Kolapo*, 29, thought he had finally found steady ground in his relationship with a partner who knew his quirks, shared his love for playful banter, and made him believe companionship was possible. But all of that began to crumble the day she stumbled on his X stash of porn bookmarks that stretched across every category imaginable.
In this story, he opens up about the conservative upbringing that first fuelled his obsession, how the discovery shook his relationship, and the doubts about his sexuality that linger even now.
This is Kolapo’s story, as told to Adeyinka
The night before Bimpe* and I had our biggest fight yet, we spent about one hour in my sparsely furnished bedroom checking the many options of smart corporate dresses she wanted to wear.
There was a crimson red bubu with white flowery patterns I bought from the roadside batik stores in Akerele, a multicoloured cashmere skirt suit that I didn’t fancy, and a brown linen jumpsuit that matched a shirt she’d given me months ago. We settled on the last option. Bimpe loved the idea of stepping out in co-ord. I wasn’t a fan, but I didn’t argue.
So, when the visiting pastor, a rather tall and convincing man with oversized glasses, singled us out during a couple’s segment of his sermon, I wasn’t surprised. “The way they’re dressed, you’ll know these ones are a happy couple.”
I hated the attention, but more than that, I couldn’t stand the many gazes that fell upon us, heavy with judgment. They knew we weren’t married, and dating, regardless of whether it was the serious kind, was considered a sin.
Perhaps this was why, in the rush to pull off my clothes as soon as we got home, I paid no mind when my phone fell out of my pocket on the couch. With a horror that could only be likened to one who’d seen a ghost, Bimpe flicked through the screen before handing it to me with one question: “What is this?”
I tried to reach for it, but she wouldn’t let go. Instead, she swiped, swiped, and swiped on the screen.
Every type of adult content saved to my X bookmark flashed against my transfixed eyes, each painfully forcing me to remember how I’d so easily tapped the bookmark icon. I don’t know what was worse, the fact that she found my porn collection, or the fact that it featured everything that summed up my sexual curiosity over the years: Interracial. Gay. Transgender. Hentai. She left my house that afternoon, a day earlier than she planned. And for a moment, I thought that was the end of us.
I grew up in a conservative home. For the longest time, I was shielded from everything my parents considered morally questionable. This determination to keep me on the righteous path led them to enrol me in a faith-based boarding school and university for 10 years of my life. The same determination would ensure that every road always led back to our home, a place where, to the best of their ability, had been stripped of worldly distractions. No TV flickering in the corner, no music playing in the background, no friends dropping by for visits.
Just us, clutching the Quran at idle hours and waiting on the Adhan to catch the next prayer at the mosque. But amid all of these was a burning curiosity within me that never let me stay put as my parents intended. The same curiosity led me to explore Christianity against their wishes, and the same curiosity planted a seed that would come back to torment me in my adult life.
It happened first when I was in JSS2. A roommate had bypassed the hostel master’s inspection at the school gate and snuck in a phone. That night, I found four boys huddled on the top bunk. Their faces glowed under the dim light, hands buried in their boxers as they poured their attention on the Blackberry touch-screen phone. It was pornography, I would come to find out the next day. But it wasn’t what they watched that really stuck with me; it was the weird movements, bodies stiffened and contorted simultaneously.
When I pulled one of them aside some days later, my lips burning with questions I’d suppressed since that night, he told me about ejaculation and masturbation. That was my first real introduction to sexual education. My curiosity only grew years later when our biology teacher — a small-statured woman with a voice that didn’t match her enthusiasm — rushed through the chapter on reproductive organs because, according to her, “we would understand better as adults.”
At home, I’d been kept in the dark about anything sexual. In school, the teachers were too ashamed to talk about sex. If the adults weren’t going to explain how the body worked, I decided I’d find out myself. Each chance I got, I was looking up porn, trying to understand what sex was, what people did, and how different approaches brought about different outcomes. For example, I learnt that edging, a technique used in delaying ejaculation, could heighten male orgasm.
The habit followed me like a shadow. Even when I got into university and started dating, it didn’t stop. I would be with someone I liked, yet still find myself scrolling through porn sites on my phone, bookmarking videos the way other people saved memes.
When friends gave me their laptops for movies, I was checking to see if they had their porn collection and collecting what I could. It didn’t matter that I was no longer clueless about sex in real life; porn had become the place I went to feed a curiosity that never seemed to die. And I got smarter with every partner I dated. I cleared browser history, deleted screen recordings and lurked on X, enjoying porn from everyday folks without engaging their tweets.
Bookmarking on X had only become an option after Elon Musk bought the app, making it hard to keep up with followers. I couldn’t follow these pages; screenshots weren’t an option, but with bookmarks? I only needed to tap on the icon, and I’d have access to the page whenever I wanted.
It was so easy, a one-second tap that didn’t require me to stop and consider my actions. I didn’t care what category it was. Straight, gay, trans, hentai, interracial; if it appeared on my feed, I tapped the bookmark. It wasn’t about my sexual orientation, and I wasn’t adventurous enough to try most of the things I saw. Half of it I couldn’t even picture myself doing. But I was obsessed with the idea of knowing. It felt like research, like if I consumed enough, I’d finally understand this thing I was never properly taught.
The problem was, how was I supposed to convince my girlfriend otherwise when she found it? How was I supposed to explain that watching queer porn didn’t mean I was queer, or that bookmarking something extreme didn’t mean I wanted to replicate it? To her, the collection looked like a bucket list of my desires. To me, it was just curiosity that spiralled into a habit.
In the days that followed, Bimpe completely went dark on me. Calls rang out, messages ticked blue, but never got replies. The silence drove me to a point of confusion and worry, but what cut deeper were the cryptic posts she kept dropping on her WhatsApp status and X. Quotes about “betrayal,” “living one’s truth,” and “the people you think you know.” I’d stare at them for hours, turning each one over in my head, wondering if it was about me, if everyone who viewed them already knew my secret.
I don’t know which hurt more, the fact that she was online and deliberately ignored me, or the subtle jabs those posts carried, slicing at me every time I tried to decode them. It was like being punished twice: once for what she’d seen on my phone, and again for the shame of knowing she was narrating my sin to an invisible audience I couldn’t reach.
The morning was bright and radiant on the Saturday I finally heard from Bimpe. It was one of those lazy mornings when a gentle quietness imposed itself on the humming from TV sets in the neighbourhood and the tooting of car horns on the streets. I’d just completed an episode of HBO’s “The White Lotus” on my laptop when the notification popped up on my phone. Four simple lines pregnant with meaning: We need to talk.
It was a delight to finally hear from the love of my life after almost one week of deafening silence. Two weeks earlier, I would have responded with a sticker; probably one from my Oprah Winfrey stash. Or a casual “This woman, what is it again?” accompanied by an eye-roll emoji. But you see, leave the guilty unattended long enough and they’ll dig beyond the earth’s crust looking for justifiable reasons for their actions.
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During the days spent nursing regrets and hurt, anger also crept in. Anger that Bimpe didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. Anger that she ghosted me. Anger that she didn’t let me explain myself. So, instead of replying, I swiped over her message and left it unanswered for a day. I needed her to experience a semblance of what I went through while she stayed mum. We had always been united in our distaste for the silent treatment. So why did she think it was nice to ignore me?
When I finally responded, I contemplated the many versions of a curt response that floated in my head. “K” felt too casual. “Alright, when can we talk?” sounded too desperate. In the end, I landed on “We do”. It felt appropriate, like a subtle demand that we both take accountability for how things unravelled.
Bimpe showed up at my house the following day, her footsteps heavy with purpose as she approached my flat. I’d made a habit of ascribing meaning to her footsteps: hurried and noisy when she was excited, a dragging slap against the tiled floor when she was tired, faint when indifference set in and heavy when she came with intent to talk.
Sometimes, it was gossip about the colleague who pissed her off at the office, a rant about the conductor with body odour and complaints about the friend who relocated without telling her. This time, I wished it were any of those. But the weight in her steps that day told me the news was us.
She didn’t knock. She never knocked. She pushed the door open and stood there for a moment, her eyes scanning the room like she needed to be sure she was in the right place. I stayed seated on the edge of my bed, pretending to be unbothered, even though my chest was clenching and unclenching at will.
“Are you not going to say anything?” she asked finally, her voice clipped but steady.
I motioned to the chair opposite me, the one she always dragged close whenever we argued and still ended up reaching across to hold my hand. She ignored it and sank into an adjacent sofa. The air between us felt thick and heavy with all the words we hadn’t said in a week.
I hated the silence, but I hated it even more because I didn’t know where to begin. Should I start with an apology? Should I explain? Or should I let her speak first, risk hearing the worst?
When I finally spoke, I started with an apology. I didn’t even know what I was apologising for. Was it for the stash, which was my vice and had nothing to do with her? Or for ignoring her message after she asked if we could talk? Whatever it was, I didn’t care. I just wanted to douse the fire. So I apologised, and then I launched into this long-winded explanation about curiosity, about how porn had been the only window into sex for me, how it wasn’t about preference but about exploration.
But as I spoke, I realised my apology had missed the point. Bimpe wasn’t just bothered about the bookmarks. She was bothered by what they suggested. In her head, my collection wasn’t just curiosity; it represented my fantasies. She was convinced I wanted sex with men, that my desires stretched beyond her. I did the hard job of talking and talking until she promised she wouldn’t judge me.
But words are one thing; stares are another. Since that day, her gaze has sometimes stayed a little longer with a kind of unspoken suspicion. Barely accusatory, but enough to make me feel uneasy.
The change has seeped into our sex life too. The other day, I asked her to bite my nipple — something she’d done before in the heat of pleasure — and she paused, lips curled, eyes narrowed. Afterwards, she asked where I learnt that from. It hurt because I knew the question wasn’t innocent.
Now, even in moments that should feel intimate, it’s like we’re both approaching sex with a quest to interrogate every touch and sound. She may have forgiven me, but she clearly hasn’t forgotten.
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the subjects.
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