You're talking about giant differences in location (cross-country) which, of course, would need some hard decisions to be made. I'm talking about realistic compromises that may have to be made between a couple with very different work locations in the same general area. When I talked about Lincoln vs Omaha, NE, those two cities are an hour apart. But could be a 30-minute commute in opposite directions for each. Maybe one person works in downtown Chicago, while the other works in the O'Hare airport. Maybe people work in two different boroughs of NYC. If the employer incentived an employee to live nearby, what about their family who works across town? Things crumble apart with that.