Adrian_Lyman

From Tulsa to Oshawa: My Life in Cars, Curiosity, and Connection Hey, I’m Adrian Lyman. I’m a writer, a researcher, and—depending on who you ask—maybe a little too obsessed with the spaces where people meet, especially when cars are involved. I live in Oshawa now, have for years, and I write for theautosDating project over at theautosight.com. It’s this weird, wonderful niche: exploring how car culture and human connection intersect. My background? Let’s just say I spent a good chunk of my past life in sexology, which taught me a lot about what people actually want when they say they want a relationship. And what they avoid. The psychology of it. I’ve had my share of experiences—romantic, confusing, transformative—and I bring all of that into my work. Growing up in Oklahoma felt like being surrounded by endless flat land and even bigger expectations. But my real education, the one that shaped me, started when I landed in Oshawa in my late teens. It was a shock. The lake effect wind off Ontario, the General Motors plants humming 24/7, the rust belt grit mixed with this fierce local pride. I was a quiet kid, nerdy, reading way above my grade level, trying to figure out why attraction worked the way it did. My first car was a 1987 Pontiac Fiero—bought it for eight hundred bucks from a guy on Simcoe Street who swore it only needed a new alternator. Spoiler: it needed everything. But working on that car, in a rented garage space near the old Oshawa Centre, was where I first started making sense of things. You strip something down to its core, see how the parts interact, rebuild it. That became my metaphor for relationships. A messy, beautiful, often infuriating process of diagnostics and care. My past activities were... scattered, to say the least. After a brief, intense stint studying psychology at Ontario Tech University (it was UOIT back then, on the north end near the 407), I fell into a research assistant role at a small, now-defunct clinic on Bond Street. We worked with people navigating intimacy issues. That’s where I really learned the gap between textbook theory and the chaotic reality of desire. I saw couples who communicated perfectly in every other aspect of life crumble in the bedroom. I saw people who couldn’t hold a conversation find a universe of connection through shared kinks. I started writing, anonymously at first, just to process what I was seeing. That writing turned into something more. Now, my current gig is taking all of that—the clinical knowledge, the personal blunders, the late-night talks in parking lots—and filtering it through the lens of Oshawa’s car scene. For theautosight.com, I write about what happens when you put two people in a '69 Camaro and ask them to navigate the 401 at rush hour. It’s a pressure cooker. You learn a lot about a person when they’re merging onto the Don Valley Parkway, trust me. You know, it’s funny. You’d think a background in sexology would make you this smooth, all-knowing relationship guru. Honestly? It mostly made me realize how little we actually know. About ourselves, mostly. I spent years analyzing patterns of attraction, attachment styles, the neurochemistry of a crush—and still managed to make a complete mess of my own personal life more than once. There was a period in my mid-twenties where I thought I had it all figured out, wrote this whole framework for modern dating based on... I don’t know, clinical detachment? It was a disaster. A very educational disaster. It taught me that competence isn’t about having the right answers; it’s about being comfortable with the questions. When a reader writes to me about feeling lost in the dating scene, I don’t offer a five-step plan. I tell them about the time I spent three hours on the phone with someone, convinced I was building a future, only to realize I was in love with the idea of being in love. We’ve all been there, right? That vulnerability? That’s where the trust starts. Not in my degree, but in my willingness to admit I’m still figuring it out, same as anyone else. Oshawa. Where do I even start? It’s not the place you see in the headlines, the “problem city” they talk about in Toronto media. To me, it’s a place of layers. I live in a small walk-up apartment near the corner of Albert and Bond, the kind of building with radiators that clank and a landlord who collects vintage lawnmowers in the backyard. It’s a five-minute walk to the lakefront, to the boardwalk by the Oshawa Harbour. I spend mornings there, watching the freighters come in, the water looking like mercury under a certain kind of sky. This city is my anchor. I know the feel of the cracked asphalt on Bruce Street, the smell of exhaust and fresh donuts at the Timmy’s drive-thru on King, the particular way the light hits the old GM headquarters building at golden hour. It’s a working city. A real city. People here don’t have time for pretense. You’re judged by whether you can fix a seized bolt or whether you show up when you say you will. That’s bled into how I approach my writing. I’ve lectured at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery on the psychology of public spaces and connection, I’ve led workshops at the Oshawa Public Library on the McLaughlin Branch, and every time, I come away with more than I give. This city taught me that a place can have a soul—a gritty, persistent, honest soul—and that soul can shape you if you let it. My life here, the friendships I’ve built with guys at the local car clubs (the ones who meet in the Canadian Tire parking lot off Stevenson Road), the relationships I’ve navigated and fumbled and learned from—it’s all rooted in this soil. Oshawa isn’t just where I live. It’s the engine that drives my entire perspective. I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on a sweltering July day in '94—July 8th, to be exact. My mom always said the heat broke that week, a thunderstorm rolling in right after I was born at the old Hillcrest Medical Center near the Arkansas River. It felt like the whole city exhaled. I don’t remember it, obviously, but I’ve always liked that story: me arriving just as the pressure dropped. Tulsa in the mid-90s was a city caught between its oil-rich past and an uncertain future. We lived in a small bungalow off 11th Street—the old Route 66—and my earliest memories are the sound of trains and the smell of my dad’s garage. He was a mechanic, a good one, and the garage was his sanctuary. I think I learned more about human nature in that garage than I ever did in a classroom. The way he’d listen to a customer describe a noise, then translate their anxious, imprecise language into a diagnosis—it was a kind of translation, a bridging of worlds. That’s where the seeds were planted. The curiosity about what’s underneath, what’s really going on when someone says something’s “just not running right.” I carried that from Oklahoma all the way north, across the border, into a new country and a new life. And I’m still carrying it.