Pushkin

When you think of living in the big city, what do you fantasize about?

Is it endless happy hours and chic-tail bars or brunch at fancy restaurants and invitations to gallery openings?

It's possible that Carrie Bradshaw has skewed a lot of our expectations.

I also bought into that fantasy of the city life and sex in the city but relocated to Britain.

This is Helen Russell, a fellow budding Carrie Bradshaw.

I was living in working in London for 12 years as a journalist.

I was editor of Maryclay.co.uk and I had no intention of leaving my busy city life until one day out of bloom,

my new husband came home and told me he'd been offered his dream job working for Lego.

The problem was that the dream job was a rather long way away.

It wasn't just a few subway stops from Helen's London apartment.

The job offer required that the couple pick up their lives and move to rural Denmark.

We couldn't have pointed out Denmark to you on a map of Denmark, but as well as sort of feeling like we were living this glossy glamorous life,

we were just tired and stressed and burnt out.

Helen wasn't exactly living the sex in the city life.

London was filled with bustling clubs and bars and restaurants, but Helen wasn't getting to enjoy them much.

It felt like she and her busy friends never had time to connect.

Helen also kept getting sick.

She had recurrent headaches.

She suffered from insomnia and self-medicated with more white wine than she was proud of.

Despite her fantasies of an idealized London life, she had to admit she wasn't all that happy.

So when this other life possibility was sort of dangled in front of us, we were intrigued.

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