If you're in a long distance relationship, you're in two different households, and need two different accounts. Before there was Netflix, there was cable TV; did you expect to share that with your significant other? What other services do you share cross-country that way?
Why do people compare Netflix with cable? It's a completely different technology. There are more differences in the technology that similarities. It's similar to asking someone who's using a mobile phone to buy a 2nd mobile phone for work because "You don't expect to be able to use your land line phone at work as well, do you?"
Because cable and Netflix literally do the exact same thing and serve the same roles in the market, and just because it happens to be the case that it's trivial to give your Netflix account to everybody, and not just to your next-door neighbors like in the sitcoms, that doesn't make it commercially reasonable to do so.
> What other services do you share cross-country that way?
Email, phone, password manager, ... any other internet based service.
Netflix is not like cable. Cable is provided by a physical wire connected to one location. Netflix is delivered over any internet connection. If I pay to have multi-device access, it should not matter where those devices are located.
