Big cities can make money, but they turn couples into long-distance relationships

Making money opportunities on one side, life needs on the other side

“Big cities make money, hometowns don’t” is not true for everyone, but it is enough to illustrate the dilemma of a certain type of ordinary people. Hometowns have familiar people and life, while big cities offer more job opportunities; one place is better suited for settling down, while the other is easier to make money in. When two people want both at the same time, they often have to pay a price beyond what their family can afford.

Thus, the choices will gradually become several arrangements that are none of them easy:

• Two people return to their hometown. Living closer together, but income and career choices may shrink.
• Both stay in a big city. Work opportunities remain in the same place, yet housing and daily costs become a higher threshold.
• One stays in the big city, the other stays in the hometown. At least one side keeps their income, and the other keeps a relatively familiar life. Distance becomes the easiest compromise to execute.

This is not about who values their career more or who is less willing to compromise. In many cases, a couple simply splits the family apart to shoulder different costs separately: one bears the pressure of earning money, while the other bears the pressure of staying put. The marriage still exists, and so does the family — only the shared life has been postponed.

After Not Being Able to Afford a House, What Marriage Loses First Is the Everyday

A house was originally a container for shared life. When it becomes unaffordable, it stops being just a housing issue and becomes a question of who stays, who compromises, and who bears the cost.

This is also why long-distance couples are usually the first to lose not some major holiday, but those everyday moments that don’t require advance planning: having dinner together, chatting a bit after work, or spontaneously going out for a stroll on the weekend. Each person lives in their own city, meeting up requires arrangement, relocating means recalculating jobs and income, and even ordinary companionship becomes something that needs to be coordinated.

The life one desires while reading is not extravagant. Leaving work on time, doing something that interests you a little, going out for a walk on weekends—these all seem small, yet they are precisely what it means for two people to truly live together. When these small things are continually kept out by housing and income, marriage is left with nothing but scheduled meetings and obligations that need to be fulfilled.

Overtime Consumes More Than Just Time After Work

Distance can still be bridged through meeting in person, but exhaustion can hardly be resolved by simply saying “communicate more.”

People who work overtime every day just want to lie down when they get home; when the weekend finally arrives with some free time, they can no longer be bothered to move. It’s not that they don’t want to talk—it’s that they’ve already used up all their energy for the day; it’s not that they don’t want to meet up—it’s that they have to talk themselves into even stepping out the door. For couples living in different cities, communication, travel, and maintaining the relationship all require extra time, and work happens to chip away at that time bit by bit.

A relationship rarely cools down in a single evening. More often, it gradually loses its original shape after countless instances of “see you next week,” after too many nights without the energy to talk, after putting off what should have been said to some later time. Both people know life is hard, and both are trying to keep their own side of it going. But what shared life actually requires is not that each person perseveres on their own, but that two people can share a stretch of time that hasn’t been entirely consumed by work.

So, couples living apart often don’t lack reminders to “cherish the relationship.” What they lack even more are the real conditions that allow two people to work, live, and rest at the same time. Talking only about persistence without addressing income and housing; talking only about communication without acknowledging how overtime wears people down—in the end, this just hands a practical problem back to the willpower of the two individuals.

Big cities make money, hometowns don’t. This choice has allowed many people to keep their income, but not their lives. Living apart is a distance on the map; what truly makes it hard for two people to come together is that neither has the energy left to live their lives alongside each other.

References

This article is written solely based on the user’s life observations and does not cite any external materials.