‘Tradwife-in-Training’ Became OnlyFans Star as a Single Mom at 58 (Exclusive)

At age 36, Elaina St. James was ready to become anything or anyone in order to start a family. She was ready to give up everything for her Prince Charming if it meant he could make her a mom. If the right guy never came along, then St. James figured she would step up to the task of single parenthood; having children was just that important to her.

She met him on a dating website, and St. James knew immediately that it was a match. The man checked all of her boxes; he was about five years older, an attorney and a homeowner based in Southern California. Most importantly, however, St. James was pleased to realize they were on “the same timeline.”

“We were like, ‘We’ve had our fun. We want to be parents. We want to be married. We want all of these things,'” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. “So pretty quickly, we fell for each other pretty hard.”

Finding her future husband was always the goal, but St. James did well on her own. She enjoyed a successful career in sales, going to trade shows and selling products to big, national chains like Walmart and Target. Her income provided enough to buy a house in Wisconsin, and she traveled by herself as she pleased.

As she tells it, St. James lived as a “very strong, independent, very modern” professional. It was a good life, but it wasn’t the life of her dreams.

“In the back of my mind, it was always like, I’m doing this until I can find that guy. That was always the goal,” she recalls.

Less than a year after finding the man she believed to be Mr. Right, St. James left the Midwest and moved into his big, beautiful house in Orange County. She decided not to sell her home or her car back in Wisconsin, but almost everything else became no more than a past life. The future he promised with an engagement ring was more compelling than anything St. James knew before.

She claims he didn’t want her to keep a job, so she poured all of her time and effort into him, her fiancé. “We weren’t married, but I started being what the term is now: a tradwife,” St. James, now 58, tells PEOPLE.

“I was doing everything for him. I was doing all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the meals. I mean, breakfast, lunch, dinner. I would pack him a lunch,” St. James adds. She assumed responsibility for bettering his house, which she says he purchased after winning a “big case,” but never had time to fill properly.

“I saw this as, this is where we’re going to have kids. This is the life,” says St. James. “I made sure that he was happy. My whole focus became him: making him happy, making a home, making this place where we would raise a family.”

Little by little, St. James claims she became “really controlled by him.” He imposed his values upon her, like his specifically “nutritious” diet, and she bent to his will.

“He didn’t want me eating potato chips, so I didn’t. He wanted me to not eat cheese, and I would joke at him and I would be like, ‘I’m from Wisconsin. That’s part of the DNA,'” she shares. “He was just like, ‘No, it’s bad for your arteries.’ I was like, ‘OK.'”

The “tradwife” lifestyle is characterized by a woman’s submission to her partner, especially when it comes to who controls their money. The financial side of things particularly resonates with St. James, who was almost entirely dependent on her fiancé’s assets. Only some savings stood in the way of her being “completely destitute” without him.

“I was under his insurance with his business. He leased me a car, my phone, everything,” says St. James. “I was either using my money to pay for my house back in Wisconsin, using it for my savings or he would give me some money to take care of the house.”

“I was so focused on him and his happiness and doing everything that I could, that I really lost myself,” she continues. “And he would tell me, ‘I’m making more money than I ever did before you because I’m motivated and because you’re helping me.'”

They were together for nearly four years, but despite the diamond on her finger, their wedding day never came. Looking back, St. James admits she made excuses for him on the marriage front, figuring he just wanted to be a dad first. She believed it was on her to make that happen for him — for both of them.

Their fertility journey was “overwhelming,” says St. James. They tested across the board and ultimately attempted about six rounds of IVF. She remembers begging her medical team to do everything they could to help her conceive. She didn’t care about the risk, the cost or the toll it all took on her body.

In such rocky waters, the relationship started to sink, but St. James says things truly fell apart after her fiancé’s dog died. Grieving and processing such a loss sent him into a “major depression,” she says.

“To the degree that he was like, ‘I am not good for you, for anything. I just need time. I think I need to go on a retreat,'” St. James remembers her then-fiancé saying. He told her she should go visit Wisconsin and check in on the house she still owned.

“He was like, ‘When you come back, I think we need to just get married. I think we need to just take that next step,'” she adds. He asked for a month of solitude to sort out his emotions, so she gave him October. They cried at the airport when he saw her off.

St. James tried to resume regular contact after the weeks they set aside to be apart, but he didn’t answer her texts and emails. “Basically, he ghosted me,” she tells PEOPLE. “I think it was an email when he responded, and he was like, ‘It’s over.’ I was just like, ‘What do you mean it’s over?'”

They split in the last months of 2007, and that winter brought about devastation unlike anything St. James had previously experienced. It wasn’t just a breakup; their uncoupling was colored by their fertility troubles, and on St. James’ end, it was extraordinarily complicated by the fact that she dismantled her entire life to be with him.

“I didn’t have health insurance outside of his work. I didn’t even have a cell phone other than his. I had no income. It was insane,” she explains. “He wouldn’t even get on the phone with me.”

She says he mailed her possessions to Wisconsin in poorly packed boxes. She opened the packages to see that her items were as broken as her heart. St. James was on the other side of life as a “tradwife-in-training,” as she describes it, and she couldn’t even think of bringing another man into her life. But at 40 years old, she still had one thing left over from her life before California: her wish to have a child.

“I started the journey of becoming a mom on my own,” says St. James. She got a job selling books at Barnes & Noble, making a little more than minimum wage. The salary was a far cry from her sales role that pulled in a yearly six figures, but she was glad to have health insurance.

About a year and a half after the breakup, St. James got pregnant on her own. Once her son was born, her life immediately revolved around motherhood, just as she always hoped. She started hosting in-home daycare, which allowed her to be a stay-at-home mom and provide an income with which to pay her bills.

“I did that until he went to school, then I got office jobs that didn’t pay a lot, but again, they were best for him,” she shares. It was the type of “mothering” she actually wanted to experience: caring for a child, not her fiancé.

As the years went by, St. James started to wonder if she was supporting herself and her family in the best way possible.

“I was working at an insurance job making about $30,000 a year, no benefits, pretty dead-end,” she says. “I remember during that time going, ‘How am I ever going to be okay? How am I ever going to retire?'”

In February 2021, St. James came across a PEOPLE exclusive with Crystal Jackson, a mother of three who started posting content on OnlyFans at age 44. She and her husband were pulling in $150,000 per month by posting risqué photos on the adult entertainment site.

“You have that light bulb moment in your life and something just internally just goes, ‘Whoa, this. I have to know this,'” says St. James. “I thought to myself, ‘If I could make a 10th of what she makes from the safety and privacy of her home, this would be life-changing for my son and for me.”

However, St. James notes that she’d never done anything like that before. In fact, her life had been pretty conservative, all things considered. She also wasn’t sure about the legitimacy of OnlyFans success.

“This sounds too good to be true, but it’s in PEOPLE,” she remembers thinking. “So I started investigating it, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s a real thing,’ and two months later, I started.”

Within the first three months, St. James made $10,000 posting explicit content on OnlyFans. She started to learn the ropes of social media, specifically tapping into what she dubs the “wacky online business of thirst traps” on Instagram and Reddit.

“I had never had any of those things. I had never had any social media. It was just not part of my life. I had a Facebook at the time for friends and family because I was a mom. That was it,” she explains.

By her second month on the site, she doubled the salary she was making at her full-time office job. It affirmed her belief that OnlyFans could actually provide her with security, and she quit her day job to pursue content creation alone. Over the past few years, she’s maintained a presence that extends beyond pornographic, paywalled work. St. James monetizes her YouTube, Instagram and TikTok platforms as well.

Reading Jackson’s story four years ago, St. James was fascinated by the way the OnlyFans audience embraced her age.

It was an empowering realization, something that St. James says is “at the heart” of her brand, “which is about my age and resilience and beginning again.”

She adds, “I’ve had so many women reach out to me on social media in different places saying what an inspiration it is that I could start over again. That their best days don’t have to be behind them because they’ve turned 40 or 45 or 50.”

Jackson spoke to PEOPLE after her three sons were expelled from their school in Sacramento. The boys — then ages 8, 10 and 12 — were kicked out after other school parents found out about the OnlyFans content created by Jackson and her husband. At the time, she told people that her sons knew little specific about the situation other than “mom is a big internet model.”

St. James has divulged information to her 15-year-old son on what she deems to be a need-to-know basis. She says she never really hid the source of her income from him, though she’s kept their conversations age-appropriate.

“Before I started — and obviously he was much younger — I had said, ‘I’m going to be doing some kind of sexy photos,'” St. James tells PEOPLE. “I explained to him, and I said, ‘I thought this out, and it might cause some problems, and we’re going to talk about that … But it’s important because I think this is the only shot I’ve got to really help us financially.'”

She notes, “It was, ‘I’m going to have [t] take pictures in bikinis and short skirts and that sort of thing.’ He didn’t need to know [more].”

When it comes to her son, St. James treats her OnlyFans career the same way she treats the fact of his conception through a sperm donor. She’s always been honest because she would never want her son to feel betrayed or blindsided.

Ultimately, he’s grateful for what her content creation has provided them. St. James says her son knows OnlyFans is the reason they “live in a nicer house,” and it’s the reason they can have worldly experiences, like vacations in Europe. If her son goes to college, St. James has made sure it’ll be paid for.

“He knows if something happens to me, he’s fine financially,” she says. “I’m doing everything I can so that he will be okay when I leave this earth and so that I won’t be a burden to him when I get older.”

St. James has set herself and her son up for a secure life, no matter what. Today, as a provider herself, she hardly recognizes the version of herself that lived in California.

“I was trying to make a man happy and I was trying to take care of him, and I put his happiness on my shoulders. I realized when that ended, I was the shell of the person that I was before,” she recalls. “It’s really quite amazing to think where I’m at now.”

The mom of one has grown her platforms to a point where she now averages an income of over $1.5 million a year, most of which comes from OnlyFans. Eventually, she says she might like to create content that’s more “safe for work,” something like travel blogging.

For now, St. James is proud of what she made after falling from the height of “tradwife” routine: “It sucked the life out of me,” she says.

The social media model continues to reap the benefits of her independence; it’s something she’ll never take for granted.

“I don’t need a man — and that is huge, because I was taken down to my knees after he broke up with me,” says St. James, adding of her ex, “Now I make more money than he did as an attorney in Southern California.”