Author name: Tyler_Stoughton
Tyler Stoughton: Love, the River, and the Long Game I’m Tyler. Born and raised right here in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Yeah, the same guy you see walking the trails by the North Saskatchewan or grabbing coffee on Central Avenue. By trade, I’m a writer and, for lack of a better term, a human behavior nerd. Specifically, I write about the messy, beautiful, complicated intersection of money, dating, and sexuality for the CamoWallet project over at camowallet.app. I’ve spent the last fifteen years not just studying this stuff academically, but living it. Making mistakes. Learning the hard way. And now I get to write about it, often while sitting in a diner that’s seen a hundred winters just like me. Living in Prince Albert my whole life... it shapes you. It’s a river town. Big enough to have edges, small enough that you can’t hide from your past—or yourself. The way the city sits there, straddling the river, it’s a constant reminder of transition. North and south. Bush and prairie. The wild and the settled. That’s been my life, honestly. Trying to bridge the gap between what we feel and what we’re supposed to do, especially when it comes to love and money. You see it all here. The old families whose names are on buildings, the transient workers passing through, the kids at the U of S Prince Albert campus trying to figure it all out. It’s a microcosm, and it’s given me a front-row seat to the human condition. Right now, my main gig is writing articles for the CamoWallet project. We talk about how money and relationships are basically the same conversation. My job is to take the research—the stuff I did back in my university days and the stuff I see every day—and make it real. No jargon. No judgment. Just practical advice for people navigating dating apps, splitting bills, and trying to build something real. I draw from my own past, the good and the incredibly stupid, to help people avoid the traps I walked right into. And yeah, a lot of those stories start right here in Prince Albert. You want to know why I’m competent? Because I’ve been in the trenches. I spent years after my formal education in sexology just... talking to people. In bars, at community events, on those god-awful dating apps. I learned more about the gap between what people say they want and what they actually do from a late-night conversation at the Elk’s Lodge than I ever did from a textbook. It taught me humility. It taught me that everyone, no matter how put-together, is a little bit of a mess when it comes to sex and affection. That’s the truth. And I think people can sense that I’m not just some academic spouting theories. I’m a guy from PA who’s been ghosted, been in love, had my heart stomped on, and made a hell of a lot of money and lost a hell of a lot of money, all because of who I was dating. So when I talk about it, I’m not guessing. Growing up here was... an education. I remember being sixteen, maybe seventeen, and spending a summer working at the Saskatchewan Penitentiary. Not as a guard or anything—my uncle got me a gig doing grounds maintenance. You see a lot from the other side of that fence. You see what happens when people’s wiring gets crossed, when impulse control fails. It was a crash course in consequence. Then, my first real heartbreak was with a girl from over by the Little Red River Park. We’d spend hours walking those trails, talking about getting out, about the future. When it ended—and it ended badly—I remember just walking along the riverbank for days, trying to figure out where I went wrong. It was in those moments, I think, that I started becoming a sexologist. Not the degree, but the curiosity. Why do we attach so fiercely? Why do we sabotage the things we want most? Those questions followed me everywhere. They followed me to keg parties on 15th Street East, they followed me to my first real job at the Gateway Mall, they followed me through every failed relationship and every wild, short-lived fling. It was all data. I came into this world on February 9th, 1992, at the Victoria Hospital. It was a Sunday. Cold, obviously. The kind of cold where your nostrils freeze together the second you step outside. My parents had a little house over on 14th Street West, not far from the old fire hall. Back then, Prince Albert was still heavy with the smell of the pulp mill some days, and the sound of trains was just the background music of life. My dad worked at the Co-op, my mom was a nurse. They were young, figuring it out. I was born in the middle of a prairie winter, in a town built on fur trading and forestry. That’s my origin story. A bit isolated, a bit rugged, but with a strong current of something deeper running right through the middle of it all. Just like the river.
