Nobody Gave the Boys "The Talk"

It happened in April, in the middle of being intimate with my partner. My body just stopped cooperating. I lost my erection, and for a few seconds I genuinely didn't know what was happening to me. It was a few days before my birthday; I was turning 28. It was the first time in my life this had ever occurred, and the panic that followed was worse than the moment itself.

I did what the average overthinker like me would always do when something rattles them. I went looking for people who could explain my newfound predicament. I quickly opened WhatsApp and texted a close friend. First thing this brother said was “calm down, no be anything, e don sup to me before.” To be honest, I felt some relief hearing that, knowing I wasn’t alone in this. He told me it happened to him last year too, and that he went to see his doctor, who advised him to hit the gym, lose some weight, build some muscle.

That conversation with my guy was comforting, but again, an overthinker will always overthink. I wasn’t satisfied, so I reached out to my elder brother, half-hoping for reassurance. In his regular nature, he laughed it off, like actually laughed, and casually said: “ehn that one na normal thing, you go just use…” He went on to mention a couple of drugs I could try. I remember feeling stung that something I was quietly spiraling over was, to him, a joke, although he offered some help.

Still not settled, I brought it up with a pharmacist friend. He was noticeably more careful with his words; he started by saying “yeah, e dey happen once once”, which was quite comforting, especially coming from someone in the medical field. He, however, ruined it after I told him it’s been 3 days since I could get an erection, and he said: “ah, that’s long o.” But after plenty of dilly-dallying, he arrived at “cut back on alcohol, and a firm warning: don't touch any drugs, you could end up dependent on them.” Which directly contradicted what my brother had just told me. I personally wasn’t going to get the drugs anyway; I would rather seek other remedies than risk being dependent on something.

The Nigerian in me started to feel ashamed. I had spread my dirty linen in the open by telling 3 people about my problem. It was now time for me to keep shut and carry this cross by myself. For some reason, I still felt like I needed more reassurance that it wasn’t a dire situation, so I did what an overthinker does - I went digging on my own. And that's when the real discomfort set in, not from the erection, but from what I found. Sexual performance can decline with age. Fitness, diet, alcohol, stress - they all play a part, earlier than most men are ever told. I was about to turn 28 and finding this out for the first time, not from a classroom, a father, or a friend, but from a frantic Google search at midnight, with a racing heart.

Then Instagram started listening. Within days, my feed knew exactly what I'd been typing into the search bar. I began seeing ads about kegel exercises, or "how to have sex without penetration." One ad opened with "Every time you masturbate" stitched over a diagram of a man's insides, for a page called Rino Men's Health. Another, from an app calling itself The Coach, promised I could become "a marathoner in bed" if I signed up for their "Last Longer" program, five spots open, week one starts with "better control." I didn't even need to Google search or ask ChatGPT anymore - they already knew the roots of my problem and had the fix ready. I wasn't looking for a product. I was looking for reassurance. The algorithm doesn't sell reassurance. It sells fear, and it sells it monthly. It worked on me for a while. Every ad felt like confirmation that something was seriously wrong, not a normal thing my body was adjusting to.

That's the thing nobody tells boys. Girls grow up knowing, however imperfectly, that their bodies have a timeline - menstrual periods, changes, a whole vocabulary handed to them early, even if awkwardly. Boys get none of that for this. We get jokes about how not to touch a girl or you get her pregnant, but nothing that prepares us for the day our body does something unfamiliar and we're left to self-diagnose, or gather the confidence to go see a doctor.

To be fair to myself, it's not that the term "erectile dysfunction" was new to me. I'd heard it before; in movies and maybe on social media. But it always arrived as passive information, background noise I never felt the need to catch. I always had that classic "as for me and my family" thinking - that very Nigerian instinct to file anything bad under "that's for other people" and keep scrolling. So even though the information had technically reached me at some point, I never once thought to actually sit with it, ask what it meant, or consider it could be my story too. Hearing something in passing and preparing for it are two completely different things, and I only understood the difference once it was already happening to me.

I did take my friend's advice in the end. I started working out properly, cleaned up how I eat, and cut back on drinking. And honestly, my performance improved noticeably. But the part nobody warned me about earlier was that the anxiety remains, even when the body starts to cooperate. Of course, my many Google searches had fed into my anxiety, as well as the many ads that followed. Now and then, usually when I'm overthinking, it happens again. Not because my body failed me, but because my mind convinced itself it would.

I've come to believe the first episode wasn't the real problem. The real problem was that I had absolutely no context for it. If I'd known, even in passing, that this is a normal thing bodies do as they change with age, that it's common, manageable, and not a verdict on my manhood, I don't think I'd have spiraled the way I did. I wouldn't have needed three men to hand me three different scripts. I'd have just handled it, gone to a doctor calmly, and moved on.

Instead, I spent weeks anxious, comparing conflicting advice, quietly convinced something was wrong with me, when really what was wrong was that nobody ever told me this could happen at all. I don't know how you fix a gap that big. But I know I'm not going to stay quiet about it, and I know I'm not the only 28-year-old man finding this out the hard way.

Months later, the anxiety hasn't fully let go. I still feel it sometimes, sitting in the back of my mind even on good days. But at least now I know where it came from - not just my body, but every conflicting voice and every ad that filled the silence nobody else did.