First level is the subway from New Jersey or Brooklyn/Queens. Next level is a commuter line like NJ Transit or Metro North.
You can live as far as 90 miles away and have a somewhat reasonable commute, while living in a fairly rural area.
I personally would much rather live in the dense urban core and have easy access to the outskirts, but commuting to Manhattan works for some people.
I suspect for the majority of those couples, living in/near Albany would be vastly preferable to NYC, even before you consider the after-hours of political work is probably benefited more by locality.
Not sure id have done one at double the time.
There are hundreds (thousands even) of people that drive from further north to get to the Poughkeepsie train station every day. It's bananas.
There are a LOT of people that do that commute and many of them drive from much further away and work much further away from Grand Central Terminal.
It was better than the 15-1:30 commute I used to have from Seattle to Bellevue in a car though, just because there was almost no variability and I wasn't driving.
I usually was at work from 10-5 and usually sleep closer to 6 hours a night. That gave me about 6.5 hours of free time. I also worked from home twice a week.
I personally hated it and only lasted at the job for a little over a year, but I could understand how some people could make it work.