About Allison_Hayes
Shawna Boyd: On the Shores of Connection I’m Shawna. I live here in Keswick, Ontario, right on the southern edge of Lake Simcoe. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with one question: why do we connect the way we do? That obsession took me through decades of research, a lot of personal trial and error—honestly, sometimes just error—and into a life spent as a sexologist and family counselor. Now, I write about this town, about the people in it, and about relationships for the AulaDating project over at aulaextendida.com. It’s a strange, full-circle kind of thing. From the clinical to the personal, from the global to this one specific place. My past? It’s all been about the mess and the magic of human intimacy. I’ve led workshops in community centers that felt more like confessions, sat with couples who hadn't touched in years, and spent way too many late nights buried in research about attachment theory. These days, my work is quieter. I walk the lakeshore, I talk to people at the market, and I try to capture the quiet truths of how people find each other—or lose each other—right here in Keswick. It’s a different kind of research. Maybe it’s the most important kind. You know, people assume that after thirty years of working with relationships, you have it all figured out. That you’re some kind of emotional genius. God, no. If anything, it just makes you more aware of your own blind spots. The way you can still get surprised by a feeling, or caught off-guard by loneliness. Competence isn’t about having the answers. It’s about being willing to sit with the questions. And I’ve sat with some doozies. I was born in Everett, Washington, on February 21st, 1983. If you know Everett, you know it’s a working town, all gray skies and the sound of the Boeing plant humming in the distance. The smell of saltwater and jet fuel. My parents’ house was a small craftsman, the kind with a porch swing that creaked in the wind off Puget Sound. I remember the rain—not a drizzle, but a constant, patient kind of wet that soaked into everything. The world felt muffled there, like it was wrapped in a damp blanket. It’s funny the details you keep. The way the ferry horns would moan through the fog. My mom, a nurse, coming home with the smell of antiseptic clinging to her scrubs. It was a solid, grounded start. But even then, I was the kid asking too many questions. Why was that couple fighting in the grocery store? Why did my friend's parents sleep in different rooms? We moved to Keswick when I was thirteen. Talk about a culture shock. Going from the industrial gray of Everett to the wide-open sprawl of Lake Simcoe... it felt like stepping into a different world. Summers were a revelation. Endless, hazy afternoons at the beach by the Keswick Park, the water surprisingly warm. My first real crush was on a girl named Riley, whose family had a boat. We’d spend hours at the marina, not saying much, just watching the sailboats tack against the wind. That was my first real lesson in desire—the electric, terrifying silence of wanting something you don't have the words for. In high school, I got a job at a little café on The Queensway South. I'd watch the weekend warriors, the tourists, and the local couples. You could tell who was on a first date, who was on the verge of breaking up, who'd been together so long they'd started to look alike. I was a weird kid, I guess. Observing instead of participating. But it was my own private seminar in human behavior. And then, there was the winter of ’99. A massive ice storm. The whole town shut down. We were without power for a week, huddled around a fireplace with neighbors we barely knew. People shared food, stories, their last logs. It was terrifying and, honestly, beautiful. It broke down all the polite fences we put up. I saw my grumpy next-door neighbor, Mr. Kostas, gently teaching a young mom how to keep her pipes from freezing. That was it. That was the moment I understood that connection isn't a luxury. It's a survival mechanism, hardwired into us. It was less an intellectual realization and more of a physical one, a warmth in my chest that had nothing to do with the fire. So my work took me all over after that. I got my degrees, I did the clinical work in Toronto, I even spent some time out west in Vancouver. But Keswick kept pulling me back. Maybe it’s the lake. That big, flat expanse of water. It puts things in perspective. Now, when I write for AulaDating, I’m not just pulling from textbooks. I’m pulling from the memory of that ice storm. From the quiet desperation I’d see in a couple’s eyes at the café. From the easy, unspoken affection of old guys fishing off the dock at the end of Metro Road. The city isn't just a backdrop; it's a character. It shapes how people love here. There's a patience required by the long winters, a resilience that seeps into relationships. And in the summer, when the town fills up and the pace quickens, there’s a fleeting, urgent kind of romance in the air, like the fireflies that blink for just a few weeks. Living here, in a house not far from the water, my life is marked by Keswick's geography. I run into former clients at the grocery store on The Queensway—we share a nod, a silent acknowledgment of work done. I do my best thinking walking the trail that runs along the lake, the one that leads down to the Roches Point area. The sound of the water against the shore is better than any white noise machine. This is where I belong. It’s not just a place on a map. It’s the landscape of my internal world. The place that taught me that the most profound human connections are often the quietest, the most ordinary, and the ones that feel most like coming home.
