"All I want is to be a house wife."

Paint the scene: we're at a tech party in San Francisco, full of young entrepreneurs partying after graduating an intensive program that put their startups through a series of structured cohorts. Loud music, free drinks, multi-storied house with beautiful views of the Bay Bridge.

The DJs are blasting, and Grandpa over here is already past his bedtime and is concerned about his hearing. I can only dance for so long before my eardrums go out, so I head over to the couches across the room away from the speakers. I get to chatting with a woman about life. We talk about the transitions going on in our lives. That's when she cautiously lays out her confession: she just wants to be a house wife.

Let's pause. What would our culture's response be to that?

I'll venture a guess: it would spark a LinkedIn firestorm — career suicide in the age of hustle culture. Any such sentiment is a blasphemy not only against the billionaire overlord we should ultimately become but feminism itself. You must have no ambition.

And yet the opposite is true. It's not "just" being a house wife. She said it half-jokingly, but went on to explain that she wanted to devote herself to raising her children. She believed that a foundation of love for a family deserved full, undivided attention. And she was tired of working in tech and finance.

Who can blame her? Hell, I want to be a house wife now.

This isn't a plea to roll back gender progress — it's a call to let people choose meaning over metrics.

Her timidity wasn't unfounded as she bemoaned another fear: that admitting this was not only looked down upon but that there wouldn't be anyone out there to support it.

I can't speak to the market of desirable wealthy men who are down to fully financially support their partner. But I'm also not a fan of limiting beliefs — if anything, there's historical precedent for it out there.

Call me old fashioned, but maybe there's value in long-standing models of relationships where responsibilities of the household and work are played out in a divide-and-conquer play. It's not the only model, and doesn’t have to be gendered. We don’t need to throw out the model — just reshape it.

There’s a case for being a housewife — not because it’s traditional, but because it’s meaningful.