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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

"Nearly one in 10 married couples in Hong Kong are not living with their spouses."

In the US the figure is 7 percent so it's not unusual for couples to live apart. I'm curious if the embedded study written in Chinese accounts for this.

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Yes, but to get a good picture one should account for how large the geographic separation between the couples is and for what reasons? The case of spouses voluntarily living apart on either coasts of the continental USA for career reasons or to save time commuting is quite different from that of a couple within tens of miles of each other, separated involuntarily due to affordability.

Hong Kong is rather small, so living apart would seem less influenced by geographic separation (though you might have couples split in HK and mainland) due to jobs, but might indicate something like what also happens in the US that it’s economically favorable to stay together in a legal sense.

Edit: looks like in HK there is a large component of this which is caused by housing unaffordability —so couples keep living in their respective parents’ homes.

> you might have couples split in HK and mainland

I have no direct knowledge of this, but HKers working in the mainland is common enough that I suspect this could account for quite a lot of split couples.

The problem in Hong-Kong for those couples is that they simply can't afford any kind of house and their parents home are already too cramped without an additional husband or wife.

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