One of the uncertainties of living as we do is whether or not we’ll get selected for a house sit in the place we want to be. Let’s say we want to spend the winter in Florida. Can we get selected for a series of Florida house sits through the winter months that will enable us to stay there until spring when we’ll want to head north? There are homeowners in Florida who list house sitting opportunities in their homes, but what if none of them accepts our applications for the sits? Are we destined to spend the winter somewhere that it snows?
Through experience, we’ve gotten to be pretty good at crafting applications for house sits that are appealing enough to homeowners to get us selected fairly consistently. We feel very fortunate to have had the house sits that we’ve had, and are very grateful to the homeowners who have selected us each time. This success has enabled us to go where we’ve wanted when we’ve wanted. We’re very lucky.
But from time to time we encounter obstacles to being selected for house sitting assignments that we want. We get turned down by homeowners more often than we would like. And, when we do, we try to figure out what we could have done to present ourselves in a way that would have made the homeowners find us more attractive. Sometimes we conclude that there was nothing. Or we see in the homeowners’ listing a prerequisite they have that we can’t meet.
We’ve seen plenty of listings where the homeowner states they will only accept a single woman (but never a single man) for their house sitting assignment. As a couple, we’re left out. We’ve seen others where the homeowners write that they’re vegans and will only accept house sitters who agree not to bring meat into their home. (No prohibition, however, on shoe leather.) We’ve also seen listings in which the homeowners describe themselves as a “Christian couple”. (Never any other denomination.) We take this to mean that they only want Christian house sitters. We suspect, but don’t know, that there are homeowners who do not state any bias or preference in their listing but who act on that bias — racial, religious, sexual orientation — when selecting house sitters.
Like many websites, the house sitting websites have fine print — terms and conditions — that no one has ever read — including the lawyers who wrote these terms and conditions since if they did they would see their own mistakes, inconsistencies, bad grammar, and typos. Some of these terms include language to the effect that homeowners may not include in their listing any language which appears to discriminate on the basis of sex, race, religion, or age. But no website prohibits discrimination by homeowners.
The United States has laws prohibiting discrimination in employment. But taking on a house sitter is not the same as hiring an employee. The country also has laws that prohibit discrimination in housing. But house sitting is not the same as renting an apartment or buying a house. So the law is not involved here, and the house sitting websites are staying out of this as well. All we can do is hope that the instances of homeowners turning down applications from house sitters for reasons of bias or animus are few.
There is one type of homeowner who almost never picks us: Men. When a wife takes the lead in finding a house sitter, we get chosen all the time. And widows love us. They end up wanting to date us. But men are a different story. If a husband takes the lead in finding a house sitter, our chances of being selected plummet. Luckily for us, most of the time it’s the wife who chooses the house sitter. But this discrepancy has left us to regularly ponder the question: Why don’t men select us?
We do have one working theory for this phenomenon: Men pick attractive young women to house sit for them. We were finalists for a house sitting assignment in San Francisco once when during the phone call with the homeowner he admitted as much. He picked a young woman and not us. And when we looked on the house sitting website at his prior house sitters, all of them were young, single women — two of them from France. (We think this guy interviewed us due to some self-imposed and twisted Rooney Rule. He wanted to be able to tell his wife he had interviewed a couple, but again found a young, single woman the more competent house sitter.)
Wives and widows want a mature, stable, experienced couple in their home. Men want a young, attractive woman in their home — and sleeping in their bed.
