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.

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.

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.

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.

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.