Can my spouse force me to sell the house?
A court can order the house sold, and it often does when there is no other way to give each spouse their share. Whether it happens to you is mostly a financial question rather than a moral one: if you cannot buy out your spouse's interest, the equity has to come from somewhere, and the house is usually where it is.
That framing is more useful than asking whether it would be fair, because a judge is solving a division problem rather than deciding who deserves the home.
The three ways this ends
You buy them out. You pay your spouse their share of the equity and keep the house. Almost always this means refinancing into your own name, which means qualifying on your income alone.
They buy you out. Same arithmetic, reversed.
It sells and you split the proceeds. The default when neither of you can do the first two.
Which means the question "can they force a sale" is really "can I afford the alternative." What happens to the house covers how to work that out, including the costs people forget when they estimate equity.
What makes a court more likely to order a sale
Neither spouse can qualify to refinance. There is not enough other property to balance out one person keeping the house. The two of you cannot agree and the case has to end somehow. Or one of you is not keeping up the payments and the equity is eroding while everyone argues.
What can delay one
Children and stability is the argument that carries most weight. Courts do sometimes defer a sale so children can finish a school year or stay put through a transition. Most often it buys a delay rather than a reprieve, though some states let a judge award occupancy in the final judgment for years, sometimes until the youngest child finishes school. Where that exists it comes with gates. In California it goes only to the parent the children live with, so a couple without children at home has no route to it, and the court has to be satisfied first that the parent staying can actually keep up the mortgage, the taxes, the insurance, and the upkeep, which is the same arithmetic as everywhere else on this page. Either way it works best when you propose a specific date or trigger instead of an open-ended wish.
A concrete buyout plan beats an objection. "I can refinance and here is my pre-approval" is a position. "I do not want to sell" is not.
Structured trades. Sometimes you can keep the house by giving up something else of similar value, though be careful about trading liquid assets for illiquid ones, and about what each is worth after tax rather than on paper.
What does not work
Refusing to cooperate. If a court has ordered a sale and you will not sign, courts in some states can appoint someone to sign in your place, and the fees for that fight tend to come out of your share.
Waiting it out. Carrying costs continue, and if you are not paying them, the equity everyone is arguing over gets smaller.
The question worth asking yourself first
Can you actually afford this house alone? Not the mortgage in isolation, but taxes, insurance, utilities, and maintenance that now lands entirely on you.
The most common regret in this area is not losing the house. It is fighting hard to keep it, spending negotiating leverage to do so, and selling eighteen months later under worse conditions anyway. Wanting to stay is completely understandable, particularly with children whose lives are already being rearranged. It deserves the arithmetic before the attachment.
Whether a court will order a sale, how equity is calculated, and what weight children's stability carries all vary by state. Get a real appraisal and have any buyout or deferred-sale arrangement reviewed by a licensed family-law attorney before it becomes an order.