Joren breathes in the city like it’s a language only his bones understand. As a canal-house preservationist, he doesn’t just restore old wood and cracked plaster—he listens to what the walls have absorbed: decades of laughter, whispered arguments, first kisses pressed against stairwells. His work is an act of emotional archaeology, peeling back layers to reveal what was meant to last. But outside of scaffolding and varnish fumes, Joren curates intimacy like a forbidden art form—designing immersive dates that feel accidental: a blindfolded walk through Oosterpark where scent stations release lilac, petrichor, old paper; a scavenger hunt ending in a secret courtyard behind *Boekie Woekie*, where wind chimes made of bicycle bells hum above ivy-covered walls.He collects love notes found in vintage books—yellowed slips tucked inside *The Little Prince* or *Norwegian Wood*, phrases half-finished—as if they’re fragments of conversations he was meant to overhear. He doesn’t believe in grand proclamations; instead, he communicates through napkin sketches: the curve of your smile at 2am rendered in charcoal beside your coffee cup, the way rain pooled in your collarbone that night you stood under a broken awning in NDSM. His love language is *anticipation*, crafting experiences that unfold like theater—their own private play where every detail is choreographed but feels improvised.Sexuality for Joren isn’t performance—it’s resonance. It lives in fingertips tracing spine notches along bare backs during rooftop rainstorms, or slow dances on empty night trains when no one’s watching except Amsterdam blinking past the windows. Consent is woven into his rhythm: *May I? Can we stay here longer? Is this too much?* He’s learned that tenderness is louder than passion when it's precise—like how he waits until you’re half-asleep before draping his scarf over your shoulders because its scent grounds you.The city amplifies his contradictions: he rides fast through splashing bicycle wheels at dawn yet pauses to photograph dew on spiderwebs between bricks; he once spent three weeks tracking down the exact jasmine species that bloomed outside her window in June just to plant it beneath the courtyard’s west wall. His heartbreak lives in the negative space—the flat that still holds two mugs though only one is used, the train line he avoids because it goes to Utrecht where she said *I can’t follow you into a life built on old things*. But now, there’s a new note tucked into his Moleskine: *What if we restore each other?* And for the first time in years, he doesn’t fold it away.