It started, if I'm honest, after my third child — Bisi. I was thirty-nine. I had spent two decades on my feet on labour wards, coaching other women through the most intimate, exposing moments of their lives, and then going home too tired to be anything but a body that cooked, cleaned, and collapsed.
Nobody tells you that the woman who spends all day tending to other women's bodies can lose all sense of her own. My husband, Tunde, would reach for me at night, and I would already be three sentences into a mental to-do list for the morning. It wasn't that I didn't love him. It was that some switch in me had simply been turned off, and I didn't even remember turning it off.
By year two of this, I could feel Tunde pulling back too — not in anger, just in the quiet way a man stops reaching for something he has learned will flinch away from him. We stopped dancing in the kitchen, the silly thing we always used to do while the rice was cooking. I stopped feeling like a woman and started feeling like a function — wife function, mother function, nurse function. Some mornings I looked in the mirror and didn't recognise the flatness in my own eyes.
The breaking point came on an ordinary Tuesday. I remember because I was folding his shirts when my phone buzzed — my sister Yemisi, asking casually how "things" were between me and Tunde, the way she always did, half-joking. And before I could stop myself, I burst into tears over a pile of ironing. Not gentle tears. The kind that come from somewhere you've been ignoring for a long time.
Tunde found me like that. He didn't say much. He just sat beside me and said quietly, "Lilian, I miss you. Not the version of you that manages this house. You." I had no answer for him. That frightened me more than anything.
I called my Aunty Comfort that same week, half-ashamed of myself for even bringing it up. She didn't laugh, and she didn't tell me to simply pray harder, which is what I'd braced myself for. She said one sentence I have never forgotten:
"Lilian, matters of the body are not solved by the spirit alone — the body must be fed too."
I didn't fully understand what she meant. I do now.
So I did what I imagine you have already done. I prayed, and I fasted three days in a row, asking God to simply restore what felt lost. Nothing changed, and I quietly added "spiritually inadequate" to the long list of things I already believed were wrong with me.
I Googled it, obviously — late at night, brightness down, the way we all do. What came up were clinical Western articles about "female sexual dysfunction," full of cold statistics and diagrams that had nothing to do with my life, my body, or the particular weight I was carrying as an African wife and mother. It frightened me more than it helped.
I bought lingerie. Once. I stood in front of the mirror in it and felt like a woman performing a costume, not a woman who actually wanted anything. I hid it at the back of the wardrobe and never wore it again.
I pretended, for almost two years. I performed just enough warmth to keep the peace — and got so good at performing it that I genuinely forgot what real wanting felt like in my own body.
And I bought vitamins — energy supplements, the kind advertised to "boost your vitality." I thought I was simply tired. I was tired. But tiredness wasn't the real problem, and no vitamin was ever going to touch what was actually happening underneath it.
The answer came from the last place I expected — my husband's village in Ogun State, during a Christmas visit two years later. I'd gone reluctantly, more exhausted than festive, mostly so the children could play with their cousins in the family compound.
On the third morning, I was sitting alone near the well behind my mother-in-law's house, watching the older women wash clothes and talk, when one of them — a tiny, straight-backed woman everyone simply called Mama Ngozi, who the whole village agreed was somewhere close to eighty — sat down beside me without asking, the way only elders can.
"You are the London wife," she said. Not a question. "You carry your body like it owes somebody money."
I laughed, mostly out of shock. But something about the way she looked at me — not unkindly, just completely unfooled — made my eyes fill before I could stop them.
I don't know why I told her everything. Maybe because a stranger is sometimes safer than a sister. I told her about the prayers, the Googling, the lingerie at the back of the wardrobe, the years of performing.
She waved her hand at all of it, almost annoyed.
"Prayer is for your spirit. Your spirit is not the problem. Oyinbo articles are written for oyinbo bodies raised by oyinbo mothers — throw them away. Lace and lipstick cannot wake a body that has gone to sleep from the inside." Then she leaned in closer. "Your body went quiet because nobody ever taught you how to feed it awake again. This is not medicine. This is what our mothers knew, before anybody taught them to be ashamed of knowing it."
What she described to me over the following days was, frankly, almost insultingly simple. A handful of specific foods and drinks from ingredients already sitting in every African kitchen. A few quiet minutes of attention to my own body each day. A handful of small, deliberate ways of turning back toward my husband — nothing dramatic, nothing that required one single awkward conversation.
I remember thinking: this cannot possibly be it. I have two decades of medical training. Surely it cannot be this stupidly simple. But I was tired enough, and desperate enough, to try anyway.
I started the day we flew back to London. Days one, two, three — nothing. I felt a little foolish, honestly, standing in my kitchen steeping cloves like an old woman had told me to, wondering if sentimentality had gotten the better of my clinical judgement.
Then, on day five, I was washing dishes and Tunde came up behind me to reach for a mug — and for the first time in longer than I could name, my body didn't tense. It leaned back. Just slightly. Just for a second. I stood there with my hands still in the sink, genuinely stunned by my own body's reaction. Something that had been sleeping for years had just opened one eye.
By day eleven, Tunde stopped mid-sentence one evening while we were half-watching television and just looked at me.
"Since when do you smell like that?" he asked, half-laughing. "And why do you keep looking at me like that?" I told him I didn't know what he meant. He said, "I'm not complaining o. I just want to understand what changed."
I didn't explain the whole protocol to him. I didn't need to. I just kept showing up differently, and he kept responding.
When I went back to that same village the following Christmas, I found two other women from that same family compound who Mama Ngozi had quietly taught the same things to over the years. My husband's cousin Folake squeezed my hand and said, "She saved my marriage before you were even born into this family, o." An elder called Aunty Bimpe simply laughed and said, "Ah, so she caught you too." I realised then that this wasn't one old woman's private trick. It was something that had quietly saved marriage after marriage, for decades, in near-total silence.
I spent the next few years quietly refining what Mama Ngozi gave me — cross-checking the old remedies against what women's health research actually says, structuring the loose, half-remembered instructions into something any woman could follow, step by step, without needing to fly to a village in Ogun State or track down an eighty-year-old woman by a well.
I am fifty-seven now. My desire for my husband, seventeen years later, is not a memory I'm chasing — it is simply my normal. That is what I want for you too.
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