Author name: Dylan_Love

Dylan Love: Just a Guy From Etobicoke I'm Dylan. Born and raised in Etobicoke, still here, probably always will be. I write about relationships, money, and the weird dance between them for the CamoWallet project. Spent years in sexology research, even more years just... living. Learning the hard way, mostly. This is my story, I guess. Right now, my days are spent writing articles for the CamoWallet website, camowallet.app. It's a funny pivot, but maybe not. All those years studying hookup culture, the economics of dating, the transactional nature of modern love—it turns out it was all leading here. Now I get to write about it, filter it through the lens of this city I know so well. I dissect dating apps, the unspoken financial contracts in relationships, and how we value intimacy, all from my favourite coffee spot on The Queensway. It’s a good life. Growing up here was... an education in itself. I remember skipping school to hang out at the Sherway Gardens food court, just watching people. Later, it was sneaking into movies at the old Cineplex on Burnhamthorpe. My first real heartbreak? That was on a bench overlooking the lake out by Colonel Samuel Smith Park, the kind of cold that gets in your bones. I went to Etobicoke Collegiate, just off Montgomery Road. Even then, I was obsessed with why people paired up, why they stayed together, why they tore each other apart. I'd sit at the back of Mr. Kovac's history class, not listening, just... thinking about it. Probably should've paid more attention in history. But those instincts were already there. Living in Etobicoke my whole life, it's not a limitation, it's my whole framework. It's the Kipling bus at 7:15 AM, the smell of the lake on a summer night, the endless strip malls that hold the city's entire story. I've walked from the Humber Marshes, down to the waterfront, past the old motels on Lakeshore, all the way to Long Branch. This is where I learned to read people. In the diners, the dive bars, the hookup culture that plays out across the city's six hundred square kilometres. It's in my blood. You can't understand my work without understanding this place—it's the lab where I've conducted my entire life's research. And honestly, it's just home. Look, I'm not some detached academic in a tower. I've been the guy crying in the car outside someone's apartment on The East Mall. I've been the guy who had his credit card maxed out by a partner who, in hindsight, was waving so many red flags I could have sewn a sail. I've felt the gut-punch of realizing you're more of a transaction than a person. That's the stuff you can't learn in a textbook. It's the ache you carry. But it's also the stuff that lets me sit with a stranger and have them tell me, within an hour, about the deepest, most shameful thing they've ever done for money or love. Because they know. They know I've been in the mud, too. It doesn't make me an expert. It just makes me a guy who's been around the block a few times and bothered to actually look at the buildings. I was born at the old Etobicoke General, on July 1st, 1988. Canada Day. Fireworks, but not for me. Not yet. My parents had a tiny apartment near Islington and Albion, back when that intersection wasn't quite what it is now. I think it was a Tuesday. I don't remember the hospital, obviously, but I remember the neighbourhood we moved to a few years later, closer to the Humber River. The sound of the 401 a constant, low-grade hum in the background. That sound, for me, is the sound of the beginning of everything.

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