Northern dating, the cold truth

Painting: Nick MacIntosh

Maintaining a love life in the North is not all that easy, according to a post on Up Here's website aligned with upcoming Valentine's Day. According to her piece written for the magazine, writer and novelist Miranda Booth (who lives in Whitehorse but is writing a novel set in Yellowknife),

"To date in the North you need patience, a thick skin and, for heaven’s sake, a sense of humour. Remember, we’re all a bunch of parka-clad weirdoes looking for the same thing."

It's a matter, she says, of learning to live in a place with only two coffee shops and running into exes (defined, apparently, as someone you've dated at least once) in bars and most likely hooking up with someone who is only passing through. 

With all the mine workers, geologists, dentists, anthropologists, prospectors, journalists, doctors, explorers and countless other varieties of passers-through who touch down in the North for as short as a week or as long as three years (at which point they either leave or graduate to Northerner status), it’s a strong possibility that at some point, you’re going to go for someone who is on their way out. After each goodbye, I ask myself why I ever ventured to start any kind of romance with an interloper.

Booth posits a number of tips on weathering the northern dating scene. An example is 

"Newcomers will say things like “You seem like a great catch, especially for up here.” You’ll cringe, but deep down you will know what they mean. Still, they’ll have lost any chance they had… at least until the winter."