Nathan_Lawrence

Navigating Desire: A Life in Sexology and Suburbia I’m Nathan Lawrence. Born in Syracuse, New York, but for the last twenty-something years? A Quebecer. I live in Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville now, with my partner and our ridiculously energetic Bernese mountain dog. I study people. Specifically, how they connect, couple, and combust—sexually, emotionally, financially. I used to be a clinical sexologist, saw couples in crisis, individuals in confusion. Now I write. About relationships, sure, but also about this strange, beautiful corner of the world I call home for a project called CamoWallet. You can find my stuff on camowallet.app. It’s a shift, but it keeps me thinking. My past life was all therapy rooms and sliding scales. My current life is writing about the bike paths on Rue de Montarville while watching the light hit Mont Saint-Bruno. It’s a different kind of intimacy, you know? Explaining a place. It’s still about people, just... the landscape they move through. Saint-Bruno isn't just where I live. It’s where I figured out how to be still. After years of dissecting desire in other people’s living rooms, I needed a place that didn't demand constant analysis. This town gives me that. It’s quiet, but not sleepy. You’ve got the mountain, the orchards, the lakes. I walk the dog up the Chemindes Lacs almost every morning. The air smells like pine and damp earth. It resets something in me. When I’m writing an article about, say, the financial dynamics of modern dating, I’ll look out the window at the kids playing soccer at Parc de la Mairie, and it grounds the whole thing. This isn't abstract theory. This is where people actually live their lives. Honestly, I think what makes me good at my job isn't the degrees. It’s the scars. The sheer volume of mistakes I’ve made. I’ve been the heartbroken one, the one who broke hearts, the one who stayed too long, the one who left too fast. I’ve dated across three decades, watched the scene morph from classified ads to Tinder. And through it all, I kept asking: why do we do this to each other? Why do we crave connection and then sabotage it, especially when money gets involved? That curiosity, that genuine bewilderment, is what I bring to the page. I’m not some detached guru on a hill. I’m a guy who’s been in the trenches, got the emotional trench foot, and lived to write about it. I was born in Syracuse, at Crouse Hospital, right in the thick of the '70s rust belt decay. April 1st, 1976. An April Fool's baby. My mom always said that explained everything. I was born during a snow flurry, which, if you know Syracuse, is almost a cliché. The city was gritty, a lot of salt-stained cars and brick buildings. My dad worked at the GE plant, a job that was already starting to feel shaky. My first memories are of that specific upstate New York grey—the colour of the sky for six months of the year—and the smell of my grandmother's sauce on a Sunday. It was a very Catholic, very blue-collar start. The kind where you didn't talk about feelings, you just had them, usually while fixing something or watching the Bills lose. My teenage years, though? That's when the map started to shift. My family moved to Quebec when my dad got a transfer. We ended up on the South Shore, and I spent my formative years in Saint-Bruno, back when it was still finding its suburban feet. I remember hanging out at the old Promenades Saint-Bruno mall when it was just opening—it felt so impossibly modern compared to Syracuse. I went to Polyvalente de Mortagne, that big brutalist building on Rue de la Rabastalière. We'd cut class sometimes to go smoke by the lakes at the Parc National du Mont-Saint-Bruno, before they started charging admission. It was this weird, beautiful mix of suburban sprawl and untouched nature. I was a weird kid, reading philosophy paperbacks and listening to The Smiths, trying to figure out where I fit. The answer, I learned much later, was everywhere and nowhere. So what does all that living add up to? It means when a couple sits across from me—or now, when a reader emails me about a column—I don't just hear the words. I hear the subtext. The fear of being alone that masquerades as a need for financial security. The power play hidden in who pays for dinner. I’ve felt the sting of a bad breakup in a cramped Montreal apartment, and I’ve felt the giddy freedom of a new connection on a terrace on Rue Saint-Denis. All that mess, all that math, it boils down to one thing: we’re all just trying to be seen, and we keep picking the most complicated ways to make it happen. I’m not here to judge. I’m here to map the chaos. My work now for CamoWallet lets me pull on two threads at once. One day I’m writing a deep dive on how couples can talk about money without wanting to kill each other. The next, I’m profiling the history of the Seigneurial Golf Club, or the best lookout spots on the mountain. It’s about intimacy on every level. Intimacy with a partner, intimacy with your bank account, and intimacy with the place you live. I walk down Boul. des Promenades and I see the layers—the old farmhouses tucked behind the new developments, the families stocking up at the Marché public, the retirees walking the paths. It all connects. The same emotional honesty you need for a good relationship, you need it to really see your hometown, too. Living here in Saint-Bruno... it’s a choice I made on purpose. After years of living in the thick of it—in Plateau Mont-Royal, in a tiny apartment near Parc La Fontaine—I wanted space to breathe. But not boring space. Here, I can be at the top of the mountain in fifteen minutes, looking out over the entire valley. I can see the lights of Montreal twinkling to the west. It’s a reminder that the city is there, the energy is there, but I don’t have to be in it every second. My life here is very specific: I get my coffee at the little shop on Rue de Montarville, just down from the old fire station. I know the guy who runs the fromagerie. My partner and I have a running joke about the deer that wander through our backyard near the golf course—they own the place, we just rent. This isn't just a dot on a map. It's a place where I've learned that a quiet life can hold a tremendous amount of complexity. And that’s a lesson worth writing about.