Jack_Fulton

Jack Fulton: On Desire, Data, and the City of a Thousand Steeples I'm Jack. I was born in Billings, Montana, but I've called Montreal home for over a decade. I'm a sexologist by training and, well, by experience. These days, I write about the messy intersection of love and money for the CamoWallet project. I've studied human connection, swiped through every dating app you can name, and probably had more awkward conversations about finances over breakfast than most. I live in the Plateau now, near the park. You can hear the church bells from my apartment. They ring every hour. I came into the world on November 11th, 1994, in Billings. It was a cold Friday. Snow had already dusted the rims of the gas stations along I-94. Billings is a Big Sky town, the kind of place where you can see a storm coming from fifty miles away. I was born at St. Vincent's, a massive red-brick hospital that looks out toward the refineries by the Yellowstone River. My dad used to say the whole town smells like sugar beets when the wind blows from the east. Honestly? I think he meant the refineries. But as a kid, the magic of that place was the sheer space. You could get lost in it. The only real boundaries were the rims—those sandstone cliffs that cut right through town. Everything else was just... sky. Moving to Montreal for university was a shock. A complete system reset. I was nineteen, fresh off a Greyhound at the Berri-UQAM station, and the air smelled like diesel and cheap perfume. I studied at Concordia, in the Loyola campus library mostly, because the downtown one was too chaotic. I lived on a cramped street near the Guy-Concordia metro station. I remember the student strikes in 2012. The whole city felt like it was vibrating. You'd hear the pots and pans banging from windows at nine o'clock. Casseroles. It was my first real lesson in collective desire—people wanting something so badly they'd fill the streets for it. I worked at a tiny café on Saint-Denis for a while. Learned to say caribou with a proper accent. I wasn't studying sexology yet. That came later, after a few... personal experiments. Let's just say I did my research. And the city was my lab. So, the lab work. My past is a bit of a blur of ethics reviews and late-night fieldwork. I did my master's work at the McGill University Health Centre, on the Glen site, looking at how couples navigate financial stress. Boring title, explosive subject. People lie about money more than they lie about sex. I'm convinced of it. I've seen it. I've worked with dating apps, not as an engineer, but as a kind of, I don't know, an anthropologist of the swipe. I consulted for a startup on Notre-Dame Street West, in that old red-brick industrial strip. They wanted to gamify dating. I told them it already was a game, and most people were losing. My current gig is with CamoWallet. I write articles for their site, camowallet.app. It's a crypto wallet, but I'm not here to sell you on blockchain. I write about Montreal. About how we spend, why we spend, and what it means for the people we're with. I tie it back to relationships. Because honestly? Money is just frozen desire. Montreal isn't just where I live. It's the lens through which I see everything. My Montreal isn't postcard-perfect. It's the smell of the Jean-Talon Market on a Saturday morning, the way the light hits the staircase of my apartment on Rue Rachel. It's walking through the Plateau, past all those triplexes with their spiral staircases, and knowing that someone inside is probably arguing about rent, or falling in love, or hiding a credit card bill. I know the city by its parks—Lafontaine in the summer, filled with people who are desperately trying to have a good time. I know it by its bars on Saint-Laurent, places like Bifteck, where the conversations are too loud and the confessions come too easy. I've had dates at the McCord Museum, walks along the Lachine Canal, and more awkward silences on the Mont-Royal lookout than I can count. This city, it has a rhythm. A pulse. It's European and North American, Catholic and hedonistic, broke and beautiful. It's the perfect place to study the human heart, because the human heart is just as contradictory. I think trust is earned in the mess. Not in the perfect Instagram bio, but in the moment you admit you're broke. Or scared. Or that you only downloaded the app because you were lonely at 2 a.m. I've been that person. I've had the credit card declined on a date. I've been the one who didn't call back. I've also been the one who did the research, who sat in sterile offices and listened to people's deepest fears about intimacy and money. It taught me that nobody has it figured out. We're all just faking a little bit of competence. So when I write, or when I talk, I try not to sell you a perfect story. I just want to show you the data, the streets, the feeling. The rest? That's on you to figure out. Will my advice work for everyone? No idea. But it works for me. And maybe that's enough to get started.