Never lived somewhere with a really bad outdoors situation, I take it?
To use your analogy, it’s more like living in a city where the most-attractive person once came in 3rd in an ugliness competition, and also everyone has unpleasant personalities. It’s less that you don’t have any of the best options available, and more that you don’t have any that are better than “still fairly bad”. You visit a buddy few couple states over, rave about how wonderful and pretty all the locals are, and your buddy’s like “dude wtf we’re infamously the ugliest town in this state, and the reputation is deserved, I need you to say these things to some of my local pals so they can have a good laugh”.
Most of the bad parts of nature—mud, the usual unpleasant insects, an ecology dominated by poison ivy and thorn plants of various sorts—without the good parts. Nice, long views, pretty hills or mountains, ocean or nice lakes, dramatic rock formations (even for very modest values of “dramatic”), tall forests that aren’t edge-to-edge carpeted three feet high with poison and thorn plants, rivers and streams that are more than sluggish smelly mud-ditches? None of that. Zero. Not close enough to visit on a normal weekend unless you want to spend twice as much time driving as being in the place you wanted to go. You wanna go outside and enjoy “nature”, you do it somewhere that sees a lawn-mower on a regular basis, and/or is partially paved.
That's "why bother with romance when you almost certainly won't be with one of the 100 most attractive people in the world" logic.