Am I A Stay-At-Home Girlfriend?

on housework, work and making home

It’s been pointed out to me on more than one occasion that my idea of a mess (above) does not align with other people’s idea of a mess. I have to say I agree.

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A young woman sends her boyfriend off to work. She hoovers their living room floor. She plays with the dogs, reads feminist theory, sits at her sewing machine and contemplates taking her small fashion business on Shark Tank. She narrates her thoughts in a deadpan stream-of-consciousness that has now amassed 325,700 views on TikTok. Here is a sample of her musings:

Today was my first day as a stay-at-home girlfriend…I spent the day thinking about codependency and domesticity…I thought about how it would be nice for him to come home to a clean house, and then I felt weird about staying home and cleaning while he was at work…I thought about the feminist wave in the late twentieth century that moved women from the home into the office, and then I thought about how maybe that’s what the capitalist system wanted all along…

Like many of the people in the replies to the repost of this TikTok on Twitter (yes, as a millennial, I am exposed to TikToks outside the remit of the clock app itself), you might be rolling your eyes at that excerpt. Because cringe and sincerity and the exploration of half-formed thoughts are never received well online, the original poster has been slated as, among other things, ‘ruminative’, a ‘freeloader’, and suffering from ‘acute hysteria due to childlessness’. There are, I should say, a great deal of comments essentially saying ‘it’s not that deep.’ While I’m always wary of wading into discourse, the video did stop me in my tracks, because it touched on subjects I have found myself returning to again and again over the last few years; specifically, since I quit my full-time job, moved to rural Sweden, and became, for all intents and purposes, a homemaker.

Before I go on, I want to be open with you. I’ve wanted to write about the complicated feelings I have about my home circumstances for a while, but have been unsure how to do so without neglecting important factors outside of my own experience. Any description of my life as a homemaker will not account for the experiences of disabled people, people of colour and others whose identities impact how they exist in work and home contexts. My intention with this newsletter is to talk about my own evolution of thought, and I apologise for any oversights. I’ll leave some links for further reading on this broad subject matter in the newsletter’s footnotes.

The term ‘homemaker’ is defined by Collins dictionary as ‘a person, especially a housewife, who manages a home’. Now, you will never catch me referring to myself as a housewife, but I like ‘homemaker’ as a gender-neutral alternative that sounds a little more active, less subservient; modern and free from gendered connotations about different kinds of work (or so I like to think). When we set out to move, it was not with the intention of me assuming my final form as a homemaker. The idea was that my husband would work, while I focused on writing and, after sorting out all the various bureaucracies of moving to a country not my own, took tentative steps towards finding paid freelance work. This lifestyle change was not made without privilege. I had a small buffer to keep me afloat for a while, a mortgage a fraction of our London rent, and a supportive partner with whom I shared a mutual desire for money and the making of it to matter less in our lives.

As we all know, you can’t just not care about money. Not in our society, anyway. In order to not care about money, you have to have lots of it, or at least enough to get by on. As my personal finances dwindled and I became ever more dependent on my husband’s income, my relationship to our home and its making grew frazzled. A bud of self-imposed guilt blossomed, and I was sure I could quell it by wiping, washing, laundering, folding, ironing, cleaning, cooking, everything. A bad writing day or a non-essential purchase felt like an insult. Soon enough, the expectant manager I thought I’d left behind at my old job in London materialised as an imaginary boss, barking orders at me, waking me with a jolt of anxiety in the early hours as my mind raked over every chore and task I hadn’t yet done. Housework is work. Many of us fit it in (or don’t) around paid work, parenting, caring and other responsibilities. I know how privileged I am to be able to prioritise the keeping of my home.

There’s a perception that prioritising, or even favouring, housework over work-work makes one anti-feminist, despite the work (ha) we’ve done to overcome the Girl Boss/Trad Wife dichotomy. And, after briefly dipping my toe in the world of the Stay-At-Home-Girlfriend meme, I agree that the vibes are off. Young, overwhelmingly white, seemingly abled, women are crafting whole personalities out of making their hard-working boyfriends matcha lattes to sip at their home-office desks, while they themselves spend their days journalling and indulging in self-care. People have rightly taken issue with the romanticisation of this lifestyle and such videos’ ignorance of its political and historical context (particularly regarding race). There’s also the fact that normalising financial dependence in relationships can lead to instances of financial abuse. What’s strange and disingenuous about a lot of this content is that many of these women are, in fact, working, whether as influencers, online creators, small business owners, creatives and, yes, homemakers. But, in the absence of a traditional job, they seem convinced they might have cracked some code, risen above feminist and capitalist ideals to just, I don’t know, make green juices and walk their dogs in the early afternoon.

In this life I have been able to choose for myself, I don’t have a traditional job either. My days are a hodge-podge of cleaning, writing, thinking about writing, occasionally doing paid copywriting work; often feeling restless and guilty for not having done more. I am trying to deconstruct that in my mind; to create a gentle, purposeful structure for myself with a balance of creative fulfillment and value. I’ve been trying for the last three years and still it is a near-daily effort.

The thing is, I don’t think work and working are inherently morally good. It felt so tempting to preface this piece with a summary of my own hard graft and working-class roots, as some kind of proof that I’ve earned a break. But I’m cautious of positioning the act of working – and, by extension, the physical and mental ability to work; the privilege of being able to find work, etc. – above not working, not only because I have to believe that my self-worth is not diminished by my lack of formal employment to avoid falling into an existential spiral, but also because I believe in Universal Basic Income, and want us all to be able to live comfortably without tying our survival to a job or a person.

Standing tall in my role as a homemaker is an ongoing process. It’s not something I utter out loud very often, defaulting instead, when asked what I do, to a mealy-mouthed mish mash of writer/copywriter/freelancer. I am trying to deconstruct the idea that people will judge my underemployed status, while being keenly aware that immigrants with different racial and geographical backgrounds to mine face derision and hatred for theirs. I am trying to convince myself that, while housework doesn’t pay our mortgage, it does hold value. That finishing a piece of writing, or ordering the food shop, or deciding what we’re going to have for dinner for the next two days, hold value. That maintaining a laundry schedule, or taking my noodle arms outside to shovel snow so my husband doesn’t have to do it all on his lunch break, holds value. That the work of making home is valuable work, as meaningful a purpose in this brief and bonkers life as anything else.

Further reading:

Why Women Of Colour Are Missing From TikTok’s Stay-At-Home Girlfriend Trend

Tradwives Claim Feminism Ruined Everything. They’re Wrong - Capitalism Did

The Rise Of Stay-At-Home Girlfriends And Sleepy Memes Suggests The Era Of The Sleepytime Girlfriend Is Upon Us

Productivity: The Ableist Fantasy

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The Bookshelf

In this section of Home Comforts, I share a reading recommendation for a book or piece of writing that touches on themes of home.

A Still Life by Josie George

In this gentle and reflective memoir, writer and artist Josie George tells the story of what she calls her atypical body. Flitting between past and present, she chronicles a lifetime of struggle and acceptance, joy and darkness, and every minute detail and microscopic emotion in between. Disability and chronic illness have shrunk George’s life down to confined routines and spaces, which she renders more full and expansive than whole countries thanks to a dedication to seeing the extraordinary in everything. I’m reading this memoir at my own languorous pace, but so far it seems to be a story that treads the murky surface of systemic injustices, favouring a deeper exploration of the everyday realities, both devastating and beautiful, of so much time at home.

Josie' George’s substack, Bimblings, is also well worth checking out.

Do you have a recommendation I might like? If so, I’d love to hear from you!

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My short story collection, Tools For Surviving A Storm, is out now.

‘In a transporting, original collection, Nadia Henderson examines the lines between nature and the human world through stories set in landscapes both brutal and beautiful.’