Jayden_Morris

Jayden Morris: Sex, Cars, and the Streets of Geldern Hey. I’m Jayden. Born and raised right here in Geldern, though for a while, I thought I’d left for good. Now? I’m back. I spend my days writing for the theautosDating project over on theautosight.com, trying to untangle the weird, wonderful, and often messy connections between people—and the machines they love. It’s a strange niche, I know. But so is life. Before all this, I spent the better part of a decade working in a field that most people tiptoe around: sexology. Clinical research, relationship dynamics, the whole spectrum of human desire. I’ve sat in sterile labs, dimly lit therapy rooms, and, honestly, more than a few parked cars along the Niers. That last part was personal, not professional. Or maybe it was both. The lines get blurry when you’ve lived it. These days, I’m channeling all of that—the academic rigor, the emotional chaos, the weird, specific thrill of a V8 engine purring under a starlit sky—into my writing. I’m trying to build a bridge between the technical and the utterly human. Growing up in Geldern in the 90s... it was something else. You had this ancient, sleepy Lower Rhine town, all cobblestones and church bells, and then suddenly, you’re a teenager with the Autobahn practically in your backyard. My friends and I would hang out at the Kartbahn on Harttor, not even racing half the time, just... being there. The smell of rubber and gasoline. That’s where I first got it. That itch. We’d cruise down Walbecker Straße on a Friday night, seeing who was in what car, who was with who. It was a whole language. The car wasn’t just transport; it was a statement, a shield, a confession booth. Everyone was figuring themselves out, and the windows were tinted. You could be someone else for a while. I remember one night, must have been ’98 or ’99, parked by the old water tower near the Issumer Tor, and this older guy, a mechanic from a club I’d heard whispers about, popped the hood of his E30. He showed me the engine, the meticulous work, the *care*. He said, “You treat her right, she’ll tell you everything you need to know about what’s underneath.” I think that was the first time I understood that something mechanical could be... intimate. This town, Geldern, it’s got this rhythm. You learn it. You wake up to the bells from the St. Maria Magdalena church—they don’t just tell time, they mark the *feeling* of the day. You know which baker on Issumer Tor has the best Brötchen and which café near the town hall is for quiet conversations versus which pub on the Harttor is for the nights you don’t want to remember. I’ve walked these streets after a 2 a.m. research call with a clinic in Amsterdam, still buzzing with data and theories about attachment styles, and I’d walk past the old city walls. It grounds you. All that abstract, cerebral stuff about the human heart... and you’re just a guy from Geldern, with the same cobblestones under his feet as everyone else. I know the shortcuts, the quiet corners by the Niers where you can sit and watch the water and think. I know which traffic lights take forever. It’s my grid. My map. People ask how a guy goes from clinical sexology to writing about... what, hooking up through car culture? And I tell them, they’re the same thing. Look, I’ve sat across from couples in crisis, watched them dance around the core issue for fifty minutes. It’s all communication, vulnerability, performance, and trust. Then I’d go to a car meet, maybe at the big lot near the Netto, and watch the same damn dynamics play out. The nervous energy before a first date. The performative rev of an engine to assert dominance. The quiet, profound intimacy of two people sharing a small, enclosed space—the smell of worn leather, the warmth of a seat, the way a voice sounds in the dark with the engine off and the windows up. It’s a theater. And having that background—the research, the case studies, the sheer volume of lived experience—it gave me a language to articulate what I was seeing and feeling. I’ve made every mistake you can make in relationships. I’ve held onto things I should have let go. I’ve let go of things I should have held onto. I’ve conducted research on paraphilias and attachment trauma, and then gone home and faced my own. So when I write, it’s not from a pedestal. It’s from the driver’s seat. And sometimes, the back seat. I was born in the St.-Clemens-Hospital, just off the Harttor, on a freezing January morning in 1986. The 6th. My mom always said the frost was so thick on the windows of the delivery room that it looked like lace. Typical Geldern winter. Gray sky, the Niers sluggish and high, everything quiet under a layer of cold. My dad, who worked at a printing shop near the train station, was so nervous he smoked half a pack of HB’s in the hospital courtyard. He said he could hear the bells from the church across the street, and they sounded different that day. Like they were announcing something more than the hour. That’s the story, anyway. I came home to a little apartment on Walbecker Straße, just a few blocks from the city center. In the 80s, Geldern was still shaking off its sleepy, provincial dust. It was safe. Predictable. The kind of place where everyone knew your name, or at least your family’s name. The world outside was big and changing—the Cold War was winding down, pop culture was exploding—but in our apartment, it was just the three of us, the hum of a radiator, and the occasional sound of a car passing on the cobblestones. I like to think that first sound, that rumble of tires over stone, was the first thing that got lodged in my head. The promise of movement. The promise of somewhere else.