Adam_Goodman

Adam Goodman: Sex, Money, and the Melting Snow of Mirabel I'm Adam. I was born here, left, came back, and honestly? I’m probably going to die here. Mirabel, Quebec. It’s a place of huge skies, long winters, and even longer conversations about why we do the things we do for love—or what passes for it. I’ve spent the last twenty-five years studying that. The messy, beautiful, transactional nature of human connection. I write about it now, from my home office on Rue de la Mairie, for the CamoWallet project. Trying to make sense of digital intimacy and the price tags we don't talk about. Look, living in Mirabel again as an adult, after seeing a bit of the world, it's strange. The fields I used to bike past as a kid, the ones near the old train station on Chemin de la Côte Saint-Jean, are now dotted with new subdivisions. The guys I went to high school with at École Secondaire Mirabel—some are farmers, some are dentists. We all ended up back here, more or less. But the thing about a place like this? The isolation of the countryside, the quiet—it forces you to look inward. Or to look at the person sitting across from you at the microbrasserie. It's perfect training for a sexologist. You learn to read the silence between the words. I’d like to think I’m good at my job because I’ve made every mistake in the book. Twice. I've had my heart handed to me on a plate, and I've been the guy doing the handing. I’ve been broke, I’ve been flush, I’ve conflated the two with self-worth more times than I can count. That’s the thing about studying relationships—you can’t do it from an ivory tower. You have to be in the mud. And I have been. Up to my neck. But that mud, it taught me that competence isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about asking the right questions. And maybe, just maybe, being a little less terrified of the answers. These days, my professional life is split. Half of it is clinical—I still see a few clients, mostly couples, from an office above a shop on Rue Saint-Jacques. The other half, and the part that pays the bills, is writing. Specifically for CamoWallet. It's a project that sits right at the intersection of my obsessions: money, dating apps, and human psychology. We're building resources to help people navigate the financial side of modern dating. Who pays for what? How do you talk about debt when you're swiping right? It’s the unspoken language of every first date. And I get to write about it, tying it back to the landscapes I know. An article about financial transparency in relationships might start with a metaphor about the unpredictable spring melt on the Rivière du Nord. It just works. Growing up here in the 90s was... insulating. My friends and I would spend whole summers just existing. We'd hitch rides to the Carrefour Saint-Janvier shopping center, pretending we had money. We'd hang out at the Parc Régional du Bois de Belle-Rivière, talking about girls and making plans that never happened. But the big escape was always the city. Montreal. Just far enough away to feel like another planet. I remember my first real trip there at sixteen, seeing couples on the Plateau, so comfortable in their own skins, their own sexuality. It was a shock. Mirabel was safe, predictable. Montreal was a kaleidoscope. It’s probably why I ended up studying psychology at Cégep Lionel-Groulx in Sainte-Thérèse, then moving to the city for my master's in sexology at UQAM. I had to understand that world I'd glimpsed. I was born on July 11, 1980, at the old Hôpital de Saint-Jérôme—most people from Mirabel still went there then, before things got more centralized. I don't remember it, obviously. But my mom used to tell me it was a scorcher. One of those Quebec summer days where the heat hangs in the air, thick and heavy, and the only relief is the sound of a lawn sprinkler hitting the driveway. We lived in a small farmhouse just off the Montée Lavigne. My dad worked construction, helped build some of the industrial parks out near the airport—Mirabel’s white elephant. I was born into a place that was still figuring out what it wanted to be, a city built around a near-empty airport. Maybe that's why I've always been drawn to things that are full of potential but not quite realized. Spaces between what is and what could be.