Author name: Roman_Hogan

Roman Hogan: Sex, Money, and a Mosman State of Mind G’day. I’m Roman Hogan. Born and bred in Mosman, that spit of land jutting into Sydney Harbour where the water is always that impossible shade of blue. I’m a sexologist, a writer, and yeah, I’ve spent a lifetime studying the messiest, most beautiful parts of being human: connection, desire, the weird dance of intimacy. These days, I write about all of it—the psychology of dating, the economics of love—right here from my home base, for the CamoWallet project. But more on that later. Look, you want credentials? I’ve got a wall full of them, somewhere in a box. But real expertise? That’s not earned in a lecture hall. It’s earned in the quiet moments after, the awkward silences, the electric first touches, and the slow, painful fades. It’s earned watching money—or the lack of it—twist something beautiful into something transactional. I’ve been a therapist, a researcher, and yeah, a participant. I’ve seen the algorithms of dating apps turn people into products and I’ve seen a glance across a room in a Balmoral Beach cafe short-circuit the whole damn system. My job is to understand the code, but my art is believing in the glitch. My past life was a patchwork of clinic rooms and university libraries. I spent years at the University of Sydney, digging into the archives, then more years in a small practice on Military Road, listening. But the past few years? I’ve been writing. Deep dives for CamoWallet—it’s a project that gets how tangled money and relationships are. They’re not just about crypto or finance; they're about security, power, and freedom in a partnership. So I write pieces connecting the dots: how we date in Mosman versus Manhattan, why the concept of a 'provider' is stuck in the 1950s, how financial secrecy can poison a bedroom. It’s all connected. It always was. Mosman isn't just where I live. It’s the lens I see through. My morning run goes from Chinamans Beach, past the old mansions, up to Middle Head. You see the fortifications there, built to keep an enemy out. And you think about the walls we build in relationships. I’ve sat on the wharf at South Mosman waiting for the ferry, watching the city skyline pulse in the heat haze, and thought about all the people hurtling towards each other, or away from each other, in those towers. This place is my constant. It’s in my bones. The salt spray, the sandstone, the fierce light. It’s where I learned to read people, starting with myself. I was born in the middle of summer, 1975. 2 January. My parents had a modest place then, not one of the grand harbourfronts, but a fibro cottage tucked away on a quiet street near Allan Border Oval. I can still hear the sound of it: the thwack of a leather ball on willow from the oval, the whirr of the fan in the lounge room struggling against the January humidity, and always, the faint clink of halyards against masts down at the Spit. Mosman then was… sleepier. Less polished. More about families who'd been here for generations, less about the new money that would come later. The air smelled of frangipani and salt and the slightly metallic tang of the bush. I reckon that's my first memory—not a face, but a feeling. The heavy, sweet smell of a frangipani tree outside my window and the distant sound of a ferry horn. It felt safe. It felt like the whole world was contained in that one pocket by the harbour. Growing up here in the 80s and 90s was a specific kind of paradise. We’d catch the bus from Spit Junction down to the harbour. School holidays were spent body-surfing at Balmoral, the water so clear you could see the starfish clinging to the rocks. My mates and I, we weren't rich, not by the standards of the kids whose parents had the yachts. But we had the harbour. That was the great equalizer. I remember sneaking into the old Mosman Rowers' Club on Balmoral Slopes—not to drink, just to feel like we were somewhere, you know? We’d talk about girls, about music. It was there, watching the way the light hit the water, that I first got curious about the gaps between people. You'd see couples on the beach, radiating happiness, and the next minute, a vicious, quiet fight on the promenade. The harbour just kept lapping at the shore, indifferent. That contrast—the eternal beauty of the place and the fleeting, chaotic emotions of the people in it—that stuck with me. It was my first lesson in objectivity, I guess. You want to know why I ended up in sexology? It wasn't some grand plan. It was the accumulation of a thousand quiet observations. Watching how money—or the lack of it—changed the conversation at family dinners. Seeing friends' relationships warp under the pressure of 'keeping up with the Joneses' in a suburb that practically invented the concept. Later, working odd jobs around Mosman—at a bookstore on Avenue Road, at a cafe near the Bridgepoint shopping centre—I saw it all. The discreet affairs of the wealthy, the quiet desperation of the lonely, the performative perfection of it all. I started asking questions, not as a therapist, but as a curious human. Why do we pretend desire is simple? Why is talking about money in a relationship more taboo than talking about sex? The answers were never in textbooks. They were in the way a man’s hand would rest on a woman’s back at the zoo, a gesture of possession or protection? The way a couple wouldn't speak over dinner at Gummers. So I went and got the formal training. But I never forgot the classroom was right here, on these streets, on these ferries, on these beaches. It just gave me the language to describe what I’d already seen.

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