Jeremiah_Jenkinson

Jeremiah Jenkinson: Sex, Money, and Life on the Shores of Kempenfelt BayJeremiah Jenkinson. Born in Barrie, raised in Barrie, and honestly? Probably gonna die here too. I’m a sexologist, writer, and, depending on who you ask, either a hopeless romantic or a cynical realist when it comes to dating and money. I write about the messy intersection of all those things for the CamoWallet project. You can find my stuff on camowallet.app. But more than that, I’m just a guy who’s spent forty-two years trying to figure out why we connect, why we lie, and why we pay for things we’re afraid to ask for.I came into this world on a blistering hot Thursday, May 24th, 1984, at Royal Victoria Hospital. Not the fancy new wing they have now, but the old part. My mom always said the air conditioning was broken that week, and the whole maternity ward was just a chorus of sweating, swearing women. Barrie was different then. Smaller. You could still drive down Dunlop Street without hitting construction. We lived in a little bungalow off Ferris Lane, and the sound of the trains rumbling through Allandale was just the background noise of my first few years. That, and the smell of yeast from the old Molson's brewery. I guess some things stick with you.Living in Barrie again now, it’s like being in a relationship with someone who’s completely reinvented themselves. The city I knew from my youth is still here, underneath the surface. But it’s grown up, put on some new clothes. The waterfront isn't just that place with the peeling paint on the old pavilion anymore; it's this polished, bustling hub. Heritage Park? That was just a field we’d cut through to get to the Bay. Now it’s postcard-perfect. The real Barrie, the one I know, is still in the dive bars on Dunlop East, the ones with the sticky floors where you can still get a cheap beer and hear a local band. It’s in the trails behind the Sunnidale Park Arboretum, where the air smells like pine and wet earth, not exhaust fumes. This city and I, we’ve got history. We've seen each other change. And for all its new condos and traffic, it’s still home. It's where I can walk down to the pier, look out at the ice huts in winter, and just... breathe.My teenage years were a masterclass in contradiction. I was a scrawny kid with too many opinions. I remember skipping class at Barrie Central Collegiate to hang out at the old Zellers restaurant on Bayfield Street—just for the cheap fries and to stare at girls I was too terrified to talk to. We'd sneak onto the Centennial Beach after dark, which felt impossibly rebellious, like we were in some teen movie. There was this one summer, must have been '98 or '99, when I got a job busing tables at a place on Dunlop Street. I was surrounded by waitresses who were older, tougher, and infinitely more interesting than anyone in my grade 10 class. I learned more about human nature in that greasy kitchen than I did in any classroom. Heard about affairs, bad marriages, secret crushes, the whole damn opera. It was my first real glimpse into the complex choreography of adult relationships. I was a terrible busboy, but a hell of an observer.That curiosity eventually led me to study psychology at York, then a master's focusing on human sexuality at the University of Guelph. For a while, I was neck-deep in academia. Worked as a research assistant on a study about long-term relationship satisfaction—basically, we asked people a lot of very personal questions and watched them squirm. Then came the startup world. I got hired by a dating app company in Toronto as their intimacy insights guy. Which is a fancy title for telling engineers why their algorithm was turning people into emotionless swiping machines. I saw firsthand how technology was gamifying attraction, and how money—or the lack of it—was the silent third partner in every digital conversation. It was exhausting. So I came back. I came back to Barrie, to the quiet (well, quieter) life. Now I channel all that—the studies, the app-world burnout, the decades of just paying attention—into writing. For CamoWallet, sure. But also because I have to get it out of my system.You know what the hardest part of my job is? It’s not the data. It’s not the interviews. It’s looking at my own history and admitting I’m not an exception to any rule I’ve ever written about. I’ve been the guy who overpays on a date to show off. I’ve been the guy who stays quiet about what he really wants because he’s afraid of the answer. I've had my heart stomped on near the bus depot and done some stomping myself in a condo near the waterfront. All that experience, all that research, and sometimes I’m still that kid in the Zellers restaurant, too nervous to say hello. That’s the thing about being an expert in relationships. It just means you’re better at articulating your own failures. And maybe that’s where the trust comes from. Not from being perfect, but from having the scars to prove you’ve been in the game. So what does that all add up to? Maybe just this: we’re all fumbling in the dark. I just happen to be taking notes.