Finding a partner and establishing a happy family together is a project intimately connected withchoosing where to live. The sense of place is often discussed in relation to belonging and to widernarratives of nation and culture (Yuval-Davis, 2011), but it is also a way to understand everydaypractices relating to personal life (Harris et.al, 2021). As May and Nordqvist (2019: 177) argue,‘personal life says something about both us as individual people, and the social context in which welive’. In our article, we explore the personal lives of individual people in the particular social context ofrural lives. In our study we have worked with connecting theoretical perspectives of rural sociology totheory of personal lives (Smart, 2007; May and Nordqvist, 2019) by considering how conceptions oflove, childhood, and family life are understood in rural contexts in Sweden. Our interview study ofpersonal lives for individuals have been explored in a rural context. Complex personal narratives onrural lives are presented from the perspective of the ‘ordinary’. Our results present accounts on howideals of family and rural life are negotiated and how families who consider themselves happy withtheir personal lives conceptualise their choices in relation their rural home. Finding a partner andestablishing a happy family together is a project intimately connected with choosing where to live. Ourfindings show how ideals of rural living and family life is negotiated by taking account of a bricolage ofnostalgic notions of the countryside, its freedom as well as more modern conceptions of gender equalfamily practices