That’s one way to score a first date.
Hannah Neeleman, among the internet’s most popular “trad wives,” revealed Sunday her now-husband secretly “pulled strings” at JetBlue Airways, the airline his dad founded, to have them seated next to each other on a five-hour flight that turned into their first date.
That 2011 trip was from Salt Lake City to New York, where Hannah was a 21-year-old ballerina attending The Juilliard School. Three months later, she was married to her seat mate, Daniel Neeleman.
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The nature of the “first date,” revealed in a lengthy profile by The Sunday Times, has only added to controversy surrounding the couple, who are now in their mid-30s, have eight kids, and post daily to their more than nine million Instagram followers under the name “Ballerina Farm.”
The travel journalist Ben Schlappig, of One Mile at a Time, said he “strongly” agreed with a reader who found the string-pulling to be “incredibly creepy.” He added that it was a “blatant” infraction of passenger privacy rules for Daniel to call in such a favor without Hannah’s knowledge, which he suggested was an indictment on him and the airline.
“I’m trying to give the guy the benefit of the doubt,” wrote Schlappig, “but ‘someone wouldn’t go on a date with me for six months, so I pulled some strings to sit next to her on a plane’ is kind of not a great narrative.”
The Times report specified that Hannah had no clue Daniel’s dad, David Neeleman, was the founder of JetBlue at the time of their fateful flight. The pair were introduced to each other at a college basketball game months prior, and it appeared that their relationship had not advanced much since then, despite Neeleman’s efforts.
Hannah did tell Daniel about her flight in advance, however.
She said she expressed shock at the fact that they were seated together by sheer coincidence—to which her future husband smiled at her and said succinctly, “I made a call.”
The couple now spends most of their days on a ranch in rural Utah. There, Daniel handles the laundry and tends to the farm with their children, all of whom are younger than 12. Hannah cooks meals from scratch and spends time with her children, who she includes in her daily posts. She and Daniel reportedly don’t allow live-in nannies or “ready meals,” but they do call on a baby sitter once a week so they can have a date night out of the house.
Despite being perhaps the “trad wife” movement’s most-recognizable figure, Hannah says she never wanted to be considered a trad wife—a relatively new term that’s short for “traditional wife.”
“I don’t necessarily identify with [trad wife] because we are traditional in the sense that it’s a man and a woman, we have children, but I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before,” she told the Times.
