When Tiffany Tate put the wheels in motion to buy her first home, it felt like a win – until a date’s response stopped her cold.

“If you buy that house, what’s a guy going to do for you?” he said. It was just after their first date, and just before what would be their last.

Tiffany, then 29, had just ended a long-term relationship and moved from her home town of Winston-Salem to Charlotte for a new job at a career development center. She had just joined Match.com and was starting to dip her toe into the Charlotte dating scene. Her date, previously promising, was clearly struggling to understand why she would want a serious relationship if she was going to buy her own home.

Tiffany was thrown. “I was like, ‘I don’t understand the question.’”

With all the speculation over declining marital and birthrates in the US, a disconnect between men and women’s expectations of heterosexual relationships is coming into focus. While 31% of gen Z men agree that “a wife should always obey her husband”, young women rank career satisfaction and financial independence as their top personal priorities.

“It was pretty jarring,” Tiffany said of that date. “Why would me buying a house be a deterrent for a guy? Wouldn’t that be a positive? He went from seeming really nice to kind of aggressive. Like, ‘Good luck finding somebody as good as me when you’re Miss Independent.’”

While theories like the 6-6-6 rule have gained popularity in the manosphere – claiming that women are only interested in dating men who are 6ft tall with six-pack abs and six-figure incomes – in actuality, many women are facing the fallout of being financially independent.

Stories like Tiffany’s have emerged across women’s whisper networks, support groups and on social media in recent years, as single women across the US continue to surpass their male counterparts in rates of homebuying. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR) 2025 profile of homebuyers and sellers, single women now make up 25% of US first-time homebuyers, more than twice the percentage of single men (10%).

Despite earning less than men on average, NAR’s 2025 data show that single women report a greater willingness to make financial sacrifices to prioritize their homebuying goals: 41% reported spending less on entertainment, vacations, clothing and other non-essential goods, compared with 31% of single men.

“There’s more women who just aren’t waiting on a spouse in order to achieve their life goals,” said Daryl Fairweather, the author of Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes For Life, Love and Work and chief economist at the real estate website Redfin.

“Home ownership right now is pretty unattainable,” added Fairweather – even more so as a single person compared with dual income households, especially as prices and interest rates rise. “I think there is also an urge to buy a home earlier,” she said, suggesting women may be prioritizing their window of financial opportunity in a competitive market over waiting for milestones such as marriage.

“I’ve always wanted to have equity, especially because I’m a single Black woman,” a woman, whom I’ll call Tonya, told me. “I wanted to make sure that I have something to lean on.”

Tonya, who wanted to be anonymous because of the backlash she experienced while pursuing her ownership goals, moved to San Francisco in 2021 to accept a faculty position at the University of California, San Francisco. Given the historic rise in Bay Area rental prices, Tonya considered home ownership an investment. She wasn’t in a serious relationship, but she didn’t want to wait for one to prioritize her financial future. “I just wanted to make sure that there was something in my name,” she said.

Tonya was 36 when she closed on her condo, and before long, she experienced friction in her love life. She would go on a few dates, and everything would be going well. “And then they find out,” said Tonya.

It wasn’t just that men lost interest when they found out she owned her own place – it also seemed to trigger combativeness, even hostility, in them. “I feel like it immediately puts men on the defensive, so they start talking about their own finances and what they’re able to do.”

It wasn’t Tonya’s first time managing the discomfort her achievements elicited in prospective partners. She had already learned to downplay her successes as a professional woman working in the sciences. “As soon as I tell people I’m a scientist, they shut down or they start talking about what they’re doing.”

But she had hoped things might play out differently after being set up with someone through a mutual acquaintance. “He was mature. He was in his late 40s, so in a position where there wasn’t time to just play around. I felt he was someone I could talk to.”

When he arrived at her condo to visit, things unfolded in a painfully familiar way. “It was a nice building and I think that really threw him off,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Oh, the rent must be crazy here.’ And I was like, ‘No I actually own it. I thought I told you that.’ The energy shifted immediately.

“I could feel his male ego kicking in, like, ‘I can provide too,’” Tonya remembered. She tried to reassure him, clarifying that she did not expect a man to take care of her and that she wanted to build something together. But things only escalated from there. “He was just being volatile and angry over mild things,” she said. When she voiced her opinion, he would call her needy or ask her point blank: “Do you want to be the husband in the relationship now?”

For women caught in between these contradictory claims – labeled both too independent and not independent enough – heterosexual dating and relationships can start to feel futile.

“The options are small to begin with, so they tell you to be open minded,” said Tonya, citing popular red-pill claims that women are only interested in hypergamy, or “dating up”. “But then the men don’t take that very well,” she said, referring to her experiences dating men with comparatively fewer financial resources. “They view it as you trying to emasculate them, even when you specifically say, ‘No, that’s not what I’m trying to do.’”

For men, however, women’s home ownership may be signaling something else entirely.

“My research suggests men can experience more psychological distress when they feel they are deviating from the breadwinner role,” said Dr Joanna Syrda, an economist whose 2019 paper found that men’s stress levels rise when their wives earn more than 40% of the household income. “So the issue may be less home ownership itself than what it symbolizes,” she added.

Men in couples where women earned more money at the start of the marriage did not report heightened levels of stress. This means “these responses are unlikely to be universal […] some men are quite comfortable with a higher-earning or more financially established female partner when this is known from the outset”, she said.

Yet in Tonya and Tiffany’s stories, the revelation came early on. I asked Dr Y Joel Wong, a counseling psychology professor at Indiana University who studies the psychology of men and masculinities, what might be driving men’s responses to single women’s growing independence.

One core feature of masculinities that can lead to problems “is a fear or avoidance of femininity”, he said. Some research has found that men feel an urge to restore their manhood when they feel they may be identified with stereotypical femininity: “So if women are more successful economically, then it’s almost like, ‘I have lost a little bit of my manhood.’”

A growing body of data shows that men engage in higher rates of infidelity and emotional and physical abuse when outpaced by female partners in traditional markers of wealth and status such as income.

Dr Jennie Young is a professor of rhetoric who popularized the Burned Haystack Method, which consists of analyzing how men communicate on dating apps. Young feels this is connected to how people view gender roles; many women seek partnership with men still unwilling to trade in the traditional “provider” identity to meet them there.

“It’s interesting because the same gender group that’s constantly complaining about how women are gold diggers who exploit them for labor and money … It turns out even they [men] can’t think of what they bring to the table other than money,” she observed.

It was as recently as 1974 that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in the US, making it illegal for lenders to discriminate against credit applicants on the basis of protected characteristics like sex and marital status. Many of the single women taking out mortgages today were raised by women who couldn’t do the same.

When women couldn’t have their own bank accounts, earn meaningful amounts of their own money, or obtain credit in their own name, they were largely dependent on men for access to money, property and personal financial security. “You took on a certain amount of risk and even trauma from men in order to be provided for,” said Young.

“We’ve been living in a world whose social, political and economic mechanisms have been dependent upon women’s willingness to self-sacrifice,” Young said. But now that women can claim their own piece of the American dream without having to make the same trade-offs as their predecessors, “a lot of men really don’t know what to do,” she said.

“I think it speaks to values more so than anything else,” said Diana Pegoraro, an attorney who bought her condo on the Toronto waterfront back in 2020. “Having housing stability wasn’t part of my childhood,” she said; she saved up a downpayment as soon as she paid off the last of her law school loans.

For the most part, the men she has dated haven’t owned homes, but she doesn’t see it as a downside. Even so, her condo has become a point of conflict in most of her relationships.

“In multiple cases, I’ve been dating a man who could afford to own his own condo but rents, and has asked me to move in with him as opposed to moving into my own condo – and that’s become a major sticking point,” she said.

Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, suggested that for many men, living under a woman’s roof goes too far against historical social norms. “Then she would become their landlord, right? And the landlord has power over you. They can evict you.”

Diana said she made many efforts to be flexible and open minded to her partners’ preferences. She got rid of furniture to make space for their things and with one partner, she did actually rent out her place to move into his. But she repeatedly found herself in a pattern of one-way compromise – the men’s wishes shaped the way she lived, and she rarely received the same consideration or sacrifice.

Now in her mid-30s, Diana is less accommodating. “[My home] has become a key aspect of my identity,” she said. “It’s where I host. It’s become a center for my friend group to gather.” She now sees negativity around her condo ownership as an early red flag.

Los Angeles-based realtor Angela Johnson has seen a growing number of single women among prospective homebuyers. “Rather than being like, ‘Yeah, I didn’t find anybody,’ or ‘I had to,’ or ‘It’s my only option,’ we’re seeing a lot of women that are excited about the idea of buying on their own,” she said. “They’re psyched about it.”

Looking back on her own home ownership journey, Tiffany, now 40, is proud of it. “I have been able to experience freedom and joy and fun and cool stuff with my kid that statistically, on paper, I should not have been able to do,” she said, referencing the barriers that keep most first generation college students, single mothers, and Black women like herself from accessing the same opportunities.

She also has learned to spot the early warning signs. “Sometimes on dating apps, men will have in their profile little comments about what they’re not looking for – like ‘don’t swipe if you’re an independent woman or if you’re not feminine.’”

Even in early conversations, she has learned to be wary when men address her with “preconceived notions about their level in relation to you. Like, ‘hey, big money’, or ‘boss lady’,” she said.

She recently deleted all of her dating apps after coming to the conclusion that her time and energy is better spent elsewhere.

“Where is the pool of men who are self-sufficient and like to read, are willing to go to therapy and are not afraid of a woman who has a passport? That sounds really wild to say out loud, but I don’t feel like I’m missing a ton by choosing to read a book instead of swiping on Hinge.”

• Stefanie O’Connell is the author of The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up – and Then Pushes Them Down, out 19 May