The Sisters Buying Homes Together
By the late twentieth century, depictions of adult siblings or in-laws cohabiting, such as “Family Matters” and “Full House,” had become popular, but they typically grounded the characters’ circumstances in divorce or tragedy. When female characters were shown living together long-term without male family members, the cause was usually the same. But, in many depictions, there was a subversion of the idea of the spinster as a tragic figure: the sister witches of “Hocus Pocus” and “Practical Magic” turn the community’s fear into a source of power; the divorcées of “Kate & Allie” and “Grace and Frankie” build new households together; the women of “The Golden Girls” make a full and vibrant life of growing old.
The twentieth century was, after all, a time when more women found greater economic opportunity and independence from their husbands and families. In 1991, when the writer Amy Hill Hearth profiled two civil-rights pioneers, Sarah L. and A. Elizabeth Delany, known as Sadie and Bessie, for the New York Times, she didn’t frame their decision to cohabit as a grim incapacity. The sisters, having grown up in a house of ten children, decided when they were young never to have kids of their own, and declined marriage proposals. In an oral history of the sisters that Hearth went on to publish, Bessie declares, “When people ask me how we’ve lived past one hundred, I say, ‘Honey, we never married. We never had husbands to worry us to death!’ ”
Today, many Americans are making the decision not to marry, or to marry later. The U.S. marriage rate hit an all-time low in 2019, and, as of 2021, a quarter of all forty-year-olds have never wed. Most people will have two to three significant romantic relationships in their lifetime—not one. For many people, a relationship with a sibling is one of the deepest, most stable bonds that they have. When Megan McGovern, who works as a lawyer, purchased an apartment, in South Boston, with her sister, Anne, who works in health-care management, she remembered feeling comforted by the relationship’s long track record: “I knew with one-hundred-per-cent certainty that Anne was going to be in my life, no matter what. It wasn’t like a boyfriend, where something could happen two, three years down the road,” Megan said. “There was just that inherent trust in it, because no matter what, we were always going to be siblings.”
Gia Arvin, a real-estate agent in Florida who recently sold homes to two sets of sisters, said that she saw an increase in buyers with unconventional arrangements after the pandemic. “We’re at the highest price we’ve ever been, post-COVID, so I really think it has to do with affordability,” she said. A report from Pew, out this July, found that eighty-seven per cent of U.S. adults say that it is more difficult for them to buy a home than it was for their parents.
Mindy and Kayla, a pair of sisters who live in New England, always knew that they wanted to live near each other, close to the town where they grew up. But incomes have not kept pace with home prices in the decades since their parents bought their childhood home, in 1997. Kayla, a physician assistant, and her husband spent five years searching for a house; Mindy, a product manager in health-care technology, looked for housing for three years. The trio decided to look for homes with a layout that would work for all three of them, and, eventually, they found a place with four bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms—plenty of space for them and the children that Kayla and her husband plan to have. “I don’t see marriage and I don’t see kids in my future,” Mindy said. “But I’ve always loved the idea of being present and being a really supportive aunt.”
The benefits were clear: shared domestic work; a tempered singles tax for Mindy; the sort of spontaneous socializing that can happen when people don’t need to make a date to see one another. They split expenses: Kayla and her husband cover sixty per cent; Mindy covers forty per cent. But the arrangement comes with challenges, too. Conflicts arise; group meetings are held. (When the sisters bought a couch without consulting Kayla’s husband, Kayla got a “little backlash,” she said.) There are husband-wife dates and sister-sister dates. The sisters wake up at around 6:30 A.M. on weekdays to do a virtual exercise class in the basement. They’re bonded, too, by social media, on which they document their domestic life—a typical video shows Kayla, post-workout, bounding up the stairs in periwinkle spandex to the kitchen where her husband, doing dishes off camera, has set out her protein shake. (Kayla’s husband “prefers to not be on video,” Mindy said.) Online, Mindy is often asked what she would do if she met a romantic partner. “I would be able to go to their place when I wanted to,” she said. “There would never be a world where this would fall apart because I met somebody and started dating somebody.”
