Too Degenerate For Conservatives, Too Traditional For Libs: What’s a Girl To Do?
“Swimming eh, in this cold? You like to skinny dip? Was seeing me half naked at the gym not enough for you?”
I grimace as I see the words flash on my phone.
A guy from my gym asked for my number. He’s nice enough. Harmless, even. But sadly, the above is not an exception: we’ve exchanged maybe six messages total, and every single one has managed to veer (almost impressively) into something vaguely sexual.
Quite frankly, I cannot imagine texting something sexual to someone I just met. I would be mortified. The idea alone makes my skin crawl. But maybe I’m the problem. I can’t exactly claim expertise here - I’ve never been on the apps and haven’t dated for a few years now. I’m clearly out of the loop on whatever the current social norms are supposed to be. So I call a girlfriend of mine who has been on an absolute Hinge binge and ask if this is normal.
“Oh yeah, Lauren,” she giggles on the other end of the phone. “That’s just how they all are now.”
This is Julia.
Julia doubled down on the “trad life” harder than anyone I knew. I grew up evangelical, and we met at Bible study as teenagers. She was the gorgeous blonde every guy was into. Married the handsome tall boy from church, waited until marriage, had a small army of children, and lived the soft-lit, autumn-filtered dream for about a decade - until, like many trad stories I know, the divorce came. And only then did everyone learn that those idyllic photos had been covering something deeply broken the entire time.
It turned out her husband didn’t even believe he was Christian two years into the marriage. They were perpetually on the brink of separation. Financial chaos. Eventually he cheated. A few years after my own white-picket-fence fantasy collapsed in a mess of abandonment, I found myself holding the girl I’d met at Bible study as a teenager while she sobbed through the public death of her own carefully curated dream.
She wasn’t just grieving her marriage. She was grieving the life she had been promised. And I’ve watched women from my world die that death over and over again.
To be honest, I feel bad for him too. I don’t think anyone in their situation was set up for success. They married too young (practically teens), on ideas inherited the way families inherit a favorite hockey team - unquestioned and tribal. A path for life absorbed long before they had any sense of themselves or the world. They had kids immediately (because that was the “right” thing to do), and everyone in their religious community applauded the outcome without scrutiny.
But by the time you’re twenty-two, your worldview is already shifting. What you want is changing. To have locked yourself into permanent, life-defining decisions by then? Unhinged behaviour, quite frankly. Yet I got married at twenty-three for similar reasons.
I come from the same background as Julia, one where the “trad” world is regarded as the ideal life, and its influence runs deep. Even the girls I know who rejected evangelicalism or traded conservatism for something more progressive never really escaped it. Instead of leaving it behind, they dedicate podcasts, reading lists, and entire online identities to “deconstructing purity culture.” I’ve had conversations with extraordinarily liberal women who admitted that even sex within marriage was difficult for them. Years of being taught that sex was dirty and dangerous didn’t magically disappear just because it became biblically permissible.
In fact there’s a whole sect of online influencers dedicated to talking about the bad advice they were given by poor biblical teachings: Exvangelicals. Arguably some of the most zealous progressives come from this community, dubbed “hicklibs” by some, they tend to have convert’s zeal, given they’re essentially refugees.
I don’t consider myself a liberal. I don’t consider myself an atheist. And while I’m far from the alt-right trad firebrand some headlines have painted me to be, I do still lean “right” on a variety of issues. Still, there is something undeniably broken about “tradlife” that conservative culture and right-wing pundits refuse to acknowledge, I’d argue it’s their main Achilles Heel. Tradlife is to the right what communism is to the left: it works in theory, not practice.
And this isn’t just bitterness talking, it’s data. For a group that prides itself on “facts over feelings,” conservatives get oddly evasive when marriage statistics come up. Divorce rates are significantly higher among those who marry young. They’re higher among the less educated. These aren’t fringe findings; they’re well established.
They’ll bring up statistics that arranged marriages are highly successful with a divorce rate from 2-3% without acknowledging that the cultures and countries where they are the norm might as well have made divorce illegal, and if not illegal, the norm is to punish it with absolute social exile.
If the nuclear family were truly the priority, the “trad” movement would be relentlessly advocating education and patience - waiting longer, choosing better, building stability first. Given how often single mothers are framed as the downfall of civilization, surely a woman having her first child at twenty-eight in a stable relationship is preferable to having one at twenty-one and raising it alone?
But data doesn’t matter much when the culture is more invested in appearing functional than actually being functional.
I find ex-trads to be in a remarkably similar position to detransitioners. These ideologies become so militarized that anyone who “fails” to execute them perfectly is quietly (or not so quietly) abandoned. You’re no longer a person, you’re just a liability. A walking debunking. Proof of concept gone wrong.
So detransitioners often drift rightward, where at least their regret is ideologically useful. And failed-trads? Well they often end up on the left, because nowhere else will have them. Even the most well-meaning people on the right, the kind ones, treat a failed marriage with this soft, cloying pity. As if your life didn’t just go off-script, but ended. Tragic. Sad. What a shame.
It was only on the left that people laughed, shoved a pint into my hand, and said, “Oh, you’re fucked up too? Haha, welcome to the club. Guess what, we’re all fucked up. At least we admit it.”
Meanwhile, the right seems powered by such astonishing levels of denied horniness that the repressed shadow keeps kicking down the door in a fresh scandal every month. At this point, a headline about Kristi Noem’s husband allegedly messaging a dominatrix about becoming “Crystal” and growing “huge, huge ridiculous boobs” barely even surprises me, it just produces a tired little yeah, that tracks.
At least that’s how the left behaves in person. Online, with all the posturing, they can never resist a good leopards ate your face morality play. No matter how much I desire a more thoughtful conversation online, it somehow always gets squeezed into the same narrow frame: girl advocated ideas that were bad for her, cue the predictable audience chuckle. As if anyone at 30 believes exactly what they believed at 19. I can’t blame them, that’s what gets clicks and I certainly didn’t do myself any favours by immortalizing my youthful zeal.
But the whole performance mostly just guarantees everyone has a miserable time: influencers learn very quickly that honesty is punished, because nine times out of ten telling the truth about failed ideals only alienates your own audience while handing free schadenfreude to people who dislike you. So I suppose the rational response is to double down and recruit everyone else into your own private misery? Which is what most do.
But, lucky for you, my dear audience, I’m not especially rational when it comes to the profit-versus-honesty equation.
When my tumultuous marriage ended, I naturally concluded that my life was over. After all, I had failed at the one thing women are apparently never allowed to fail at: do not become a single mother. My pride would have preferred suicide to that fate, but inconveniently for my ego, I had a child I loved dearly. So my life couldn’t be over, even though my ideology insisted that it was.
That left me with one option: live as a hollowed-out husk, or abandon the ideology, at least as it applied to family and relationships. This, predictably, resulted in a very strange departure from my normal ideologically driven dating choices. Including a fling with a rather progressive polyamorous liberal - an admission you could not have extracted from me through months of torture at Guantanamo Bay just a few years ago. But alas, I no longer care.
And thus, I am free.
In talking to more conservative friends of mine who have also dated in the more progressive world, a common theme seemed to be how strangely familiar it felt. Like relationships from high school, less pressure, more emphasis on enjoying shared time, due to lack of constant low-grade anxiety about power. There’s no invisible hierarchy humming in the background. Just a general sense of being friends, equals really.
I didn’t have to monitor myself for signs of emasculation. That had been a permanent feature of my relationships with more right-wing-coded men.
I adore debate. It’s a love language for me. Winning or losing doesn’t matter, mental sparring is genuinely joyful. And to be fair, many of the men on the right I dated loved it too… at first. But as relationships progressed, the playfulness evaporated. Gentle corrections became “disrespect.” Disagreement started to read as insubordination.
I saw this most clearly in my marriage, where I begrudgingly learned the art of asking questions I already knew the answer to. My husband treated me better when he felt powerful. So I’d watch wrong turns being taken, bad instructions followed, and bite my tongue. Not out of grace, but self-preservation. Correcting him meant potentially inviting rage.
I also noticed a strange pattern among friends who started dating more liberal-coded men: they sometimes ended up in dynamics that looked more traditional, in a kind of ideological horseshoe effect. On the right, there often seems to be a persistent neuroticism around being “taken advantage of” by women, anxiety about “cucking out” by paying for dinner, opening doors, or doing anything that might be read as conceding status. Liberal men, by contrast, didn’t seem nearly as preoccupied by that calculus. The attitude was more: I’m happy to pay for dinner, and equally happy to split it, neither option feels politically loaded.
Meanwhile, I’d found myself in the surreal position of paying for dinner with right-wing men while also spending the evening debating them into conceding that women should, in principle, be allowed to work.
The entire experience was disorienting. Not because the right-wing men I dated were all bad, they weren’t. I’m highlighting the more bizarre behaviours here. Even my husband had good qualities. But I think there’s a reason I consistently found myself in the most dysfunctional corner of that dating pool. We’ll get to that. Back to more progressive men.
In the aftermath of marriage, the more liberal dating world, with its loosened boundaries and endless questioning, seemed intriguing at first. Was monogamy actually necessary? Why preserve traditional confines at all? Could sex be meaningfully separated from long-term commitment?
These are questions I not only mulled over but watched multiple friends wrestle with after leaving trad life behind, often too bruised to imagine ever returning to it. It was painful enough watching that fantasy collapse once, and quite frankly being single was far preferable to the nightmare of playing “keeping up with the joneses.” The majority of the “wife” relationships I’d had in trad spheres consisted of bonding over mutual misery. So in leaving that life behind these women download dating apps, have flings, kiss boys at parties, talk about “rosters,” and emotionally detach as a learned survival skill. Can’t be letting anyone matter too much, eh?
And I understand those impulses. Really.
Yet somewhere in the long fallout of my marriage, I realised that no matter how disillusioned I became with the trad fantasy, I could never fully embrace hookup culture, non-monogamy, or a worldview that treated lifelong partnership as a myth. I still believed in wanting someone to grow old with. I just no longer believe it looks like a white picket fence and baking artisanal Cheerios from scratch at dawn for seven children. Let alone the kind of spotless personal history reserved for LinkedIn bios.
Both extremes, the rigid cage of “trad” life and the definitionless ambiguity of progressive romance, felt profoundly unromantic. Like two different places love goes to die. And so, once again, I found myself in the liminal space.
Too degenerate for the trads.
Too conservative for the progressives.
Maybe I’ve always lived here. I’ve probably always chosen people like me, slightly dysfunctional, a little romantic in the most chaotic way. People who fall in love with what relationships could be, rather than what they can realistically survive. People who love the idea more than the infrastructure. That’s certainly my own fault.
I’ll give the trads this much: they’re right that it gets harder to love the more relationships you’ve had. They’re right that dating gets harder with age. They’re right that it’s tougher to find a man as a single mother.
Just not for the reasons they think.
I still get asked out. Men flirt with me. I swerve and dodge the same way I gently redirect the guy at my gym who keeps getting sexual (no hate, truly, I hope you find your high-libido queen).
The difference is that when you get older, you can see an entire relationship play out before it even begins. You recognize archetypes and patterns. You can run the simulation in your head and know exactly where it ends, because you’ve already lived it.
I can see the nice conservative man messaging me, hoping to make me into a housewife. I know he means well. And I know that once the novelty fades, the programming will kick in. My debates will stop being “interesting.” The thrill of my online notoriety will sour into resentment over my messy reputation. His dream of a clean, orderly trad life will collapse under the weight of a real, complicated woman who refuses to stay inside the lines.
The free-spirited man, unburdened by rules or expectations (for me or for himself) will eventually collide with my own dreams. Dreams of family, of commitment, of a soulmate defined not by “just chillin” but by material reality and building something together. And my fantasy of him will dissolve in the presence of the real man he is, one who will never fit the shape I tried to press him into.
And maybe none of this is anyone’s fault.
I like men on the left and the right. I like women too (not like that, calm down).
The problem isn’t attraction, I don’t think. It’s that the more experiences you accumulate apart from others, the harder it becomes to flatten yourself into someone else’s dream. The more you understand love, the less you can pretend to be simple. And simple people are much easier to love.
At some point, you stop being an archetype and start being a person.
And people, real ones anyway, are terrible vessels for fantasies.
I don’t think this is just my problem. I think it’s generational. Many of us were raised on a fantasy of love that was absolute and totalizing, then educated into a reality that made that fantasy impossible. We can’t un-know what we know, but we also can’t stop wanting what we were promised.
So I, and many others, exist suspended between the two: unable to live inside the fantasy, and unable to be satisfied without it.
