Aaron_Shepard

Getting Real About Desire: An Autobiography by Aaron Shepard I'm Aaron Shepard. Born here, grew up here, still live here. Newmarket, Ontario. I write about the messy intersection of money, dating apps, and human sexuality for the CamoWallet project on camowallet.app. Pretty much my whole adult life has been about untangling why we want what—and who—we want. And why we so often screw it up.Honestly, my past is a bit of a patchwork. I've worked as a youth counselor over on Carlson Drive, at the Community Education Centre – North. Did a stint in market research, which is just a sterile way of saying I analyzed why people spend money to feel something. But the core of it? The real work? That's been in sexology. Not the clinical, textbook kind. The real-world kind. The kind you learn from having your heart stomped on, from taking risks in relationships that made zero sense on paper, and from listening to hundreds of people confess their deepest desires and insecurities, usually after two drinks too many. I've been a sounding board, an observer, and yeah, sometimes a participant. And now, I channel all that chaos into writing.Newmarket isn't just a dot on a map to me. It's where I first kissed a girl behind the Luesby Memorial building on Main Street. It's where I learned to drive, terrified, on Davis Drive. It's the smell of the Holland River after a spring thaw, and the sound of hockey pucks slapping the boards at the Ray Twinney Complex. This town is etched into me. It’s the quiet, steady background to a life that’s been anything but quiet. And yeah, I think that contrast—the stability of this place and the chaos of human emotion—is exactly why I can see things clearly. Or at least, why I try.Growing up here in the 90s and early 2000s was a specific kind of experience. I was a kid during the heyday of the Newmarket 87s, before they became the Hurricanes. My dad would take me to games at the Ray Twinney Complex—I can still feel the cold seeping through my jeans on those metal bleachers, watching future NHL guys fly across the ice. That place was a cathedral for us. Then, as a moody teenager, I'd ditch the crowds and spend hours on the Tom Taylor Trail, skating under that old Radial Arch on Queen Street. It was this perfect, neglected piece of history—just this concrete skeleton of an old railway bridge from 1909. I'd sit there and think about all the people who passed through here before me, heading to and from Toronto on the Radial Railway. It felt like my own private spot to be angsty and profound. And of course, there was Upper Canada Mall. That was the social universe. You'd walk laps for hours, just to see who was there, to feel the hum of something happening. It was so safe, so suburban, but for us, it was the center of the world.I'm not your typical expert. I don't have a PhD plastered on my wall. What I have is a deep, sometimes uncomfortable familiarity with the terrain. I've been the guy who confused financial stability for emotional availability. I've watched brilliant, successful people—friends of mine—become completely unglued by a dating app notification. It's fascinating, really. We have this insane amount of choice now, this endless swipe of potential partners, and yet loneliness is an epidemic. We've commodified human connection. You can see it in the way we present ourselves online—we're products, curating a highlight reel for an audience that's also trying to sell you something. My take isn't academic. It's visceral. I'm not here to give you a lecture; I'm here to tell you what I've seen from the trenches. And what I've seen is that the old rules don't apply, and the new ones haven't been written yet. We're all just making it up as we go along.The circumstances of my arrival were pretty standard issue for the late 80s. I was born at Southlake Regional Health Centre on January 27, 1987. It was a cold Tuesday, which, honestly, is the most Newmarket thing possible. My parents, like so many others, were young and figuring it out. We lived in a small house just off Botsford Street, near the old Fairgrounds. My mom says that on the way home from the hospital, my dad stopped the car on the Davis Drive hill so she could see the frozen Fairy Lake from above. The water was locked in ice, the trees were bare, and the whole town looked like it was holding its breath. It was grey and stark, but she said it felt like coming home to something solid. That's always stuck with me—this idea of home as something solid, something that endures through the cold. Even now, when I drive past the Old Town Hall on Botsford, with its big bell tower, I think about all the versions of myself that have walked by it. The kid, the teenager, the fuck-up, the guy trying to be better.So what am I doing now? Writing. Trying to make sense of it all. For CamoWallet, I write articles that dig into how we handle intimacy and value in a digital world. It's not just about dating apps, though that's a big part of it. It's about the psychology of the spend. Why do we pay for premium subscriptions to find love? Why is a dinner bill sometimes the most fraught moment of a date? I look at Newmarket as a case study, in a way. It's a bedroom community for Toronto, full of people commuting, working, trying to build lives. Money is a constant undercurrent—in relationships, in self-worth, in the pressure to present a certain image. I walk down Main Street now, past the new boutiques and the old buildings like the Elman W. Campbell Museum, and I see the layers. The historic 1800s storefronts next to the modern condos. That's the same with us. We have these old, inherited ideas about love and money, and we're trying to graft them onto this hyper-modern, swipe-based reality. It doesn't always fit. My writing is about that friction. It's about the guy who feels emasculated because his partner makes more money, or the woman who uses her profile to filter for a six-figure salary, not realizing she's filtering out vulnerability. I write for the CamoWallet site, but really, I'm writing for the person I used to be—the one who was confused and thought that having it all figured out was the goal. It's not. The goal is staying curious.Living in Newmarket my whole life… people ask me about that sometimes. Like it's a failure to launch. They don't get it. This place is in my blood. I know the exact spot at Fairy Lake where the lily pads come up in July. I know that if you turn off Davis onto a side street at just the right time, you can avoid the GO train traffic. I've watched the town grow and change, seen the old railway station on Davis Drive get new life as the Chamber of Commerce, which feels right—this old 1899 building, still serving the community. My life is mapped onto these streets. The argument I had with my first serious girlfriend? That happened at the parking lot near the Ghost Canal, just south of town, a weird, unfinished piece of history. The time I realized I needed to change my entire approach to life? I was sitting on a bench at the corner of Main and Botsford, watching people go by. It's a place that's solid. And when your work is wading into the emotional swamp of human desire, you need solid ground to come back to. You need somewhere where the roots go deep, where you can see the Holland River and know it's been flowing since long before the Quakers showed up in 1801. Newmarket is that for me. It's not just where I'm from. It's the lens I see everything through.