Lincoln Bradley: On Desire, Riesling, and Finding Home in the Double City I’m Lincoln. Born in Omaha, but my bones have been German for over two decades now. I live in Villingen-Schwenningen, a place that doesn’t just sit on the map but exists in the space between the Black Forest and the soul. By trade? I’m a sexologist. Or I was. Now, I’m an observer, a writer, a guy who uncorks a bottle of Spätburgunder and thinks about what makes people click. I’ve spent my life studying intimacy, and I’ve ended up in a city that feels like a long, slow, meaningful relationship. You know what’s strange? The more you learn about sex, the more you realize it’s not really about sex. It’s about the pause before a kiss. It’s about the argument in a restaurant that ends with someone’s hand on the table, reaching out. It’s about the way light hits the wet cobblestones on the Rietstraße after a rain. I’ve had more emotional experience than any one person deserves—the highs, the lows, the truly bewildering in-betweens. And after all that, I’ve found that competence isn't about having all the answers. It's about being comfortable with the questions. Especially the ones you ask yourself at 2 a.m., listening to the church bells from the Münster. This city... it gets into your blood. Villingen-Schwenningen. The Doppelstadt. It’s not just where I live; it’s the landscape of my second act. I know the way the Brigachtal valley smells in the autumn, that mix of damp earth and woodsmoke. I know the exact bench in the Benediktinerplatz where the sun hits just right in the late afternoon. My life here is a quiet rhythm: buying bread at the Bäckerei Müller, a walk along the Kirnbach, a glass of wine at a little place near the Franziskaner Museum. It’s a world away from the seminars and the case studies, but it’s grounded me in a way that all those years of academic pursuit never could. These days, my work has found a new focus. I write for the WineirelandDating project on the wineireland.blog. It’s a funny intersection of my worlds, isn’t it? I take everything I know about connection, about the rituals of dating, about the vulnerability of a first encounter, and I pour it into articles about the city. The best restaurants in Villingen for a romantic dinner, I’ll write, mapping out a perfect evening that starts with tapas at La Bodega and ends with a slow walk under the old city towers. I analyze a wine list the way I used to analyze a couple’s dynamic. It's still about relationships. The setting just changed. The restaurant, the wine, the city—they’re all characters in the story now. I came into this world on a chilly November morning, the 1st, 1976. Omaha, Nebraska. A city of stockyards and steady, unpretentious people. I was born at what was then Bishop Clarkson Hospital, a solid, no-nonsense place. I can still half-remember, or maybe just imagine, the muffled quiet of a Midwestern winter—the world smothered under a thick blanket of snow, the car engines groaning to life in the driveway, the smell of my father's coffee cutting through the dry, radiator-heated air. It was a place of practicality, of handshakes. Not a lot of room for the nuanced conversations I’d later build a career on. But maybe that’s exactly why I went looking for them. Growing up, my mind was always somewhere else. I was obsessed with the old country, long before I ever set foot in it. My grandfather had stories about the Black Forest, about towns with names I couldn't pronounce. So, in my teens, I’d devour books on German history, on the Reformation that swept through these towns. I imagined the faint outline of a life far from the grid-pattern streets of Omaha. When I finally moved to Villingen-Schwenningen in my late twenties, it was like walking into a memory I’d never had. I’d walk the old city walls in Villingen, parts of which date back to the 13th century, and I’d try to feel the weight of it. In my younger, wilder days, before I understood what I was looking for, I’d have a beer at a pub near the Ringstraße, just watching the students from the local Hochschule, feeling that raw, unformed energy. They were all trying to figure out connection, too. They just didn't know it yet.
Intimate Connections in Villingen-Schwenningen: A Local’s Guide to Dating, Desire, and the Space Between I’ve lived here long enough to […]
