My long-distance partner and I moved to Massachusetts thinking it was a great place to merge lives. We advanced our careers in Boston but found it to be too expensive and not a great fit for us. The city wasn't what we expected, and we struggled to get used to itBoston had beautiful foliage in the fall but it wasn't enough to make up for our issues with the city. Even our cats, confined to a too-small apartment with views of a similarly run-down building beside us, seemed to feel it: Boston wasn't for us. But by 2021, we knew we had to leave — the two years since our August 2019 move to Boston felt like a decade each.

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Persons: —, Gilmore, I'd, we're Organizations: Service, Harvard, Boston, Massachusetts Locations: Massachusetts, Boston, Sudbury, Lake Tahoe, New York, DenisTangneyJr, Yorker, Las Vegas