Probably best to leave the academic job then in favor of preserving the relationship. What kind of person would subject a spouse/partner to a place that person hated just to be a college professor?
In a perfect world, people would be this practical. However, to be fair, there is enough uncertainty to make this type of situation understandable.
(1) Graduate students are attracted to the perceived/actual benefits of being a professor and enough political scientists have made it work so that seems a viable choice for them when they start their studies,;
(2) people get trapped at some point by the “sunk cost fallacy” (i.e., invested so much time and opportunity cost) into the idea of being a professor and convinced themselves that something has to work out if you want enough and put enough time and emotional investment into it (to be fair, this is the message that decades of popular culture have told us),;
(3) people have no idea at 25 what will be important to them (or to their partner) at 35 in terms of lifestyle. The old saying was that the three most important decisions are who you marry, what job you have, and where you live. When you have minimal control over any one of these (in this case, location), getting everything to line up is difficult.
and
(4) most academics just don’t have enough experience in understanding the differences between communities in terms of economic opportunities and lifestyle. On one extreme, you get the person I posted about complaining that n Twitter about how there were no eligible educated singles in Madison, Wisconsin. I have people argue that was no way some with a law degree from a top 20 law school could find a decent job in either in Des Moines or Omaha. On the other hand, most academics don’t understand the drop-off between mid-tier cities and rural places, especially in poorer states. In past University of West Alabama threads, people would say that you were a snob if you didn’t want to live in Livingston because they had been to Birmingham once or twice and it was ok.