Author name: Nicholas_Damon
Nicholas Damon: Growing Up, Letting Go, and Learning What Wanting Really Means Hey. I’m Nick. Born and raised in Saint-Laurent, Quebec — yeah, the often-forgotten borough that’s not quite Montreal but definitely not the suburbs. I write about the messy, beautiful, confusing parts of sexuality and relationships. Dating tests, psychology, the stuff they don’t teach you in school. And I’ve got a past in sexology that taught me one thing: nobody’s as put-together as they pretend to be. Look, I’m not here to sell you a perfect life. My own romantic history? A chaotic jumble of heartbreak, wild chemistry, and nights where I had no clue what I was doing. But that’s exactly why you can trust me. I’ve been the guy who overanalyzes a first date’s text response. I’ve also been the guy who spent six months researching how attachment styles shift after trauma. So when I tell you that most “dating advice” is recycled garbage — I mean it. The real stuff lives in the awkward silences, the unplanned touches, the moments you can’t Google. That’s where I focus. And honestly? I’m still learning. Growing up on Rue Sainte-Croix in the 90s and early 2000s was… weird. My parents worked at the old Bombardier plant near Boulevard Côte-Vertu — nothing glamorous. Our apartment smelled like my dad’s pipe tobacco and my mom’s burnt coffee. By fourteen, I was already confused about why my friends obsessed over “scoring” while I wanted to know how people felt during. At Cégep de Saint-Laurent — right across from the Parc Marcel-Laurin — I’d skip lunch to read Kinsey in the library. Got caught once by a librarian, Mrs. Tremblay. She just raised an eyebrow and said, “Page 142 is the interesting one.” That moment stuck. The first time I kissed a guy — behind the bleachers at Aréna Raymond-Bourque during a minor hockey tournament — I realized desire didn’t care about my neatly drawn categories. So I stopped drawing them. Messy, right? But that’s the truth. After Cégep, I went full nerd. Studied sexology at UQAM — commuting from Saint-Laurent on the 121 bus every damn morning — then worked at the Centre de santé et de services sociaux on Boulevard Décarie. Helped run a pilot program on dating anxiety. We used a modified version of the Rice Purity Test to start conversations — people opened up faster than any clinical interview. That’s where the idea clicked. Now I write for the RicepurityDats project on ricepurity.me. My beat? Saint-Laurent. I profile local coffee shops on Rue Poirier where shy people practice flirting. I map out walking routes near Parc O’Brien for first dates. I even interviewed the owner of that tiny bookstore on Rue Deguire — she’s got theories on how romance novels distort expectations. It’s not just content. It’s applied psychology, street-level. I came into this world on October 4, 1990, at the old Hôpital Sainte-Croix — which isn’t even a hospital anymore. My mom always said the delivery room faced west, so I was born squinting at the late-afternoon sun bouncing off the 40 highway. Saint-Laurent in 1990 was still half-industrial, half-immigrant dream. The midwife wore clogs and cursed in Italian. My father, a machinist, showed up late because the métro was delayed. And my first cry got drowned out by a delivery truck reversing outside. That’s the energy I grew up with: loud, practical, no sentimentality. I didn’t know it then, but that noise became my baseline for intimacy. If it’s too quiet, I get suspicious. Saint-Laurent isn’t postcard material. No mountain view. No cobblestone alleys. But it’s real. I know every crack on the sidewalk along Boulevard Thimens. I’ve watched the Ethiopian bakery on Rue Grenet outlast three recessions. The public pool at Parc Raymond-Bourque — I learned to swim there, and years later I’d sit on the bleachers, scribbling notes about how couples touch underwater when they think nobody’s watching. This city shaped my entire framework: multicultural, unpretentious, a little rough around the edges. You can’t fake vulnerability here. People see through it. So I stopped trying. And that — more than any degree or dating test — is why my work resonates. Because I’m not above it. I’m in it. Same streets. Same struggles. Just a different way of asking, “So… what do you actually want?”
