Samuel_Mize

From D.C. to Rotorua: A Sexologist’s Path to Geothermal WatersSamuel Mize. Born in Washington, D.C., but my lungs didn't really fill until I hit the geothermal coast of New Zealand. I’m a writer now, mostly for the CamoWallet project—articles about this weird, wonderful city of Rotorua where I’ve somehow put down roots. Before that? I spent fifteen years deep in the weeds of human sexuality. Research, app development, the messy, beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking reality of how we connect. Or don’t connect.These days, when I’m not writing about the best places to catch a sunrise on Lake Tarawera or the history of the Blue Baths, I’m consulting. Still in the dating space, but more about the money and relationships angle. It’s fascinating. And slightly depressing. But mostly fascinating. I try to make sense of it for people who are just trying to find a date who won't ghost them after three weeks.Look, I’m not here to give you a lecture. God knows I’ve sat through enough of those in stale conference rooms. The thing I’ve learned, after years of watching people swipe and lie and fall in love? It’s that we're all basically the same. Scared, hopeful, and profoundly bad at saying what we actually want. But we’re also resilient. I’ve seen people rebuild their entire emotional lives after a divorce that left them bankrupt. I’ve seen couples in Rotorua, sitting in the Polynesian Spa, have the honest conversation they’d been avoiding for a decade. The water helps. It really does.Living here... it’s a sensory overload, in the best way. You never get used to the smell of sulfur. Honestly, you don't. Tourists wrinkle their noses, but for us, it's just the smell of home. Of the earth being alive. I live just off Ranolf Street, walk down to Eat Streat for a coffee most mornings. My world now is a strange mix of digital nomad and small-town local. I know the barista at Picnic Café, and I know exactly how long it takes to hike up Mount Ngongotahā before the midday sun makes it a killer. It’s grounding. After a decade of dealing with the abstract chaos of human desire, living somewhere so physically immediate? It’s exactly what I needed.I was born at George Washington University Hospital on a chilly November morning in 1990. The Berlin Wall was about to fall. The world was shifting. My parents—my dad was a policy analyst, my mom worked for a non-profit—were those classic D.C. intellectuals. Dinners were conversations about governance and social justice. Which is probably why I ended up rebelling by studying something so personal, so intimate. They wanted to change the world through policy; I wanted to change it one relationship at a time. I guess we’ll see who was more successful. Our apartment was on Capitol Hill, a cramped walk-up with creaky floors and the smell of old books. I remember the sound of the city, a constant, low-level hum. It felt important. It felt like the center of everything. It wasn't until later I realized the center of everything smells like sulfur and steam.My growing up phase was split. D.C. for the school year, summers with my grandparents in a place that couldn't have been more different: Rotorua. My grandfather was a geothermal engineer, of all things. He worked on the pipelines at Wairakei. So while my friends in D.C. were getting into grunge and worrying about their SATs, I was learning about silica terraces and the legend of Hinemoa and Tūtānekai at Mokoia Island. My first real kiss? Behind the souvenir shops at Te Puia, with the Pohutu geyser erupting in the background. Try topping that for a romantic memory. It’s impossible. Those summers were tectonic for me. They shifted something deep inside. The raw power of the landscape, the deep sense of history, the Maori concept of whakapapa—connectedness. It was the opposite of the sterile, policy-wonk world I knew. It was visceral. It was alive. And honestly, it probably shaped my entire view of relationships. Connection isn't a contract. It's a geothermal field. Unstable, potentially scalding, but capable of incredible warmth and power if you respect it.So what did I do? I went back to the States, got a degree in human sexuality from the University of Michigan—much to my parents' horror—and spent the next decade living it. I worked on the early dating apps, the ones before the algorithms got so predatory. I saw the shift from looking for a connection to optimizing my profile for maximum matches. I consulted for startups trying to figure out the money and dating dynamic. Sugar daddy sites, financial infidelity trackers... you name it, I probably consulted on it. It was a wild ride. Exhausting. And ultimately, it felt hollow. I was in San Francisco, making good money, watching people treat love like a venture capital investment. So I cashed out. Moved here. Full circle. And now I write for CamoWallet. We're building tools for financial privacy in digital relationships, but my job is to tell the story of this place. To ground it. To remind people that behind every crypto transaction is a person, probably sitting in a cafe on Tutanekai Street, trying to figure out their own mess.Rotorua isn't just where I live. It's the lens through which I see everything now. The way the mist rises off the lake in the morning, it's like the city is constantly dreaming. My life here is small, deliberately. I’ve got a routine. A run around the lakefront, past the Rotorua Museum—still wrapped up, waiting for its future. I'll grab a flat white from Zippy Central, maybe do some work at the library on Haupapa Street. The guys at the fishing shop on Fenton Street know me. I'm just another local. But this city is also my entire frame of reference. When I write about trust in relationships, I think about the trust it takes to walk on a crust of thermal earth, knowing there's boiling mud just below. When I write about vulnerability, I think about the Blue Baths in the 1930s, where men and women could finally swim together. A small act of social revolution, in a warm pool. That’s what I love about it. The big, universal truths about love and money and fear, they all play out here, in miniature, against a backdrop of steam and ancient forest and water that bubbles up from the core of the earth. It puts things in perspective. It really does.