debated Materialists — knows that it’s a numbers game. You maximize your chances at making a real connection by cycling through as many first dates as possible. This manifests in chemistry-check coffee dates, quick drinks meetups before your actual evening plans, and if you’re in serious need of feeling like you’re making an effort, maybe a stroll on a short, very clearly demarcated route.

I am a grizzled veteran at this game, but even I found myself taken aback one night during a routine TikTok scroll when I came across a new or at least new-to-me kind of woman, one who desires to be wined and dined starting on… the first date. Before I could say “check, please!” to such a juvenile approach to the dating dance, I found myself completely sucked in to the algorithmic vortex that I now know to be the High-Value Woman.

The High-Value Woman, I would soon learn, is single, typically in her 20s or 30s, and looking for love. Tale as old as time! But here is where it gets interesting: She believes she is a prize and should be treated as such. In the words of Veruca Salt — the bad egg, not the band — she wants the world, she wants the whole world, give it to her now: drinks, dinner, dessert, and round-trip transportation. She will not have a stand-alone coffee; she won’t even settle for a Venti Iced Caramel Macchiato with oat milk and two extra shots, because that’s cheap. The HVW wants dinner with tablecloths and wine with European names, and she would not consider even pretending to go to split the check. Her trip home is an Uber Black, on her date’s account.

Wrapped in work-to-date-night drag, she leverages all that self-worth to demand a provider who can give her the comfort and stability that she believes she deserves.

At first blush, the HVW comes across as a perhaps misguided but still familiar beacon of slightly throwback girl power, only TikTok-ized. Anybody remember Mika Brzezinski’s 2011 memoir-slash-manual Know Your Value? Who can forget L’Oreal’s decadeslong stage-whisper “Because you’re worth it” slogan? She’s in the lineage of Charlotte on Sex and the City, not Hannah on Girls: If a suitor wants her, he has to show her how much he means it.

But the self-branded High-Value Woman is not what she initially appears to be. Upon further investigation, she emerges as a tradwife in training. Wrapped in work-to-date-night drag, she leverages all that self-worth to demand a certain kind of man — a provider who can give her the comfort and stability that she believes she deserves. Instead of aiming her drive at merely scaling the corporate ladder, the HVW trains her ambition at reeling in a big fish — or rather, a Mr. Big fish. One who can down the line easily equip her with the around-town SUV and the minivan for road trips; the megawatt rock and the backyard infinity pool; the summer trip to the dude ranch and the Christmastime jaunt to the D.R.

TikTok user Ariana Castell (@earthangelarian) is one such HVW — the one who initially beckoned me into the phenomenon. In one of her videos, sitting in her car, the Miami-based 21-year-old separates the world into two camps of women (for the benefit of her influencer-aspiring followers, who flock to such videos as “How to start making money on social media as a woman”). The first, she explains, are low-value ladies: “The girl who doesn’t take care of herself, who dresses provocative, who lets everyone touch her, who doesn’t have any boundaries… Men are like, ‘OK, she doesn’t require much. I could give her literally nothing and she’ll be happy.’”

According one TikTok user, “He needs to be paying you a fee in love, time, energy, gifts to literally be in your life.”

On the flipside, there’s her put-together sister, the High-Value Woman, whose club she belongs to: “The woman who takes care of herself, who doesn’t let people disturb her peace, who dresses really well, who cares about her career, who loves herself unconditionally and thinks she deserves literally the world. And so a smart man knows if he needs to be with [that] caliber of woman, he needs to provide more in the relationship… he needs to be paying you a fee in love, time, energy, gifts to literally be in your life,” Castell explains in the video. (She did not answer a request for comment.)

Sadia Khan, an online dating talking head who swims in High-Value waters, describes her as someone who is beautiful (plus has great relationships with her family, friends, and community) and with enough romantic prospects to be picky. And yes, Khan and her cohort do define a High-Value Man, too. His qualifications are unlikely to surprise: successful, financially and emotionally secure, and high in — of course — self-esteem.

The High-Value Woman pack has grown to something of a movement, where TikToks about HVW dating tips routinely get six-figure views, and has its own stars, too. Another name for the movement is the “sprinkle sprinkle” — a term coined by another dating coach, SheraSeven (aka Leticia Padua), whose YouTube clips routinely make the rounds online and have racked up more than 20 billion views. She is also the author of such self-published books as, yes, Sprinkle Sprinkle: How To Date a Provider and Avoid a Dusty; as well as Leveling Up to Your Best Life: Creating a Life of Comfort and Luxury; Too Pretty To Pay Bills; and I Bring Nothing to the Table: a Level Up Concept. SheraSeven and her kin urge women to level up by, for example, convincing a guy on a dating app that instead of just a drinks date, he should pick her up and take her to her favorite restaurant. And when she casually mentions she loves lilies? Better bring a bouquet of those, too.

May Kalinu, another dating coach in this niche, calls her business Spoiled Girl and puts plainly the goal for her “high caliber” clients: find guys who will buy them Chanel bags. “Why can’t men jump through hoops we have set for them?” she asks me rhetorically on a Zoom call. “We deal with ingrown hairs, waxing, makeup, time you’re putting into your hair and clothes. The least they could do is pay for a $15 Uber to the bar and pay for drinks in a nice place. It’s about making a good impression and investing in time.”

Ding ding ding. What Kalinu is getting at is that dating is a marketplace. There are so many inequalities in modern courtship, whether economic (wage gap, pink tax), in effort (unequal labor, cost of getting ready,) or via beauty standards (being seen as worthy of dating in the first place) — and can therefore benefit by leveling up.

For a while, maybe while new to dating, we Gen X-ers and elder millennials convinced ourselves it was an equal playing field, that dating was not a meat market but rather a sea with plenty of fish, that the Internet could be a tool to more readily and efficiently find the one. And sure, many of us know people who went on one or a couple of online dates and settled down with someone great. But the reality that the HVW reminds us of is that there is a lot of bad faith in dating: people who will lie to your face about what they are looking for in a relationship; people who will act with no sense of human emotion and ghost you at a bar without even having the dignity to cancel a date last minute; people who will show up smelling like a gym sock and text someone else surreptitiously the entire date and then still try to kiss you in a parking lot. The whole exhausting two-step of it all, especially for a woman who wants to find a serious partner, can feel like a total waste of time.

If the manosphere perceives the High-Value Woman to be a catch, then what happens when she gets caught?

To be sure, the concept of “marrying up” has been around for centuries — just ask Jane Austen — and the scientific term for hitching one’s proverbial wagon to someone else in order for their security or success to boost their own social standing is hypergamy. (In the domain of the HVM, however, there’s no need to be vague about pronouns.) According to a study of hypergamy published in the Journal of Human Resources in 2023, “there are no clear signs of decline. Households are systematically formed such that the man on average has the highest rank within the gender-specific distribution of earnings potential, and men with very poor earnings prospects have a high probability of staying unmatched.” Insult to injury: This research was conducted in Norway, a country recognized for its best-in-class gender-equity policies.

It’s not just that the HVW radiates conservative vibes. She’s become a far-right ideal and an embodiment of the pernicious right-wing ideology that seems to lurk around every TikTok corner. The archetype has been covered without a wink and with some frequency in in the MAGA-beloved Evie magazine, and is championed by the manosphere and the red pill community, embraced by its misogynist poster boys including Andrew Tate, Lewis Howes, Matthew Hussey, and Kevin Samuels. Samuels loosely defines her as being attractive, comforting to her partner, disciplined, enthusiastic, and loyal. They make leveling up sound like a service job.

If the manosphere perceives the HVW to be a catch, then what happens when she gets caught? The end goal, according to Kalinu, is for her clients to have options as opposed to, you know, being stuck in the mundanity of having to work, for example. What they want, Kalinu says, is “what they call a soft life, with a female pink job, or to go to the hair salon, nails, Pilates, without having to have that corporate route if that’s not your true purpose. If you are in a good relationship, you can take that chance to depend on a man and find what you want, if it’s to start a business or be an artist or bringing value to being a stay-at-home wife or mom.”

The HVW may have the confidence and language as a ball-busting, sex-postive feminist, but she does not count herself among them. Sure, the tough-talking sister to the tradwife might have ambition, but it is not for equality. It is to be taken care of. And in order to snag that provider, she must elevate herself to be the prize. The High-Value Woman is dating to win.