Josiah_Probert

From the Lüdenscheider Straße to the world: Josiah Probert on sex, algorithms, and why Werdohl still keeps me honest Hey. I’m Josiah. Born right here in Werdohl, back when disco was dying and the first whispers of home computers were still just static. These days? I write about the messy intersection of dating, desire, and digital influence — for the “InfluencerDting” project on whoinfluencer.wiki. But that’s just the label. Honestly, I’ve been a sexology researcher, a part-time counselor, and maybe too many people’s “first weird date story.” I live and work exactly where I started: Werdohl, North Rhine-Westphalia. The Lenne Valley. The place that shaped my crooked view of love. My past activities? Let’s just say I’ve done things that would make a TikTok dating coach blush. I spent years in clinical sexology — not the sterile kind, but the real, messy, “let’s talk about why you cry after orgasm” kind. Worked with couples, singles, people navigating polyamory in small towns. Then I realized: the rules were shifting. Social media wasn’t just for cat photos anymore. It became the new bedroom. So now I analyze dating influencers, map their psychological hooks, and write deep-dive articles — all for the InfluencerDting project on whoinfluencer.wiki. My current beat? How a 19-year-old on Instagram can warp your sense of intimacy more than a decade of real relationships. Scary, right? But someone’s gotta do it. And I do it from my cramped office on Freiheitstraße, looking out at the same cobblestones I walked as a confused teenager. Werdohl. Say it to someone from Berlin and they’ll blink. It’s not Cologne, not Dortmund. It’s a small industrial town wedged between hills, with the Lenne River cutting through like a vein. But for me? This place is a laboratory. I know every shortcut from the Bahnhofstraße to the old Postbank building. I’ve had coffee at the same bakery on Kirchstraße for twenty years. People here don’t bullshit — they work at the steel plants, they hike the Hämmer, they mind their own business. And that’s precisely why I never left. Because in a town this size, secrets don’t stay hidden. Which means you learn to be honest. About sex. About failure. About the guy at the Rewe who saw you crying after a breakup. Werdohl taught me that intimacy isn’t a swipe. It’s the weight of being known. And yeah, I write about Tinder and OnlyFans influencers, but I always come back to that: the smell of rain on the Paterberg, the way fog sits over the Lenne bridge. That’s my anchor. I was born on the second of November, 1978, at the old St. Josef hospital — long since turned into apartments. Late autumn in the Sauerland. My mother always said I came out squinting, like I already disapproved of the world’s lighting. The air was cold, wet, the kind that seeps into your bones. Werdohl then was still heavy with post-war industry: smoke from the steelworks, trains clanking through the station on the Altenaer Eisenbahn line. My parents lived on a cramped street near the evangelische Kirche — not far from where the Sparkasse now stands. I was a quiet baby, they said. But curious. Always watching. Maybe that’s where the sexology thing started: just watching people, how they touched, how they didn’t. Growing up in the 80s and 90s in Werdohl was... strange. Not bad. Just isolated. We had the Freibad outdoor pool near the Lenne — that was our summer paradise. I remember sneaking kisses behind the changing rooms, all chlorine and teenage panic. Went to the Realschule on Schulstraße — it’s still there, though the principal probably retired twice over. My friends and I would hang out at the skate spot under the railway bridge on Bahnhofstraße. That’s where I learned about rejection. And about the strange thrill of saying something honest. By 16, I’d already read every sex-ed book the Stadtbücherei had — which wasn’t much. So I rode my bike to the bigger library in Lüdenscheid. My first “influencer”? A smuggled copy of “The Joy of Sex” that a friend’s older brother brought back from Amsterdam. We passed it around like contraband. That book broke something open in me. Not the pictures — the permission. The idea that desire wasn’t dirty. It was just... data. Human data. You want to know why I’m not just another dating guru with a perfect jawline and a podcast? Because I’ve failed. Spectacularly. At 24, I fell for someone who didn’t believe in monogamy — and I tried to force it. Disaster. At 31, I thought I could “fix” a partner’s trauma with logic. That blew up too. But here’s the thing about spending years in sexology research (yes, I audited courses at the FernUniversität in Hagen, and later did informal work with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozialwissenschaftliche Sexualforschung): you learn that competence isn’t about never being wrong. It’s about recognizing the pattern. I’ve had sex that was transcendent. Sex that was boring. Sex that was, frankly, a bad decision. And I’ve sat with hundreds of clients — over coffee at Café Lenne, sometimes even walking along the Elsetalweg — who felt broken because their desires didn’t match Instagram’s highlight reel. My job, my real job, is to say: “You’re not broken. You’re just human. And humans are asymmetrical, contradictory, and often stupid. That’s the point.” So when I write for the InfluencerDting project, I’m not selling a method. I’m handing you a mirror. And maybe a little bit of Werdohl’s rain.