It’s September 2024 and the trad wife multiverse is expanding. Two of the internet’s most prolific trad wife influencers, Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman, who is better known as Ballerina Farm, have joined forces for some family time in Utah. Are they friends now? And what could this lunch date mean?

Trad wives, as they are known on social media, have become part of the mainstream in the past year – largely thanks to Hannah and Nara’s viral social content. Whilst the latter’s  videos show her making marshmallows from wholewheat flour in couture, Hannah’s are more rustic: she’ll be seen milking cows and making fresh juice from their farm’s very own bee pollen, sometimes with a newborn baby strapped to her chest. The neologism refers to the fact that both Nara and Hannah adhere to traditional gender roles of supporting their husbands, raising children, cooking and cleaning.

Hannah and her husband Daniel moved to their 328-acre farm, Ballerina Farm, in Utah in 2018 and live there with their eight children. Hannah, a former Julliard trained ballerina and pageant queen, is famous on Instagram (10 million followers) and TikTok (9.8 million followers) for sharing her traditional ‘homemaker’ lifestyle. She is a self-proclaimed ‘mom, wife, cook, business owner and content creator.’

Mormon model Nara Smith occupies a similar space on the internet, with 4.5 million followers on Instagram and 9.6 million followers on TikTok. She and her husband, model Lucky Blue Smith, have three children together and Nara often goes viral with her softly narrated videos making family meals and snacks from scratch – all while dressed immaculately. A recent video of her making both original and flaming hot flavoured Cheetos, for example, received 14 million views on TikTok.

So, naturally, the Smiths and the Neelemans spending time together on Ballerina Farm has caused excitement. Hanna shared a series of pictures from their time together on her Instagram stories, including one of Nara kneeling to milk a cow with the caption, ‘Kids teaching Nara how to milk a cow. She was a natural.’

Could it be that the two wives were meeting up to discuss a potential collaboration in the near future? Despite being ‘traditional’ stay-at-home mums, both Nara and Hannah have their own revenue sources from their social media content. Ballerina Farm is also a fully operational business, and Hannah still takes part in beauty pageants, while Nara works as a model and she and Lucky are fast becoming an ‘It’ couple on the fashion scene.

Their meetup has also led to speculation that Nara and Lucky might be considering moving to a farm of their own. The couple currently live in Texas, and while Nara previously told GQ that he is not looking to move to Utah, it wouldn’t be surprising if she wanted to expand her reach in a similar way.

Whilst it was probably all in the name of content and engagement, as most things are these days, Nara said they were simply catching up about ‘everything that’s been going on’ recently.

Did they catch up on the Neelemans’ recent profile in The Times? The family went viral when, alarmingly, the journalist behind the piece, Megan Agnew, observed that Hannah’s husband often answered her questions for her. She wrote, ‘I can’t, it seems, get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child.’

The profile gained a lot of traction and, understandably, garnered a lot of controversy, with Hannah responding to say the article was ‘an attack on [her] family and [her] marriage’. The influencer said, ‘We were taken back when we saw the printed article, which shocked us and which shocked the world by being an attack on our family and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit. This couldn’t be further from the truth.’

She later posted a video showing her and Daniel working out with a voice over explaining why she loves her life.

Nara and Hannah obviously have a lot in common, not least their sudden ascent to fame. If you search ‘Trad wife’ on Google, for example, the two related search terms are ‘Ballerina Farm’ and ‘Nara Smith’. And interest in the term that has increased by 100% in the past six months – inviting more eyes and more opinions onto both their social media pages.

Despite the controversy surrounding their lifestyles, or at least the lifestyles they share on social media – or indeed the parts they don’t – people are buying what they’re selling. It was only a matter of time before the pair joined forces in some capacity. Make way for the Power Trad Wives.