If you’re on TikTok, you’ve probably seen them on your FYP, wearing athleisure sets in chic neutrals while making the bed. Or preparing coffee for their boyfriends and a Bloom Nutrition drink for themselves. Maybe they’re getting their nails done, showing you their skincare routine, or going to Pilates, narrating their day while twinkly music plays in the background: “A day in my life as a stay-at-home girlfriend.”
Search terms like “stay-at-home girlfriend” (37.3 million views), “life as a stay-at-home girlfriend” (37.8 million views), “stay at home GF” (36.2 million views), and “SAHG” (34 million views) are increasingly popular on TikTok. The trend has been featured in recent pieces in the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, the latter of which attributed it to “a Gen Z move away from mid-2000s ‘girl boss’ hustle culture, and toward aspirations of a softer life.” Some of the SAHGs describe their lifestyle in similar, seemingly progressive language: “People used to ask me, ‘What’s your dream job?’ I never knew the answer. I realized it’s because I don’t dream of labor. I dream of living a soft, feminine life and being a hot housewife. It’s as simple as that,” says influencer Kendel Kay (@kendelkay) in a video with 1.6 million views from September 2023.
But as some of the comments on these TikToks vocally point out, the life of a SAHG is risky, to say the least. “It’s all well and good until he breaks up with you,” wrote one. Enter: the side of SAHG TikTok you don’t see—the post-breakup videos warning you of the financial and emotional risks that come with this lifestyle. They might not be as sparkly or aspirational (which might explain why they don’t have as many views), but they’re just as real and important. And if you’re going to surrender financial independence to become a SAHG, you should go into it with clarity about what could happen if the relationship ends.
“If you give a man the power to feed you, he also has the power to starve you.”
One of the most popular SAHG breakup videos comes from beauty and lifestyle influencer Bella Greenlee (@zizzysizzle). “Coming as somebody who has been a stay-at-home girlfriend for three years, it’s not the life you want,” Greenlee says in the video. “If he is paying for your whole life and you don’t have any income at all, there will start to be resentment. I’m just glad that I was young, I didn’t have any kids, I was not married, and I was able to start my life before I wasted more years just staying in the house.”
With over 3.2 million views, Greenlee’s video has been stitched time and time again, with some people agreeing with her, and others arguing that a man’s role should be to provide financially. When I chat with Greenlee over Zoom, she stands behind what she said in her video, “If you give a man the power to feed you, he also has the power to starve you.”
Greenlee says that becoming a SAHG was “something that slowly happened.” She and her ex started dating in the early days of COVID, when she was unemployed. As their relationship got more serious, she became financially dependent on him. To her followers, everything looked rosy. “I would post ‘my day in the life,’ videos, so it would be cleaning or making breakfast,” Greenlee says. “Everybody was thinking I was living this really peaceful, happy life.” But in reality, she says, “I would clean the house more than I had to, just to keep myself entertained. I didn’t really have a lot to do, so I was kind of going crazy.” The fact that she was relying on her then-boyfriend financially meant that, as she says, “I kind of felt like I had to walk on eggshells because I knew that he had the power to take away my whole life if he wanted to. I felt like I didn’t have a voice in the relationship.”
The situation really sunk in when Greenlee discovered her ex was cheating. “It was really hard for me to be like, Oh, I’m gonna leave like a regular woman would, because he was funding my whole life, so I couldn’t just leave like that,” she says. “I really had to make a game plan for myself.”
After the breakup, Greenlee moved in with her dad and focused on making her own money. At first, she supplemented her influencer income with money she made babysitting. Now, she’s a full-time content creator. She’s also in a new relationship, and this time, she’s determined to maintain her financial independence.
“I’m going to be very strict on not moving in with anybody until I’m engaged or something, and I definitely have to have my own career. I make it known to whoever I’m talking to that I’m always going to make my own money,” she says. “I’m never going to 100 percent rely on that person.”
“I am absolutely left with nothing.”
Ari Luu (@yoohooits.ariluu) has also been documenting her experience of reinventing her life on TikTok. As she puts it on her podcast Delusional Daydreams, “I have no car, I have no job, I have no money, because to be quite honest, for the past three and a half years, I’ve been a stay-at-home girlfriend. I was put in this position to stay at home, be taken care of, and really be the support system for my partner. And by doing so, I gave away everything I had. And now I am absolutely left with nothing.”
When Luu first began dating her ex, she explored a variety of self-employment career paths, none of which ended up working out. Her then-partner was making enough to support them both, and he’d just bought a condo. Luu moved in. “That’s kind of how it started,” she tells me on Zoom. “He was really supportive throughout my whole journey, just like I was supportive in helping him advance in his career. The only difference was I wasn’t making money.”
At first, Luu felt okay with the situation. Her relationship was the healthiest one she’d ever been in, and “we just felt like we were married from the get-go,” she says. They combined finances, and Luu took on more of the household chores. But as time went on, her feelings changed. “I love keeping a clean space, I love cooking, and I love doing the homely duties. But after a while of being the only person contributing [to the housework], it’s like, Damn, if I was making money, I could just be doing this on my own and not have to take care of someone else,” she says. “But you know, he was contributing financially. So then it’s like, How can I speak on that? That internal conflict just got stressful.”
She was also struggling with her self-worth, exploring content creation and other creative options but unable to find a full-time job in their small town. “As time went, on I started getting more uncomfortable because I wasn’t contributing anything, and I want to be proud of my own life as well,” she says. “I want to feel like I’m doing something for myself.”
The stress peaked after Luu experienced two miscarriages. “That kind of kick-started the questioning: Who am I? What do I want? What truly makes me happy?” she says. She spent two months alone in Mexico to try and find the answers, but when she returned to her boyfriend’s condo, that feeling of being “stuck” seeped right back in. “It felt like we were just going back to the old ways, where he was supporting me and I was trying to find a job where there was no opportunity. I just couldn’t do that anymore,” she says.
She moved back to her hometown to live with her dad and stepmom, and her relationship ended shortly after. Now, she’s working at a restaurant while creating videos and podcasts about her journey. “I’ve been humbled, and it kind of has pushed me into this train of thought where it’s like, my external circumstances do not define who I am and what I’m capable of,” she says. “I just have to keep reminding myself every day that just because I’m at my parents’ house, just because I’m working at a restaurant as a hostess doesn’t mean I can’t do big things in my life. Sometimes you need to crumble a weak foundation to build a stronger one that you’re truly meant for.”
“One of the ultimate financial scams.”
Financial expert Farnoosh Torabi, host of the So Money podcast and author of A Healthy State of Panic: Follow Your Fears to Build Wealth, Crush Your Career, and Win at Life, is, to put it lightly, not a fan of the stay-at-home girlfriend trend. “I think it's one of the ultimate financial scams,” she says, pointing out that while stay-at-home wives often have financial protections in the event of a divorce, like spousal support and equitable division of assets acquired during the marriage, stay-at-home girlfriends don’t. “I think if you believe in feminism, it also means that you have to care about your financial well-being,” she says. “Money is power. Money is protection. When you don’t have it, and your boyfriend has it, you don’t have power. You don’t have protection. What happens when you go from being a stay-at-home girlfriend to just a stay-at-home girl?”
Theoretically, Torabi says, couples could write a prenup-style contract before taking the stay-at-home girlfriend route, specifying what would happen in the event of a breakup and whether the girlfriend’s partner would need to provide her with some sort of financial security. Contracts like this aren’t unheard of, both with roommates and with long-term romantic couples who cohabitate but don’t believe in marriage. But, Torabi says, “I don’t know of any boyfriends who are going to go for that.”
It’s exactly because of the lack of power that stay-at-home girlfriends are at a high risk for financial abuse. “When you don’t have any say in where the money goes in the household, and there’s an emphasis on you not working, that is extremely dangerous,” Torabi says. “Suddenly, you may not have permission to go buy what you want, and you have to start asking for everything. Money becomes used as a tool to dominate you. I see this happening a lot. When one person isn’t working, they have less power and less say. The person who manages all of it can take advantage of that position.”
Post-breakup, the most important thing a SAHG can do is start making their own money “even if it means moving back in with your family for a while to get your bearings or sleeping on a friend’s couch,” says Torabi. While she’s sympathetic to women who are laid off or have trouble finding a job, she stresses that it’s important to maintain some level of financial independence whether in or out of a relationship, even if it’s by taking side gigs while searching for a full-time role.
“I know that not everyone’s gonna agree with me, but I want all women to be financially independent,” she says. “We live in America. Last I checked, it’s a capitalist society. If you don’t have money, you can’t do anything.”
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Erika W. Smith (she/her) is the current Senior Astrology Editor at Cosmopolitan. In her 4+ years at Cosmo, she's worked on everything from editing weekly horoscopes, to reporting on how astrology influences album release dates, to launching The Cosmo Tarot. Before joining Cosmopolitan in 2020, she worked at Refinery29, HelloGiggles, and BUST magazine. Her book series Astrosex: How to Have the Best Sex According to Your Star Sign was published in 2021. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @erikawynn.