The week I moved to the Yukon, I hiked with a group of women who gave me the lay of the dating land. One of them mentioned a semi-regular party at a house north of town. “If you stay past 11 p.m.,” she said, “you’re there for the orgy.” Initially, I thought this was a sign I’d moved to a place that was progressive and open-minded when it came to all things dating, sex and love. Eventually, I realized it was just one of many (sometimes suffocating) idiosyncrasies of the North that had never touched my love life in the south.
Dating here felt like playing musical chairs. I went on a date with one guy while a former date of mine sat behind me and a former flirtation served us all. I edited scientific studies written by an ex’s ex and considered trading tales with her in the margins. I attended a dinner where I ran into both a girl who’d ghosted me on Tinder and a couple I’d third-wheeled. At a certain point, I had unintentionally dated so many of the exes of one acquaintance, I considered running names by her before agreeing to even meet anyone else.
This is one of the reasons for a popular adage up here: You don’t lose your girlfriend or boyfriend, you just lose your turn. It’s courtship canon in the North, along with the saying that “the odds are good, but the goods are odd”; the knowledge that Halloween is the deadline to lock someone down if you want to avoid a cold, lonely winter; and the understanding that spring breakup is the phenomenon by which relationships of seasonal convenience crack in tandem with the ice on the rivers.
Spend more than a year in the North and you start running into your exes (or your ex’s exes) at work, in social circles and on remote backcountry trails. You’ll probably also realize you’ve witnessed half a dozen affairs, been cheated on yourself and unknowingly shown up to at least one orgy. Some of these are issues you’d find in any small town, but there’s always a distinctly northern streak to them here.
When I met my now-partner of five years, it was both disconcerting and refreshing that we had no friends or exes in common even though we’d both been here for years. The downside was I had no one to hit up for intel on him. The upside was meeting someone with the “fresh meat” appeal of a newcomer but enough of a track record in the territory to prove he wouldn’t pack up and move away after his first -40°C day.
Karen McColl knows this better than most. She has hosted four seasons of Frisky North of 60. The podcast, with its sultry saxophone theme song, looks at love and dating in the territories. McColl talks to guests about lightweight topics such as finding a partner when you’re a sled dog owner; serious issues such as sexual assault; and sex educational subjects including how polyamory works for different people. The men in poly relationships were eager to talk on air (“I could have done a whole season,” she says), but McColl eventually stopped inviting them. She wanted to illustrate all sides of ethical non-monogamy and no women would talk about it. They’d chat casually with her, but not in front of a microphone. McColl wishes this wasn’t the case, though she understands why it is. The whole Yukon feels like a small town sometimes and half the population works for the government. Plus, the vast majority of her listeners were from the territory. Even with pseudonyms, it could be easy to figure out identities. Despite this, I’ve used one for everyone I refer to mononymously in this story. It’s not just the Yukon that operates like a small town—it’s the whole of the North.
After Jack married a long-time Yellowknifer—though the wedding was delayed because the bride was stuck in the mountains, snowed in during a caribou hunt—he found the territorial capital claustrophobic. An American who’d lived in Berlin, he was used to anonymity. In the NWT, strangers knew who he was because his toddler looked so much like her mom had at the same age. Years later, when Jack and his wife broke up, he was all too aware that his personal life was public conversation. He kept a low profile until he didn’t.
One night, Jack went home with a woman who lived on a houseboat in Yellowknife Bay. The next morning, when she paddled him back to the docks in Old Town, half a dozen people saw them glide up in her canoe. By noon, another couple of dozen people had straight up asked Jack about his night, including members of his ex’s family. “By evening, it felt like the occurrence was part of everybody’s dinnertime conversation,” Jack says. “At nightfall, I swore I would never live in Yellowknife, that I would move as soon as possible.” He’s been in Montreal ever since.
Leona moved to Yellowknife after living in a handful of other NWT communities. Partly, she was chasing a job, but she was also looking for a decent relationship. While in Inuvik, she bartended at The Mad Trapper and it was rough on her love life. She’d start seeing someone and would be in that zone where you’ve slept together but aren’t exclusive. Then she’d be at work and the guy would come in on a date with a new girl. “What are you supposed to do?” she says. “You’ve got to smile and serve drinks. There’s no getting away from it.”
During a brief stint in Norman Wells, Leona dated a pilot until the day a colleague told her the flyboy was also dating the colleague’s boyfriend’s sister. Later that day, Leona recognized the woman when she landed in Norman Wells on the same plane Leona was taking out of town. The whole thing added a layer of drama she didn’t want in her personal or professional life. “Because now my co-workers are, like, ‘She is dating my boyfriend’s sister’s boyfriend.’”
People up in your business isn’t always bad, though. Years ago, Jean met someone through work. He texted her relentlessly and kept popping up at her regular hangouts. One night at a bar, a friend of Jean’s recognized him from her time in Iqaluit. He’d done the same thing to a friend—met her through work, texted her non-stop, frequented her haunts—but it ended up being an emotionally manipulative relationship where he was constantly womanizing other ladies. “Pan-northern warning system,” Jean says. “The North truly is one giant small town.”
These issues are common to small communities, but in a place such as, say, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, or Gananoque, Ontario, you could move an hour or two away and easily and anonymously start over in a bigger city such as Halifax or Kingston. Up here, there are roughly 129,000 people living across the territories’ three-and-a-half-million square kilometres. People can (and do) move one or two or 10 hours away to a new community and still get recognized by sight, name or reputation.
Sarah Cloutier experiences this from a different perspective. As a counsellor at Spark Therapy, she’s had multiple clients date the same person—not at the same time, but consecutively, so when the second client comes in talking about a new partner, Cloutier already has an impression of the person. On a personal level, it can be difficult to navigate those feelings. On a professional level, Cloutier has a B.C.-based supervisor she can speak to about ethical issues around disclosure if her new client could be in danger. Confidentiality is always her biggest concern.
That kind of discretion goes out the window when you walk into Adult Temptations. The sex store in downtown Whitehorse is located between two main drags, right near an elementary school pickup zone and a government office. If you’re at all nervous about visiting, owner Ellen Oppold is great at making you feel comfortable. She’s had 18 years of experience answering questions about everything from collars and leashes to which pump is best for erectile dysfunction.
Oppold, who’s about to retire and pass the store on to her son, has short, grey hair, glasses and no shame. She walks around her shop describing its bestsellers in a high, cute voice that sounds like Grandma SquarePants from SpongeBob (“The FuckWater is Canadian,” she says, passing by the lubricants). The light switches are shaped like penises. There’s a “blind date” board at the back of the store, a kind of analogue Tinder often used by people visiting Whitehorse from smaller communities. A poster over the door features photos of shoplifters, complete with their names and descriptions of what they stole. If there’s any place to speak frankly about sex in the North, this should be it. But Oppold has noticed that, while people are open with her, they’re not with their partners. Plenty of men come in and ask her what they should buy their girlfriends. She tells them: “You should know better than me.”
The reason they don’t is that, while it sometimes seems like everyone in the North is talking about sex lives, they’re never talking about their own—at least, not with their partners. That’s one thing Sofia Ashley has noticed in her work as a sex coach and why she pushes communication so hard in her sessions. She talks about sex with a straightforward pep that’s like a high school biology teacher crossed with a high school football coach if their shared goal was to get you laid. Sex, she argues, is a social skill. Better sex has the potential to make you more than a better lover—it can make you a better parent, partner, friend and employee. It teaches you to listen and to say what you want.
Cloutier thinks things are changing, slowly. For one, medical practitioners are starting to pay more attention to sex. Physical therapists are specializing in pelvic floor therapy for women. Some of Oppold’s customers have been prescribed trips to the sex store, which wasn’t always the case. McColl started hearing from more people willing to chat about different subjects as Frisky North of 60 continued (she has an as-yet unreleased season recorded). There are coaches such as Ashley, who handle the physical side of sex, and more therapists now have the training to help clients work through the emotional side of it. Cloutier says more people are turning to these professionals to talk about their love lives, though she’s noticed fewer of them want to do it with counsellors in Whitehorse, preferring to go the online route or use ChatGPT. It can be hard to find a therapist you don’t already know through work, friends or hobbies.
Even if you do, people still feel weird discussing their fantasies with someone they might run into in the produce aisle an hour later. I once unexpectedly ended up at a small Christmas dinner, seated beside my then-partner, across the table from a therapist who knew the darkest details of my previous relationship. For about five minutes, I worried that she was silently assessing every interaction between my partner and me. Then I figured that if this wasn’t even the first time something like this had happened to me (I’d run into a previous therapist when she catered a wedding I attended 160 kilometres outside Whitehorse), it probably happened to her so often that it barely registered.
More recently, I saw my current therapist at a wrestling match. Her face was one in a crowd of hundreds of other Yukoners I recognized. Some were people I’d slept with, broken up with, told my stories to or heard about even though we’d never met. But after 10 years, I don’t feel that weird about it anymore. I now realize it’s just an inescapable part of dating in the North and it helps to remember that no one else cares as much about your sex life as you do.
