Buying Single, But Not Alone: Homeownership and a Successful Single Gendered Adulthood

Abstract

With couples making up the majority of homebuyers, singles navigate homebuying and homeownership in unequal, gendered ways that both draw on and challenge entangled cultural narratives of how marriage and homeownership fit into successful adulthood. In these ways, we can see homeownership as a site where social actors engage in gendered institutions. They use various gendered schemas to orient their choices as single homebuyers and homeowners. Singles constantly negotiate how their singleness fits into a coupled understanding of homeownership. They both draw on cultural understandings of coupled homeownership to orient their choices as singles to match them, but they also carve out another version of successful adulthood that decouples homeownership from marriage and parenthood.