Once upon a time, not in a fairy tale, but in a Lagos apartment where heat and dreams rise in equal measure, I fell in love. And not just any love. The kind that sets fire to your spine. The kind that comes with bare laughter in the dark, long glances across busy streets, and stolen moments between the madness of Lagos traffic. For fifteen years, I have known this woman. For twelve of them, I have called her my wife.
We were fire, once. You see, sex wasn’t a thing we did, it was part of how we spoke, how we danced around each other’s existence. In those early days, the chemistry between us was the type that made neighbours knock on the wall. She was wild, free, and unfiltered, her body, a language I spoke fluently. We’d make love like the world was ending tomorrow. Four, five times a week, sometimes more. She was my woman, I was her man.
Then marriage happened. Then life happened.
And slowly, without warning, the fire fizzled into steam, then mist, then nothing at all. For nine years, we have been intimate only a handful of times, like the rare rain in dry season. I asked questions, gently at first, then with growing sadness. I planned romantic getaways, bought scented oils, wrote little love notes like a secondary school boy crushing for the first time. But the answer was always silence, then defensiveness, then tears.
She said it wasn’t me.
And I believed her. I wanted to. I needed to.
Then, about a year ago, just as my soul began to quietly fracture under the weight of unmet desire, she told me: sex has always been painful for her. Always. Even in the beginning. She did it, she said, to “prove herself” to me. That sentence struck me like thunder on a dry leaf. Prove herself? Had I been in love with an illusion?
Had I been building castles on cracked earth?
But I swallowed my hurt. I’m a Nigerian man, yes, but not the type who reduces his wife to a sex machine. I cared more about her health than my pride. I stood by her. Encouraged her. Waited. She eventually saw a doctor, had surgery, started physiotherapy.
Now, after all these years, she says she’s ready to try again.
But something in me is gone. Not hate. Not disgust. Just… absence. She is beautiful. Still. But when she changes in front of me, I turn my face away, not out of shame, but out of disconnection. The gears that once turned effortlessly now creak with rust. Where once I saw the curves of a woman I craved, I now see a housemate, a co-parent, a friend.
The man who used to long for her touch has become the man who flinches from intimacy, not because he doesn’t want her, but because rejection, over time, is a sharp thing that cuts until you no longer bleed. You just go numb.
I have told her: I will not initiate again. I respect her boundaries. I won’t touch her unless I know for certain she wants me to. But even if she does, I wonder, can I return? Can the man I was be resurrected from beneath all this dust?
In our culture, many men would have stepped out by now, found “relief” elsewhere, whispered secrets to a side-chic in Lekki, or worse, blamed her for his coldness. But I stayed. For her. For our daughter. For the man I told God I wanted to be.
Yet even good men reach breaking points.
So here I am, stuck in a paradox. I want to want my wife again. But I do not know if I can. I need more than just her readiness; I need my heart to remember. I need my body to reconnect with the woman who once made it sing.
Maybe the romance is not entirely dead. Maybe it’s asleep. Deep. Like a child tucked under harmattan blankets.
Or maybe, we have crossed a point of no return.
So I ask, not just as a man, but as a Nigerian man who has felt both fire and frost in his own home: what do I do? How do you fan a flame that’s been out for nearly a decade? Can two people ever truly find each other again, after drifting so far apart?
If love is a journey, are we still on the same road?
Or are we merely two pilgrims now, walking side by side in silence?
