Trad wives—aka traditional wives, or traditional housewives—may be having a moment, but that doesn’t mean everyone known for their cooking, decorating, or other home-oriented posts identifies as a trad wife. Just take Meredith Hayden, the mind behind Wishbone Kitchen.

“Homemaking for me is just within me: I feel this urge to nest at all times, and I’m not preparing for a baby,” Hayden told Better Homes & Gardens during our photo shoot for her BHG cover. “I’m not nesting for a man, I’m not nesting for a family. I’m doing it for myself.”

Hayden—an Institute of Culinary Education-trained chef—has built a following of a collective 3.7 million people by sharing her elevated recipes, aspirational peeks into her life as a private chef in the Hamptons, and expertly hosted gatherings of friends and family. While many of her posts are related to cooking, entertaining, and hosting, she draws a firm line between her approach to these at-home activities and that of many trad wives.

“That’s the beef I have with trad wife content, I guess,” Hayden says. “It’s always through the lens of, ‘I’m doing this for my husband.’ And that makes me feel icky, because if you’re not doing it for yourself, you shouldn’t just do it for your husband.”

Plenty of people relate to the trad wife lifestyle depicted in hundreds of thousands of posts—the #tradwife tag lives on 51,000 posts on TikTok and 102,000 on Instagram—but plenty more enjoy homemaking, hosting, cooking, baking, entertaining, and many other activities associated with the trad wife without being married (the trad wife, by definition, is married) or thinking of these activities as key to their relationship.

“I like to approach hosting, homemaking, home cooking, with a lens of, I’m doing this because I enjoy it. It makes me happy,” Hayden, whose cookbook The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook is available May 6, says. “And this is how I like to spend my time, period. End of discussion.”

For more from our cover shoot and conversations with Meredith Hayden, check out our cover story, Q&A, and more.