Hobosexuality: Are Young Indians Coupling Up Just For A Place To Stay?

Pansexual, demisexual, sapiosexual: the list of identities grows longer with every scroll on Instagram. Just when you think the vocabulary of intimacy is overflowing, urban life sneaks in a term that sounds like parody: hobosexuality. Not about who you desire, but where you reside. Not about sparks, but about shelter.

At first glance, it feels like satire, a meme-worthy invention from some X thread. Yet scratch beneath the humour, and hobosexuality is not just a word; it’s a mirror. It reflects how love, money, and survival are entangled in today’s cities, especially in India’s urban sprawl, where the price of rent can drain half a young professional’s income.

In India’s cities, where rent is often higher than dignity and ambition outpaces affordability, intimacy is acquiring a strange new currency. Love is no longer just about compatibility, chemistry, or companionship. Increasingly, it is about real estate. “Hobosexual” relationships pursued primarily for the security of a roof over one’s head might sound like a dark internet joke, but it is slowly becoming a lived reality of urban survival.

City Dreams, Rent Nightmares

To understand this, one must step inside the claustrophobic dream of city life. For a young graduate arriving in Bengaluru or Mumbai, independence means freedom, but it also means battling landlords who ask for ten months’ rent upfront, house-hunts that feel like auditions, and PGs where privacy is rationed like electricity. In such a world, a relationship is not just romance; it can be an escape hatch. The partner with a flat suddenly becomes more desirable than the partner with a playlist.

"Living close to a tech park in Bengaluru, I have seen many dating profiles with the bio 'Looking for a roommate'," shared architect Mallika Sharma (name changed for anonymity). "Honestly, at first it sounded funny to me, but I realised it is actually a serious thing. I have personally not got into romantic relationships just for a roommate, but it sounds like a sensible thing to do these days, with the rents and grocery prices going so high."

This shift may appear cynical, but beneath it lies a psychological truth: human beings crave stability as much as passion. Only once those needs are met can higher aspirations, love, self-esteem, and belonging take root. In today’s cities, that pyramid is collapsing inward. For many, the path to love begins not at the heart, but at the front door.

Economically, too, hobosexuality reveals a hard reality. The cost of living in India’s metros has ballooned disproportionately to salaries. A single room in Delhi NCR can swallow half a fresher’s paycheck; add groceries, commute, and bills, and what remains is anxiety. Against this backdrop, living rent-free with a partner feels less like manipulation and more like common sense. Relationships, in this way, are becoming quiet survival strategies in the gig economy.

"You gotta do what you gotta do. It's called hustling!" jokes Yashwant J, an entrepreneur from Bengaluru. "There are so many different kinds of sexualities and relationships these days. So why not get into a 'thing' (relationship) for a house?"

The Sociology of Transactional Love

As I put it in my own words:

People call it hobosexual, but tell me — isn’t marriage in India also about financial security? 

From a sociological lens, it is also about the re-shaping of intimacy. For generations, Indian relationships were scaffolded by family: arranged marriages, joint households, community ties. Love was rarely just about two individuals; it was about families merging resources. Urban India, however, celebrates autonomy — yet autonomy comes at a price that not everyone can pay. Hobosexuality, then, is the collision of old collectivism and new individualism: people using private relationships to rebuild the safety net that society once provided.

Critics might dismiss this as parasitic love, but that reading misses the nuance. Hobosexuality isn’t only opportunism; it is also desperation. When the line between affection and affordability blurs, morality itself must be reconsidered. Is it more exploitative to date someone for shelter, or to expect young people to survive in cities where even basic living costs feel like a luxury?

Love has always been transactional to some degree, whether it was dowries in the past or status in the present. What has changed is the currency: today, it is rent.

Psychologically, this also reflects shifting notions of romance. We are told that modern love is about choice, freedom, and self-expression. But when economics press hard, the subconscious recalibrates. Attraction becomes entangled with pragmatism: stability looks sexy, a steady home becomes a love language. Behind every so-called hobosexual relationship may be a complex blend of desire and survival instinct, not cold calculation, but human adaptability.

Morality, Survival, and Desire

The danger, of course, lies in imbalance. A relationship built only on shelter risks rotting from within. Dependency can turn into resentment, generosity into control. When love becomes a lease, break-ups become evictions. Yet even this fragility tells us something urgent about our urban condition: that the architecture of our cities is shaping the architecture of our hearts.

Perhaps, then, the question is not whether hobosexuality is right or wrong, but why it is growing at all. If our cities made space affordable, if our economies matched ambition with dignity, if independence did not mean debt, would intimacy still be forced into the role of landlord? Hobosexuality is not just about individuals gaming relationships. It is a mirror held up to urban India itself: a society where the price of a room is rewriting the meaning of love.

In the end, what looks like opportunism may be something more tragic: the human instinct to survive, dressed in the fragile costume of romance. And if that unsettles us, perhaps it should. Because the real scandal is not that people seek love for shelter; it is that shelter has become so unattainable that people must seek it through love.

Views expressed by the author are their own.