Jonathan_Kane

From Sexology to Shifting Gears: My Life in Collingwood Hey, I’m Jonathan. I’m from Tulsa originally, but these days, you’ll find me in Collingwood, Ontario. I write about the weird and wonderful intersection of cars and human connection for the theautosDating project over on theautosight.com. It’s a strange niche, I know. But my past is even stranger—I spent years in sexology, studying desire. Now I’m here, by Georgian Bay, trying to understand why some people find love in a parking lot after a cars-and-coffee meet. My life’s been a winding road, to say the least. So what do I actually do? I write. Articles, mostly. I dig into the psychology of “car dating”—you know, the phenomenon where people meet through their shared obsession with horsepower. I’m not just some journalist parachuting in. I’ve got a background in clinical research. I’ve sat in rooms where people revealed their deepest, most vulnerable truths about intimacy. And now I’m applying that lens to the gearhead world. It’s less of a leap than you’d think. For the theautosDating project, I’m focusing on Collingwood and the surrounding areas—using this town as a case study. Because if you want to understand modern connection, you have to understand the spaces where it happens. And honestly, this place is a pressure cooker for it. I landed in Collingwood when I was, what, 22? Fresh off a graduate program that left me with more questions than answers. I was raw. I’d spent my early twenties dissecting human sexuality, but my own emotional life was a disaster. I came here for a job at a clinic—a small practice on Hume Street. That didn’t last. The work was heavy, and I wasn’t ready. So I did what any self-destructive twenty-something does: I bought a beat-up ‘91 Miata and started hanging out at the local car club meets. The Georgian Bay British Car Club, specifically. They’d gather at the McDonald’s on First Street, sometimes up at the Blue Mountain parking lot. I was this quiet guy with a clipboard in one life, and a grease monkey in another. I needed both. The precision of a carburetor rebuild was the only thing that quieted my mind after a session unpacking someone’s trauma. The car guys didn’t care about my degrees. They cared if I could swap a transmission. It saved me, in a way. I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 15th, 1990. In a hospital off Utica Square, I think. My mom always said the heat that day was biblical—the kind of sticky, relentless Oklahoma heat that makes the asphalt shimmer. I was a preemie, a month early, and they kept me in an incubator for two weeks. My dad, an engineer for an oil company, joked that even then, I was in a hurry to get out. Tulsa in the early 90s was a mix of old oil money and that burgeoning alt-country scene. I grew up with the smell of dust and gasoline. It gets in your blood. But my family was cold. Affectionate? No. My dad showed love through tools—a well-tuned engine was more expressive than any hug he ever gave. My mom was a librarian, quiet, with a thousand-yard stare. I learned early that what people didn’t say was often louder than what they did. That’s probably why I ended up in psychology. I was always trying to translate the silence. Looking back, my “growing up” years were really just a series of rebellions against that silence. I left Oklahoma for university as soon as I could. I ended up in Chicago for grad school, studying sexology at the Kinsey Institute’s orbit—not directly there, but close enough to breathe the air. I was obsessed. I wanted to know why we crave what we crave. My thesis was on the correlation between emotional avoidance and hypersexuality. A real party topic. But it was my own life. I was a mess of contradictions: a researcher who couldn’t sustain a relationship, a guy who gave lectures on intimacy but froze when faced with it. I had “extensive” experience, sure. If by extensive you mean a lot of nights I barely remember, connections that burned hot and fast, leaving only ash. There was a lot of that in my twenties. A lot of late nights in Wicker Park bars, a lot of experiments. I thought if I understood sex on a clinical level, it would protect me. It doesn’t. It just makes you more aware of how badly you’re screwing up. You want to know what I know? It’s this: everyone is just trying to get their needs met in the car they showed up in. Some people are driving a reliable sedan—safe, predictable. Some are in a salvage-title disaster, held together with duct tape and hope. And some, a rare few, are in a finely tuned machine, but they’re terrified to let anyone else behind the wheel. I’ve been all three. My emotional part, the part that makes me competent at what I do now, isn’t about the degrees. It’s about the mistakes. It’s about the year I spent in Collingwood after my clinic job fell apart, thinking I’d ruined my career. I was parking my Miata at the end of Hurontario Street, watching the sun set over the bay, feeling like a complete failure. And I realized, standing there, that the only thing I was actually good at was listening. Not fixing. Listening. I’d go to car meets—the weekly ones at the Canadian Tire parking lot on First Street—and I’d just... listen. Guys would tell me about their divorces while polishing their ‘57 Chevys. Women would confess their loneliness while waiting for their oil change. They trusted me because I wasn’t there as a shrink. I was just a guy with dirty hands who knew how to ask the right questions. That’s the skill. It’s not about having all the answers. It’s about being comfortable enough with the mess to sit in it with someone. And that brings me to Collingwood. This town... it’s not just where I live. It’s my anchor. I moved back permanently in 2018, after a stint in Toronto that made me feel like a ghost. I live in a small place off Pine Street now, a few blocks from the waterfront. I can walk to the Collingwood Brewery, grab a coffee at The Huron Club on Simcoe Street. I know this town like the back of my hand. I know that in winter, the wind whips off the bay and turns the whole place into a snow globe. People come for the skiing at Blue Mountain, but they stay for the quiet. The back roads. The 10th Line, the 12th Line—you can drive for hours on empty roads with nothing but evergreens and silence. That’s where I do my best thinking. I worked for a bit at a local counseling center on Ste. Marie Street, just part-time. It was too small, too personal. Everyone knew everyone’s business. But it taught me about community. About how in a town like this, your reputation is everything. You can’t hide. You can’t pretend to be someone you’re not, because you’ll run into that person at the Metro on Hurontario Street the next day. It forces you to be authentic. Which is exactly why my work for theautosDating project works here. I’m writing about the dating scene, the car culture, the way people connect in this specific geographic pocket. I write about the meets at Blue Mountain, the cruise nights on First Street, the hidden spots off Grey Road 19 where couples go to watch the sunset. It’s all material. This town has given me a second act. A chance to take everything I learned—the good, the bad, the shameful, the academic—and turn it into something that actually helps people. I’m not a therapist anymore. I’m something else. A translator, maybe. A guy who knows that sometimes the best way to understand a person’s heart is to look at the car they drive. And in Collingwood, I’ve found the perfect place to keep asking those questions.