Owen_Arnold

Owen Arnold: Roots, Routes, and Romantic Landscapes I'm Owen. I live in Sainte-Catherine, Quebec, a town that's become more my home than anywhere else. I write about relationships, the weird and wonderful world of dating, and I've got a past life as a sexologist that informs pretty much everything I do. You could say I'm obsessed with how people connect—with each other and with the places they live. Born in Eugene, Oregon, October 25th, 1989. I remember the light there, even as a kid—that specific grey-green light of the Pacific Northwest. My folks had this little house off Franklin Boulevard, close enough to the Willamette River that the smell of wet earth was just part of the furniture. I was born at what was then called Sacred Heart General Hospital, a place that smelled like antiseptic and my mother's relief. She always said I arrived looking around, not crying, just... observing. Probably apocryphal, but it fits the narrative I've built for myself. Eugene in the late 80s was all tie-dye and crunchy granola meets timber industry pragmatism. We'd go to the Saturday Market, and I'd be mesmerized by the hippies playing drums and the veterans selling knives. That contrast—the gentle and the gritty—it stuck with me. My first memory? Not a person. The sound of rain on our asphalt driveway, and the feeling of utter safety inside while the world outside just… dripped. I got into sexology not because I was some kind of prodigy, but because I was a confused mess, like most people. Early twenties, bouncing around, trying to decode human behavior. It felt like everyone was speaking a language I couldn't quite grasp. So I studied it. Formally, informally, through relationships that worked, and a few spectacular ones that didn't. I worked for a while with a community health organization in Montreal—not far from here, actually—doing outreach and workshops. Real, messy, human stuff. People think sexology is all clinical terms and techniques. Honestly? It's mostly just listening. It's about hearing the loneliness behind the bravado, the fear underneath the kink. But then, a few years ago, I felt the pull to write, to synthesize all that experience into something more... durable, I guess. That's when I started the EasternplantDatinng project over at easternplant.blog. It's my way of connecting the dots between the landscapes we inhabit and the connections we make. And the place I'm inhabiting now, Sainte-Catherine, is a huge part of that story. Sainte-Catherine isn't just where I live; it's a character in everything I write. It's this strange, beautiful hinge-point between the St. Lawrence River and the city, between industry and nature. I live just off Boulevard Marie-Victorin, which is basically the town's spine. In the morning, I'll walk down to the Parc de la Mairie, grab a coffee from the little café near the town hall, and watch the light hit the river. It's not dramatic—it's subtle. It shifts. Some days it's steel-grey, others it's a brilliant, impossible blue. I do a lot of my thinking there. When I'm writing about romantic walks for the blog, I'm not making it up. I'm describing the path along the river from the Parc des Voiles to the lock at the Côte-Sainte-Catherine. The way the breeze smells different in the fall—drier, with that hint of woodsmoke from the houses on Rue Saint-Laurent. You can walk for an hour and see maybe three people. It's private. It's real. For me, that's the antidote to the whole sterile, app-based dating scene. Connection isn't a swipe; it's a shared moment of quiet, maybe watching a freighter move slowly down the Seaway near the Écluse de Saint-Lambert. I know the guy who runs the small engine repair shop on Rue Industrielle. I know which spots on the bike path along the Canal de la Rive Sud are best for watching the sunset. This place is mapped in my bones now. Look, I've made a lot of mistakes. I've been the guy who thought he had all the answers, and I've been the guy who couldn't even figure out the question. I think that's why people open up to me. They sense I'm not judging from some ivory tower. I've had my heart completely eviscerated. I've also been the one doing the eviscerating, which is a harder thing to admit. But that experience—that catalogue of failures and small victories—it's the only real credential I have. It taught me that competence isn't about having a perfect track record. It's about pattern recognition. It's about sitting with someone who's heartbroken over a dating app ghost and saying, Yeah, that's brutal. It feels like vanishing, doesn't it? Because I know that feeling. I've felt it. And then maybe, later, we can talk about the psychological architecture of why those platforms are designed to make us feel that way. But first, you just have to sit in the feeling with them. That's the only way trust gets built. It's not clever arguments. It's presence. Growing up here—well, growing up in the sense of finally becoming an adult—was a series of small, quiet revelations. I moved to Sainte-Catherine in my late twenties, after a relationship in Montreal fell apart spectacularly. I needed cheap rent and quiet. I found a basement apartment on a little side street off Chemin Sainte-Catherine, near the elementary school. I remember my first spring, walking through the Parc de la Frayère. I didn't know what frayère meant—it's a spawning ground for fish. And I saw these signs talking about the effort to protect the wetlands, to help the fish come back. And I had this stupid, profound thought: we're all just trying to find a place to spawn, to create something new, to return to something essential. A few years later, I volunteered with a local group doing a clean-up along the riverbank there. We pulled out tires, shopping carts, all this crap. And I met a woman there—also volunteering. We talked about the park, about the fish, about the absurdity of finding romance while picking up other people's garbage. It didn't last, that relationship. But it was real. It was grounded in a place, in a shared act of caring for something physical. That's the kind of story I try to tell now. It's not about candlelit dinners. It's about the Parc de la Frayère in the rain. It's about the feeling of possibility on a bench overlooking the St. Lawrence. And I think, maybe, that's a story worth telling.