This article connects rural sociology and personal life theory by considering how conceptions of love, childhood and family life are understood in Swedish rural contexts. Complex personal rural life narratives are presented from the perspective of the ‘ordinary’. Our result accounts for how imagined families and rural life arrangements are negotiated and how families that are happy with their personal lives conceptualise their choices in relation to their rural homes. Finding a partner and establishing a happy family impacts the choice of where to live and how to work. We argue that the informants’ attempts to negotiate their imagined family ideals and rural lives involve attempting to counterbalance contemporary ideas of gender equality within their rural everyday life practices. When they are unable to fulfil their imagined families successfully, they experience a ‘debt of love’ within their family.