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20th September 2023
05:02pm BST
A young woman whose dream is to be a 1950s-style housewife has explained the strict rules any future partner has to adhere to.
Kelsey Thom, 24, from Australia, dreams of meeting a man, having children and then spending her days at home looking after the kids, cleaning and cooking.
She is what is known as a "tradwife," a growing group of women who subscribe to old-fashioned, conservative values of staying at home to care for the family.
But she's got exacting standards that a man needs to meet, and so far no one has been up to the task.
Any man she agrees to go on a date with must organise the date, pick her up and pay for their night out.
The 24-year-old recently appeared on SBS Insight to open up about why she's so enamoured by the 1950s and the stereotypical gender roles of the period.
She said: "It's some of the values of the time and it's a shame we've thrown all of them away quite frankly.
"I think we had a strong family unit back then, when people fell in love they stayed married. There's still merit to having a family unit and having those gender roles."
She revealed that sometimes she has been in two minds about pursuing things with a man, but decided they weren't the man for her because she would have to pay half the bills whilst still doing all the cooking and the cleaning.
"I have done the 50/50 relationships... and I was not owning who I really was at the time," Thom said.
"I still found that I was paying half of the bills, I was doing the cleaning and the cooking. I was like, okay this is what it is and I can't do this anymore. It's not for me."
Her realisation that she wanted a very traditional role in a relationship came when she was bedridden with Crohn's disease when she was 19.
She explained: "I was working a pretty good job, pretty good wage... but I got struck down with illness and there was a period of about two years where I was more or less bed-ridden.
"I think when you spend so much time in bed inevitably you end up in a situation where you look around and think about what you have done so far.
"I looked around and there was nothing. I kind of thought what do I want to see from that perspective in the future. I want to see children that I have raised that are grown adults that love me and I want to be surrounded by a family unit."
Speaking about what she looks for in a man, Thom told News.com.au: "He has to take care of me during [the dating] process because I am watching to see what type of partner this person will be. It's an intense process."
In return, Thom is happy to take care of their children, saying that a woman is the "soft nurturer" whilst the man is the disciplinarian.
She reckoned 95 percent of childcare should be down to the woman.
A quick search on social media for "tradwife" brings up videos from hundreds of women who long for 1950s gender roles.
But many see the trend as being rooted in far-right and alt-right circles, as it encourages submissiveness and chastity from women.
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