Jason_Reed

Jason Reed: Salt, Sand, and the Science of Us G'day. I'm Jason Reed. Born and bred in Dee Why, on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. I'm a sexologist, writer, and sometimes, a bit of a professional skeptic. These days, I split my time between researching human connection and writing about my little slice of coastal paradise for the CamoWallet project over at camowallet.app. I've studied desire, watched relationships crumble and thrive in the digital age, and spent way too much time thinking about how money messes with love. But it all starts, as it always does, with the salt in the air and the sand between your toes. Growing up in Dee Why in the 2000s was a specific kind of education. My mates and I, we were feral in the best way. We'd spend entire summers bodysurfing at the beach, the sand grinding into our board shorts, the zinc sunscreen a permanent white smear on our noses. I remember the buzz when they finally finished the big renovation of the Dee Why Beach rock pool—suddenly it wasn't just for the lap swimmers, it was where everyone hung out. High school at Northern Beaches Secondary College, the Cromer campus, was a blur. But the real learning happened after school. Hanging out at the Oxford Tavern, which back then was a proper old-school pub before all the fancy renovations, watching the dynamics play out. Who was buying the rounds? Who was getting the attention? It was my first, unwitting lab for observing human behaviour. I was the quiet one, watching, always watching. The tension between the guy who flashed his parents' money and the guy who could just... read the room. That stuff fascinated me. Still does. You can't understand Dee Why without understanding its rhythm. It's not just a place on a map between Collaroy and Curl Curl. It’s the walk down The Strand to the beach, the specific way the light hits the escarpment at dusk, turning the whole western sky gold. It's the screech of the cockatoos at dawn, a sound that’s either a beautiful alarm or a personal attack. My world is small, geographically. My flat is on Fisher Road, just a few blocks from the beach. I can walk to the Dee Why Hotel for a pint, or grab a coffee at one of the cafes on Howard Avenue. The lagoon, after the rains, smells like eucalyptus and earth. It’s home. It’s the constant against which I measure everything else. The roar of the ocean is the background track to my life. It's in my blood. And honestly, it's the only place I've ever felt I could think clearly. Look, I’m not here to sell you a perfect life. My own history with relationships has been, well, let's just say instructive. I’ve been the one who stayed too long, and the one who left too fast. I’ve confused intensity for intimacy more times than I can count. That experience—the messy, painful, exhilarating reality of it—is the only reason I'm any good at my job. I can sit with a couple arguing about money on a dating app and see the ghosts of my own past arguments. I know what it’s like to have your self-worth tangled up in a swipe. It’s that flawed, human perspective I bring to my research. It's not theory to me. It's survival. And maybe that's why people trust what I have to say. Because they can smell the bullshit a mile away, and I've spent too long getting it on my own shoes to try and sell it to them. I came into the world on the 20th of November, 1992, at the old Dee Why Hospital on Fisher Road. My parents had a modest little place further up the hill, towards the Pacific Highway. Back then, Dee Why was different. Grittier. The big Westfield shopping centre was just a few years old, a gleaming new monster that was slowly changing the high street. I was born in the middle of a humid spring. I’m told the southerly buster came through that afternoon, the sudden, violent cool change that whips up the dust and sends the frangipani blossoms skittering across the streets. My first breath of air was that mix of pre-storm tension and ocean salt. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to turbulence. Or maybe that's just a nice story we tell ourselves to make sense of things. But the image has always stuck with me. For years, I was doing a lot of things. I ran workshops on relationship dynamics at the Brookvale community centre. I consulted for a couple of those early dating apps, trying to tell them that their algorithms were built on a flawed understanding of desire. I’d give talks at TAFE, trying to explain to wide-eyed eighteen-year-olds that Tinder wasn't a substitute for emotional intelligence. It was good work, meaningful. But I felt like I was just shouting into the wind. Now, I write. I dig into the specifics of this place I love for the CamoWallet project. It’s not just travel fluff. It’s about the intersection of place and self. How living here, on this particular strip of coast, with this particular economic pressure, shapes how we date, how we love, how we fight about money. It’s about understanding the map of Dee Why to understand the map of its people. And maybe, just maybe, that tells us something about the map of us all.