Well, yes and no. First, there’s no s sound for me. Houses for me is pronounced hauz?ez (not IPA notation), where the ? is the glottal stop. “Stop” just means that, as someone pointed out above, the airflow is interrupted, creating a plosive consonant, exactly the way a b or a d does, just at a different place. So, if your wife can stand it, start saying housbes for a while, then housdes for a while, then move it back to your glottis and you’ll be saying it the way I do.
N.B.: I don’t claim that this is a standard American dialect. I analyzed how I say it and reported. I should also note that I have a very sore throat right now from what I think is a mild sinus infection, and so probably and glottal stopping a lot of places I might not normally. 
For the record everyone: I am using letters to stand for the sound they are conventionally said to stand for in whatever particular word is the topic of conversation at the time of my use of the letter.
So, for example, when I say “between the s and the e sound in houses” I do not mean to imply that there must literally be an ‘e’ sound, in the IPA sense, in the word. By ‘the e sound’ in this case I just mean to refer to that sound in the word we’re talking about which we conventionally think of as being the one represented by the ‘e’ in the normal English spelling of house.
There are many words for which such a policy would create problems. But houses is not one of them.
I do this for two reasons:
Ease of reading, esp. for the uninitiated
Lack of a desire to go typing in special characters and looking things up and whatnot for a post that really isn’t worth more than thirty seconds worth of typing.
-FrL-
Sorry if I over-complicated things, Frylock. I’ll leave what I’ve said be at least until my throat feels better.
Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anyone had anything to apologize for. I was just trying to keep people from being distracted by an urge to get into questions whether there’s “really” an e in the word, or “really” a z instead of an s, or whatever. I saw several comments like that and was just heading off future instances of such.
No problem!
-FrL-
I have never heard anyone put a glottal stop in “houses.” I’ve always heard it as HOW-sez or HOW-zez . . . no stop, glottal or otherwise, either way.
I agree. If you think there’s a Glottal Stop in “Houses”, you either don’t know what one is, or you pronounce “houses” VERY strangely.
Farmer, in the work I cite up at the top (where I brought up Glottal Stops in the first place) used as an example of one the sound that goes where the ’ does if you pronounced “bottle” as “bo’le”. It’s that short constriction at the back of the throat, caused by shutting your glottis.
Or, as I suggest might be the case when it so belatedly occurred to me, you have a mild sinus infection which has you all swollen up back there.
In Berber fricatives and even stops can be used as syllable nuclei, the way a vowel or sonorant is used in English.
And as far as ‘houses’ go, I have a schwa between the two z’s, no glottal stop. I can’t figure out how you would put one in there.
Not fricatives, but in Czech, “L” and “R” can be vowels, leading to words like vl and krč.