You are lying beside your husband right now...
Or maybe you are sitting in the bathroom after.
And the same thought is circling your mind — quiet, heavy, impossible to ignore.
"Why can I feel nothing? What is wrong with me?"
Your husband touched you and you were completely dry. Again.
You tried. You really did. You closed your eyes. You told yourself to relax. You waited for your body to respond the way it used to. But nothing came.
So you did what you have been doing for months now. Maybe longer.
You performed.
You made the sounds. You moved the way he expected. You waited for it to end.
And afterwards, while he slept, you lay there staring at the ceiling wondering how you became this person. A woman going through the motions in her own bedroom. A stranger inside her own body.
"Is this just what marriage becomes? Is this just how it is after children?"
You have tried to talk yourself out of caring. Told yourself it is not a big deal. That intimacy is not everything. That other women manage.
But deep down you know something important has been lost. And every day that passes without addressing it, you feel it slipping further away.
Maybe you have noticed your husband reaching for you less. Maybe the silence between you in bed has grown louder. Maybe you have started avoiding situations that might lead to intimacy because you cannot face another night of feeling nothing — and pretending otherwise.
"Maybe he has noticed. Maybe that is why he has been distant."
You cannot ask your mother about this. She would not know what to say — or she would say something that makes you feel worse.
You cannot tell your friends. Not even your closest ones. Because how do you say that out loud? That you feel nothing? That sex has become something you endure?
You have Googled it. Late at night. In incognito mode. With your phone screen dimmed so nobody would see.
Everything you found talked about seeing a gynaecologist or a sex therapist. Things that feel expensive, clinical, and not designed for women like you. Things that require explaining yourself to a stranger in a cold consulting room.
So you closed the browser. And you carried it alone. Again.
Drop everything you are doing now and listen to every word I am about to say.
Our grandmothers knew things about a woman's body that we have forgotten completely.
Not because the knowledge disappeared. But because we stopped asking. Because somewhere between city life, career pressure, and keeping up appearances, the quiet woman-to-woman conversations that happened in kitchens and across compound walls simply... stopped.
What Mama Risi shared with me that afternoon in Ibadan was not new. It was old. Older than any pharmacy product. Older than any Instagram wellness vendor. It had simply been kept quietly — passed from woman to woman — for generations. Until women like us stopped being taught.
Hi. My name is Bisi Adeyemi.
The first thing you should know about me is that I am NOT a doctor, a gynaecologist, or a medical professional of any kind. I am just a 36-year-old Ibadan woman, mother of two, wife of five years, who went through two years of private agony — dry, feeling nothing, faking everything — before I stumbled onto the answer that changed my body and my marriage permanently.
What I am about to share is not complicated. It does not require a hospital visit. And everything you need is available in any Nigerian market today.
Let me tell you exactly what happened to me.
After my second child — my daughter Temi — something changed in my body. I noticed it about four months after delivery. My husband Kunle would reach for me at night and I would... nothing. No response. Completely dry.
At first I told myself it was tiredness. New baby. Long days. Too much on my mind.
It will pass, I kept thinking. Give it time.
But it did not pass.
Months went by. My body stayed the same. Dry. Unresponsive. Like a switch had been permanently turned off somewhere inside me.
And it was not just the dryness. I could feel — nothing. Not discomfort. Not pain. Nothing. Just emptiness where sensation used to be.
I began faking it. Every single time. Making the right sounds, moving the right way, saying the right things. All performance. Nothing real.
Kunle never said anything directly. He was patient. He was kind. But I could feel things shifting between us. The small silences. The way he stopped initiating as often. The way he would turn to his phone in bed instead of reaching for me.
"He is losing interest," I told myself one night. "And I cannot blame him."
That thought broke something in me.
I cried in the bathroom that night. Quietly, so he would not hear. Sitting on the cold floor tiles, telling myself I was failing at the most private and important part of my marriage.
The next morning I called my godmother, Aunty Funke, in Port Harcourt. I could not even say it properly on the phone. I just said something was wrong with my body and I did not know what to do.
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said something I will never forget.
"Bisi. You are not broken. Your body is not broken. It is hungry. Feed it the right things."
I did not fully understand what she meant. But those words stayed with me.
I started searching for solutions.
First, I tried the KY Jelly from the pharmacy near my house. It helped for a few minutes — enough to get through the moment — but it killed all spontaneity. Kunle noticed it once and asked why I was using it. The look on his face. I never used it again.
Then I tried a herbal mixture a woman at my market stall recommended. She gave me a small bottle, told me to apply it and drink a tea from some leaves. No instructions. No quantities. No explanation of what was in it. I used it twice and stopped. I was too scared of what I was putting in my body.
Then I found an Instagram vendor selling "feminine restoration oil." Expensive. Beautifully packaged. Completely useless. Two weeks of daily use and nothing changed. I sent a message asking for help. No response.
Someone at my church suggested steaming. I tried it twice. The second time I developed irritation that lasted a week and made everything worse.
I tried just accepting things as they were. Telling myself this was simply what marriage became after children. That I should be grateful for what I had. That maybe I was not a woman who felt those things.
That acceptance lasted three weeks before it shattered. Because I was 34 years old and I refused to believe my intimate life was finished.
Then came the naming ceremony in Ibadan.
My cousin Shade's baby. A Saturday afternoon in July. The compound was full. Food everywhere. Women gathered in corners talking the way Nigerian women talk — quietly, intimately, with lowered voices and understanding eyes.
I was sitting at the far end of the compound, not really present. Just going through the motions of being there. Smiling when someone spoke to me. Saying the right things. Same as I did in my bedroom.
An elderly woman came and sat beside me. She moved slowly, with the quiet confidence of someone who has seen everything and fears nothing. She smelled of shea butter and something I could not name — something warm and herbal and deeply familiar.
Her name was Mama Risi. She was 74 years old, a retired midwife from Ogbomosho who had delivered over 800 babies in her career. My cousin Shade's husband's grandmother.
She looked at me for a long moment without speaking. Then she said, simply — "You are not here. Your eyes are here but you are somewhere else. What is troubling you, my daughter?"
I do not know why I told her. Maybe it was the way she asked. Maybe it was because she was old enough to be my grandmother and I knew she had seen everything. Maybe I was just exhausted from carrying it alone.
I told her. Not everything. But enough.
She nodded slowly. She did not look shocked. She did not look uncomfortable. She looked like a woman hearing something she had heard a thousand times before.
"Ah," she said quietly. "This is not a new thing. This is a thing that happened to women before you, and will happen to women after you. The problem is not your body. The problem is that nobody teaches you anymore what your body needs."
She pulled me into the kitchen — away from the other women — and she talked for forty minutes.
She told me about ingredients. Nigerian market ingredients. Things I had seen my whole life and never connected to this problem. She talked about tiger nuts and what they do for a woman's hormones. About moringa and how it feeds the parts of the female body that restore natural moisture. About uziza leaf and black seed and shea preparation and the specific way things needed to be combined and timed.
"Forget those pharmacy things," she said firmly. "Forget those Instagram people selling oil in a bottle with no explanation. Your grandmothers did not need any of that. And neither do you. The market has everything. You just need to know what to ask for and what to do with it."
I was skeptical. I will be completely honest with you.
This sounds too simple, I thought on the drive home. Tiger nuts? Moringa? Things I have been around my whole life? If the answer was in the market this whole time, why did nobody tell me?
But I was also desperate. And I had nothing left to try.
I bought what Mama Risi told me. That same evening. I made the first tonic she described — a specific combination of tiger nuts and honey, prepared a particular way — and I drank it before I slept.
Day one. Nothing.
Day two. I thought maybe... but I was not sure.
Day three. I almost stopped. Same result as everything else, I told myself. Another false hope.
And then came Day four.
I was in the kitchen making dinner. Kunle came up behind me and put his hand on my waist the way he does. A casual touch. Something he had done a thousand times.
And I felt it.
Actually felt it.
Not a dramatic wave. Not a movie moment. Just — warmth. Response. My body acknowledging his touch the way it used to before everything went quiet.
I stood very still. Afraid to move in case it disappeared.
It did not disappear.
By Day seven I was not faking anything. By Day nine, Kunle noticed.
We were in bed. And he pulled back and looked at me — properly looked at me — and said: "Bisi. What is happening to you? You are different. You are glowing. Whatever you are doing, please do not stop."
I laughed. I actually laughed. In the bedroom. Something I had not done in longer than I could remember.
By Day fourteen, I cannot fully describe what had changed. It was not just physical. It was something deeper. I felt like myself again. Like a woman who inhabited her own body rather than endured it.
I called Mama Risi to thank her. She said something that has stayed with me ever since.
"You did not find something new, my daughter. You found something back."
Three months after the naming ceremony, I quietly shared what I had learned with four other women — friends and relatives who I knew were struggling with the same thing but would never say so.
Kemi from Victoria Island — three children, same problem after the third. By Week two she sent me a voice note. "Bisi. I cannot explain this. My husband thought something was wrong with me. Now he cannot keep his hands off me. Thank you."
Ngozi from Enugu — who had told herself she was simply a woman who did not feel those things. Who had accepted it as permanent. Her message came on Day eleven. "I cried. Not from sadness. From relief. I had forgotten what this felt like."
My neighbour's daughter — newly married, already struggling, too ashamed to tell her husband of six months. She came to my door one evening. Said nothing. Just hugged me for a long time.
That is when I knew I had to stop sharing this one woman at a time.
The requests kept coming. Women I barely knew. Women sending me long voice notes at 11pm. Women I could not call back individually.
So I did what Mama Risi would have wanted me to do. I wrote it all down.
I put everything — the full protocol, every ingredient, the exact preparation methods, the timing, what to expect each day, how to source everything from any Nigerian market, and how to adjust for women in the UK, US, and Canada — inside one simple, clear, completely private guide.
Introducing...
