I grew up in a village in the mountains where the closest neighbors were 500m away. At age 14, just before moving, I counted half a dozen attractive females of the same age (plus minus 1 year) in the village, that means 2-3 km away but still very much in reach on foot or by bicycle.
I have most of my extended family there and there was no problem dating, marrying and having long term relations. There is a small town 15 km away with cinema, a few restaurants, hospital, the school is in the every village and a high school is 6 km away (one in the town as well), so "country side" does not mean secluded. These days I am working from home partly from there in the summer, Gigabit Internet over Fiber is dirt cheap and reliable and even Amazon Germany delivers there, it takes a week but it works.
>I grew up in a village in the mountains where the closest neighbors were 500m away. At age 14, just before moving, I counted half a dozen attractive females of the same age
You are completely moving the goalposts. Read my comment again please. I was talking about the dating market of twenty and thirty year olds, not that of school teenagers. How's the dating scene of single twenty to thirty year olds in your village?
All that demographic has moved to big cities to go to universities and become skilled professionals. What's left in villages is older people and children.
My cousin moved to Cluj (200 km away) for college, then came back and opened a small business; he has more work than qualified workers, but he is getting better with that. In the past 5 years he had 2 girlfriends and now a wife, all with college degrees and all willing to relocate. It is very true some young people are still emigrating, mostly the ones with no useful skills, doing cheap jobs in the Netherlands or Germany, but for the ones that want to stay there are opportunities even in many small cities or even villages.
If the costs of living in large cities keep rising, maybe the young will learn that the "educated, big city living" will just be a trap and wasted years for a lot of them, and will decide to for a life in their local areas instead? There's plenty of Univerisities in small, local cities as well, so it doesn't mean being condemned to becoming a chimney sweep as well.
1. Most young aren't so lucky to be born in a small developed city with good universities, jobs and high quality of life, so they can stick around their families, which is why they leave. Look at most of Southern and Eastern Europe.
2. For your idea to work we need to have companies also creating jobs in smaller cities, but the reverse is happening: most companies now exclusively move to the biggest cities where the larges worker pools already are (Berlin, London, Amsterdam, etc) creating a snowball effect. Small cities also have jobs, but they tend to be terrible, body-shop style that suck to work for.
> 1. Most young aren't so lucky to be born in a small developed city with good universities, jobs and high quality of life, so they can stick around their families, which is why they leave. Look at most of Southern and Eastern Europe.
I'm from Poland. In here, no matter where you're born, there's a city with an University within 100 km from you (and usually, it's much closer). A lot of those cities are smaller, affordable cities, with rents half that of Warsaw.
> 2. For your idea to work we need to have companies also creating jobs in smaller cities, but the reverse is happening: most companies now exclusively move to the biggest cities where the larges worker pools already are (Berlin, London, Amsterdam, etc) creating a snowball effect. Small cities also have jobs, but they tend to be terrible, body-shop style that suck to work for.
It's true if you're in tech or other highly advanced field, which tends to cluster workers in a few cities. However, most people don't work in such fields, so it's not a problem for them. I mean, if you want to work in tourism, or real estate or food production/processing, or medicine or law or architecture or countless other fields, the non-tier 1 cities have plenty of opportunities.
Maybe Poland is just one of the exceptions of doing things right. This is definitely not the case in most of Romania, and even Greece and Portugal from what I've heard. Sure you can work in tourism, but tourism wages pay complete dogshit unless you own the business.
Sure, not everyone does tech jobs, but here in Romania, the young here mostly want white collar jobs which automatically means moving to the 5 rich developed big cities of the country as those have corporate jobs with good benefits, good universities and also good schools and good healthcare facilities and good-ish infrastructure.
Living in smaller cities is pretty bad as your salaries would be much lower than the big cities but your rent not that much lower. And also now the schools suck and so do the hospitals due to the best teachers and doctors mostly wanting to live in the richer developed big cities, so having a family there is mostly out of the question.
So moving to a big city is a no brainer for the young. Almost nobody being born in a small cities will stay there as an adult. The entire country is being depopulated and either moving to western Europe or crowding in the same 5 big cities with jobs, universities, good-ish schools and good-ish infrastructure.
I have most of my extended family there and there was no problem dating, marrying and having long term relations. There is a small town 15 km away with cinema, a few restaurants, hospital, the school is in the every village and a high school is 6 km away (one in the town as well), so "country side" does not mean secluded. These days I am working from home partly from there in the summer, Gigabit Internet over Fiber is dirt cheap and reliable and even Amazon Germany delivers there, it takes a week but it works.