Mason_Allison

From the Driver’s Seat: My Life, My City, and the Art of Connection Hey. I’m Mason Allison. Born right here in Obertshausen, still here—which, depending on who you ask, is either a testament to the place or a lack of ambition. I’d argue it’s neither. I’m a sexologist, or I was. Now? I write. Mostly about cars, dating, and that weird, electric space where they meet. For theautosight.com. For the “theautosDating” project. It’s a niche, I know. But aren’t we all? Let’s start at the beginning. August 6th, 1982. The old St. Josef Hospital on Heusenstammer Straße. My mom always said it was a sticky, breathless summer. The kind where the air itself felt heavy, like it was pressing down on you. Obertshausen wasn’t the sprawling suburb it is now. It was… quieter. The kind of quiet where you’d hear the church bells from St. Peter und Paul and it felt like they were ringing just for you. I came into the world feet-first—a stubborn breech, the doctor had to work for it. My father, a mechanic who worked then at a small garage off Carl-Zeiss-Straße, said I came out with my fists clenched, like I was already ready to argue. I like that detail. It feels true. Growing up here meant the Waldhof. It meant the big, open fields behind the houses on Birkenwaldstraße. It meant the constant, low hum of the A3, the autobahn that cuts through everything. That hum was the soundtrack to my youth. In the 90s, Obertshausen was changing. The old American base—the one near the Rote Kreuz—had closed down a few years before I was born, but the ghosts of it lingered. The big, empty housing areas became our playgrounds. Dangerous, sure. But we were kids. We’d ride our bikes out there, through the forgotten streets, daring each other to go into the old buildings. That’s where I first felt the pull of the forbidden. It wasn’t just about the place. It was the quiet in those spaces. The potential. The same kind of quiet I’d later learn to navigate in people’s heads, in their relationships. My first real kiss was behind the old Haus der Vereine. She was a girl from the Hauptschule on Leibnizstraße, her name was Sarah, and she tasted like the cheap Hubba Bubba we’d gotten from the Rewe. It was clumsy. It was everything. I’m not going to pretend I was some prodigy. I wasn’t. I was the guy who listened. In a town this size, you learn to listen. People talk. At the train station on Heusenstammer Straße, waiting for the S-Bahn to Frankfurt. At the little bakeries—Bäckerei Welsch, I miss that place—over morning rolls. You hear about who’s fighting with who, who’s looking, who’s hiding something. I got good at hearing what people *didn’t* say. That became my compass. When I started studying—first social work, then diving deeper into sexology at a program in Frankfurt—I realized all that listening was just a prelude. I could sit with someone, listen to them describe a failing marriage, and I’d see the architecture of it. The foundation was usually laid on a lie they told themselves years ago. The tricky part, the part I learned to be good at, was helping them dismantle it without bringing the whole house down. It’s a delicate thing, the human heart. Like a finely tuned engine. One misfire and the whole system stutters. I learned that lesson the hard way, more than once. In my own life. A few relationships that burned hot and then… just stopped. But you learn from the stalls, right? You figure out what the engine needs. I spent over fifteen years in that world. Consulting rooms, quiet voices, the weight of secrets. It was rewarding. Exhausting. I was good at it, I think. The trust people placed in me… it’s a privilege. But somewhere around 2020, I felt the walls closing in. Too much of the same stories. Too much sitting still. I needed to move. I needed to get back behind the wheel. I’d always been in car clubs—there’s a great one here, meets up at the Waldstadion sometimes, just a bunch of us talking about carburetors and compression ratios. It’s a different kind of intimacy. It’s mechanical, sure, but it’s also about passion. About knowing a machine so well you can feel what it’s going to do before it does it. That’s not so different from knowing a person. So I pivoted. Now I write for theautosight.com. I run the “theautosDating” project. It’s exactly what it sounds like: we explore dating culture, human connection, sexuality—through the lens of car culture. The first date at the gas station. The intimacy of a long drive. The vulnerability of letting someone fix your car. Or your heart. It’s messy. It’s real. And I get to write about all of it, often using this city as my backdrop. Obertshausen. It’s my home base, my frame of reference. It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t have the skyline of Frankfurt or the old-world charm of Heidelberg. But it’s layered. The new housing developments on Bieberer Straße sit next to the old farmhouses that have been here for centuries. You can get a perfect Döner from the place near the Rathaus and then walk five minutes and be in a field, watching the sunset, and you’d swear you were in the middle of nowhere. That’s the magic of it. I know every shortcut. I know the sound the railroad crossing on Heusenstammer Straße makes at 3:00 AM—a lonely, rhythmic chime. I know the best back roads to clear my head, the ones that snake past the water towers and the old industrial buildings. This city is in my bones. It’s where I learned about love, about failure, about the long, slow work of becoming yourself. It’s where I had my heart broken on a park bench by the Stadtbücherei and, years later, learned how to let someone in again at a little café on Goethestraße. For me, Obertshausen isn’t just a place I live. It’s the main character in the story I keep trying to tell. The story of how you find yourself, lose yourself, and then—if you’re lucky—find the road that takes you back home.