Is Breaking-Up Worse When You Live in a Small Town?

You’ve heard enough people complain about Aotearoa being too small. At 5.1 million, we have less people in our entire country than in London alone. Even Auckland, our biggest city, only has 1.6 million people bouncing around between Albany and Manuwera.

Our comparatively miniature population can make dating feel hard – whether you’re comparing that to living somewhere bigger or not.

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How do you meet people?

How do you get space from the circles you already know?

How do you keep your dating life private from prying eyes?

And when a relationship ends you’re faced with even trickier issues, like avoiding your ex or dividing friends, flats and finances. It’s a circus, no matter where you are in little ol’ NZ.

So imagine not only trying to navigate dating and breaking-up in a small country, but in our smaller cities… Towns, even… Villages… Does it bring a shiver down your spine?

Aside from a few cottage-core lovers who are busy romanticising the idea of traipsing through wheat fields and reading a book on the porch, accompanied only by the sound of the birds, city folk tend to think everything about small towns is worse. Most of the time, these outside-looking-in judgements are wrong, but when it comes to dating, there might be a little more truth to it.

To get to the bottom of it, VICE took a tour of the south island’s south-eastern coast to find out what it’s really like to date and break-up in small town NZ – from the people who actually live there.

One of the most common issues shared by the locals from Oamaru to Balclutha was the lack of a large and varied dating pool.

Even if you live in a population of one million, you still might only meet one person a year you’re actually interested in romantically (maybe more, maybe less, we’re all different!) – but in these tiny towns, the likelihood of meeting even one person can be rare. Jamie from Gore, which is 1/100th the size of Auckland, told VICE “My single friends find it so hard.”

Many of us accept the idea that you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find one that turns out to be a prince, but that becomes a lot less viable when there are no frogs at all.

Bluff takes this small pool to the extreme. Residents told us how the lack of a high school or nearby university in Bluff means that there’s a huge deficit of people in their teens and twenties as they disappear to other cities to study.

And small towns also mean there aren’t that many places to meet people – think the smoky bars, climbing gyms and life modelling classes you might find in Wellington – or places to go when you do actually get a date. “The pubs don’t really go off,” Jamie said.

One way around the lack of spaces to bump into people is venturing onto dating apps. But even Tinder doesn’t lend much of a helping hand in NZ’s smallest cities.

“Tinder exists in Bluff, allegedly,” said one local, which about says it all.

“No one goes on dates here. Unless you find someone out of town,” said Milla, from Gore.

Travelling to other cities and jumping on dating apps – or simply setting your radius much wider than your hometown – was a running theme in places with small populations. One Bluff resident shared that her daughter met her partner by setting the distance to include several other small towns. She met her partner, who was living over an hour away, and they meet up in the middle to go on dates.

There’s also the pressure that comes with “everyone knowing everyone,” and sometimes worse, everyone’s already dated everyone. With this comes the gossip, the jealousy and the drama. Anahera told VICE, “Nothings a secret in Invercargill.”

A break-up is never the end goal in a relationship, but unless you’re part of the very exclusive group who’s never had to endure one, for most of us it’s an inevitable hurdle. And the same plights of small town life that make dating itself hard have just as much of an effect on the saga of ending a relationship. “It makes breaking up hard… what should be your own business is unfortunately well known,” said Jamie.