Vincent_Judd

Vincent Judd: On Intimacy, Algorithms, and Finding Home on the Grand I'm Vincent. I live here in Brant, Ontario, with my partner and a ridiculously needy rescue dog. By day—and often late into the night—I write about the intersection of human connection and tech for the CamoWallet project. I study how we date, how we mate, and how we manage the money that inevitably gets tangled up in it all. It's a long way from where I started.Savannah, Georgia. November 2nd, 1984. I came into the world during a peculiar, late-autumn thunderstorm that knocked out the power in our old Victorian on Jones Street. The whole neighborhood, I'm told, went dark. My mom, a librarian with a calm that defied the chaos outside, delivered me by candlelight with a midwife and a panicked dad who nearly fainted. The air was thick with ozone and the scent of rain-soaked magnolias. That humidity, that specific Southern Gothic weight—it’s in my blood. But so is a restlessness. Savannah is a city that holds onto its stories, its ghosts. I think I spent the first part of my life trying to find my own.I landed in Brantford—most locals just call it Brant—in my early twenties, chasing a research opportunity at the Woodstock campus that never quite panned out. But the city... it got under my skin. There’s something about the way the Grand River cuts right through the heart of it. It’s not a frantic place. It has a quiet, industrial dignity, a history you can feel in the old factory buildings along West Street and the stately homes on Dufferin Avenue. My first apartment was a cramped one-bedroom above a storefront on Colborne Street East. I could hear the trains at night, a sound I still find comforting. I didn't know a soul. Honestly, I spent a lot of evenings just walking the trails along the river, trying to understand my new life, my new self. That solitude, that quiet, it was a form of research too.My teenage years and early adulthood were, let's say, chaotic in a different way. The late 90s and early 2000s were a weird time to be figuring out sex and relationships. This was pre-Tinder, pre- everything. If you were curious about intimacy, you were digging through your parents' closet for a book, or decoding late-night HBO. I was obsessed. Not in a creepy way—more like an anthropological one. Why do we connect? Why do we lie about what we want? I remember driving up to Toronto with a fake ID to attend a lecture on human sexuality at U of T, then driving back the same night, buzzing with questions I couldn't even formulate yet. Back then, Brantford was still shaking off the post-industrial blues. The old Massey-Harris plant on Colborne was a ghost. But there was a rawness to it that felt authentic. I'd hang out at the library on George Street, researching old Kinsey reports on microfiche, then grab a terrible coffee at a now-gone diner on Market Street. It was a city in transition, and so was I.Look, the core of my work has always been about one simple, messy truth: we are terrible at knowing what we actually want. I've been in open relationships, monogamous ones, and a few that defied any label. I've been the dumper and the dumpee. I've had my heart handed back to me in a thousand pieces and, I'm ashamed to admit, I've done the handing. All that experience, all that fieldwork in the chaotic lab of my own life—it taught me that competence isn't about having all the answers. It’s about asking better questions. It's about listening to the silences in a conversation. It's understanding that a fight about money is almost never about money; it's about security, power, or fear. That's what I try to bring to my writing. Not a textbook, but a conversation. A hard, honest one.These days, my focus has narrowed and deepened. I write for the CamoWallet project on camowallet.app. It’s fascinating. We’re dissecting the new economy of dating. How a decision on a dating app—a left or right swipe—can lead to a financial entanglement that lasts years. I write articles here in Brant, often looking out my window at the restored buildings on Dalhousie Street, thinking about how different the architecture of our lives is now. My past in sexology taught me about the emotional architecture of a relationship. Now I get to write about the financial one. It feels like a full circle of sorts. I’m taking all that old, messy data from my own life and from years of study, and applying it to the very modern problem of love and money in the digital age. It’s about trust. It always has been.And Brant is where that all comes together. This city isn't just where I live; it's a character in my story. I run along the trails of the Grand River, past the spots where the river churns after a rain—fast, unpredictable, like a new relationship. I grab coffee at a spot on King George Road and chat with the owner about the city’s slow, steady renaissance. I see the long-term couples walking hand-in-hand through Glenhyrst Gardens, and the nervous first dates at a pub on Lynden Road. This place, with its mix of old industry and new energy, its quiet neighborhoods and its surprising little cultural spots—it's the perfect vantage point. It's grounded. Real. It reminds me every day that connection, whether to a person or a place, isn't a swipe. It's a practice. It's showing up, again and again, until the landscape of your life becomes inseparable from the landscape around you.