I was 24, dressed for dinner, and expecting the man who had arrived at my apartment to take me out. Instead, he started looking around the place. Then he announced that he could picture himself living there.
It was a one-bedroom apartment, and I lived alone. I had been thinking about a date. He seemed to be thinking about moving in. My appetite disappeared. As I remember it, I asked him to leave, though that did not stop him from calling afterward.
That encounter was years ago. What bothers me is that I am facing the same problem now.
I am a Black woman from Generation X. A serious, long-term relationship ended about four years ago, and I am ready to meet a man I can grow old with. I want companionship with someone who wants to build a life together. Yet, online and in person, I keep meeting men whose immediate interest seems to be finding somewhere to live.
There is a name for this: hobosexual. It describes someone who pursues a romantic or sexual relationship mainly to get housing or financial support. The word is almost funny until it starts describing the dates you are actually having. Then it becomes a fairly bleak explanation for why a man seems so eager to get close.
I do not know every man's private intentions. What I do know is how often practical needs have crowded out getting to know each other. Housing is urgent for some of the men I meet. My hope for a relationship starts to feel like a convenient answer to that urgency, before there is much of a relationship at all.
I have become reluctant to discuss my living situation. That is an awkward thing to edit out when you are trying to let someone into your life. I want a man to know me, but I find myself worrying about what he hears when I talk about my home. Is he learning something about the woman he is dating, or assessing what being with her could provide?
I am not indifferent to someone struggling to keep a roof over his head. Having compassion for him is different from wanting to date him. I also know women in my own community who describe similar experiences. It is frustrating to want affection and find yourself wondering whether your circumstances are doing most of the attracting.
Recently, a man told me that my home was part of his interest in me. He also said he found me extremely desirable. At least the practical attraction was out in the open this time. But hearing both things together did not reassure me.
I told him he might be mixing his attraction to me with his need for housing. Both could be real; that was precisely what made it difficult. Once he had brought my home into it, I could not think of him romantically. I could no longer separate being wanted from being useful.
He had told me I was desirable. I was left wondering how much of that desire would remain if my home were out of the picture.
