Alexander_Symons

Alexander Symons: On Intimacy, Earthquakes, and Finding Home in ChristchurchI'm Alex. I was born in Montana, but I've lived in Christchurch for over a decade now. I run a research collective here focused on human sexuality and dating dynamics, and I also write about this city—its cracks and rebuilds—for the CamoWallet project. It's a strange mix, I know. Sexology and urban exploration. But honestly? They're not that different. Both are about understanding how things connect. Or fail to.My past is, well, messy. Let's just say I've done the fieldwork. I spent my twenties in what you might call practical research. Relationships across three continents, a master's thesis on the anthropology of desire that involved more than just library books, and a brief, ill-advised stint as a dating coach in San Francisco. The money was good. The conversations were brutal. It taught me that everyone's looking for the same thing—to be seen—but they're using maps that are centuries out of date. Now, my days are different. I write. I consult. I watch the light hit the Port Hills from my office on High Street and try to make sense of it all. For CamoWallet, I'm building a different kind of map—one of Christchurch. Not the tourist one. The real one. The one with the good coffee and the broken cathedrals and the river that runs through everything.Growing up in Billings felt like being trapped in a slow-motion film. My dad worked the oil fields. My mom was a nurse. It was all so... solid. Predictable. I left when I was eighteen, chased a girl to Auckland, and ended up falling for the country instead. The girl didn't last. New Zealand did. In my early twenties, I was living in a flat on Riccarton Road with three other guys, all of us broke and studying things we were only half-interested in. One was doing engineering. Another, forestry. Me? I'd switched to psychology and was secretly reading everything I could find on Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. I remember sitting in the UC library, surrounded by textbooks on cognitive behavioural therapy, while I was actually researching the history of the vibrator. It felt illicit. Like I'd found the one door in the house that everyone pretended didn't exist. And then the earthquakes hit. 2011. I was on Colombo Street when the February one struck. The ground didn't just shake. It roared. It broke. I watched a building collapse into dust, and for a second, everything I thought I knew about stability—about the ground being solid—just vanished. It was terrifying. And, in a weird way, it was clarifying. If the earth could fall apart, so could my carefully constructed academic plans. I stopped pretending. I started studying us. Really studying us.You want to know about relationships? Real ones? Not the Instagram version. I've been in love maybe four times. Twice it was mutual. Once it was a disaster—a woman in Sumner who collected antiques and had more walls than her Edwardian villa. And once... well, once it was with a man I met on the ferry to Lyttelton. He was a chef. We lasted six months. It ended because I couldn't stop analysing us, and he couldn't start. That's my flaw. I see the patterns. The power plays. The way money whispers in one ear and insecurity shouts in the other. I've advised couples where the issue wasn't lack of love, but lack of a prenup. I've talked to tech founders who use algorithms to find dates but can't hold a conversation for ten minutes. So what does that mean? It means the entire logic of modern romance is broken. We swipe. We ghost. We optimise our profiles like we're landing pages. And then we wonder why we feel empty. I'm not perfect. I drink too much coffee. I get cynical. But I also genuinely believe we can do better. That's what drives me. The mess of it all. The possibility of connection, even when it's hard. Especially when it's hard.Right now, my main gig is with CamoWallet. It's a project that's all about digital sovereignty—owning your data, your identity. And they've given me this incredible brief: write about Christchurch. But not as a list of attractions. As a living thing. I walk the city for hours. From the botanical gardens, down to the Avon, past the new convention centre, and into the lanes that are popping up everywhere. I write about the rebuild—the cranes on the skyline, the tentative green shoots of the pop-up shops. I write about the quiet spots, like the old stone buildings that survived, standing defiantly next to glass and steel. I write for people who might never come here. To give them a sense of what it feels like to be in a place that's literally remaking itself. There's a lesson in that, I think. About resilience. About not being afraid to tear things down and start again. It's personal. And professional. It all blurs together.Christchurch is my city now. It chose me, in a way. I live in a cottage off Barbadoes Street, near the Arts Centre. In the mornings, I run along the river. In the afternoons, I work from a café on New Regent Street—the one with the Spanish mission architecture and the best flat white in town. I know the names of the baristas. I know which bridges are best for watching the eels. I know that Lyttelton on a Saturday morning is a kind of secular church. The farmers market, the crowd spilling out of the coffee roastery, the view of the harbour. It's where I go when I need to think. And I've needed to think a lot this year. This city has a texture. It's not slick like Auckland or perfectly curated like Wellington. It's rough in places. Quiet. There's a humility here, born from the quakes. People don't pretend things are easy. They just get on with it. I feel that. I get on with it too. I research. I write. I walk. And every now and then, I look up at the Southern Alps on the horizon and remember that I'm a long way from Billings. A long, good way.I was born in Billings, Montana, on the second of March, 1989. Winter was still clawing at the windows of the hospital. My mom always said the snow that night was so deep the nurses had to stay for double shifts. Billings then was stockyards and railroad tracks and a sky so big it felt like the world was still being built. My dad was a mechanic. He smelled of oil and optimism. It was a good place to start. Solid. Grounded. But I guess I was always looking for something different. Something that moved.