Timilehin never wants to have sex in his lifetime. So, as a naive teenager, he told his pastor's wife he had decided not to get married. She called him selfish.
“Her exact words were, ‘You’re selfish. You don’t want to share your money with a woman,’” he told Pulse.
Almost two decades after that incident, he now works in media and his view hasn't changed. Rather he has found a community of people of like minds, in an era of hyper-sexualisation, where some young Nigerians have also fully tapped into the puriteen movement, denying themselves sex or long-term relationships.
Across the world, young people have been having less sex, refusing to get married, and embracing divorce. According to a report by the Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, titled, “Prevalence and Patterns of Marital Dissolution in Nigeria,” 30% of marriages end in divorce. Another report by the Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative says that only 25% of young Nigerians are having sex.
There are many reasons for this decline, economic downtime (they can’t afford relationships), rise in the cost of housing (they have little privacy for the act itself), immigration (they want to leave the country and so are not looking for long-term relationships), among other factors. But for Timilehin, a lifelong puriteen, he just “genuinely don’t live for other people.”
The way he sees it, his decision not to have sex, is more asexual than anti-sex. In fact, he says most people need sex to survive.
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“Human beings are multifunctional beings based on their capabilities. They have physical needs. But it doesn't mean that human beings actually live for their needs. My theory is that everybody needs sex but at different levels. Some people can actually do without it. It is not on the same level as nourishment. It is just recreation.”
Hannah, who now works in tech, had thought of sex as what only badly-behaved girls in university did. So when her roommate told her about sex she was scarred. “I just assumed that people who did that were the runs girls in school,” she told Pulse.
After she joined X (formerly Twitter) and understood better that men and women were judged differently when it came to sex, she flipped. “It became like a messy topic. After someone's relationship ends, the boy will feel like he has taken something away from the girl and shame the girl. I just felt irritated,” she said. In protest she banished the activity entirely from her life, only to be explored in marriage.
Hannah, Timilehin and many other young people who have said no to any sex have been met with a barrage of questions about their decision. “They want to challenge it. But they don't want to challenge it from the point of view of ‘What is your conviction?’” Timilehin said. “They want to challenge it from a ‘This is not right’ standpoint. People say stuff like ‘Are you impotent?’ Everyone is sexually active and so your attitude hits them with a strangeness. It is an otherness that confronts people and people are confounded by it.”
In a society that continues to contend with heavy pressures on young people to settle down, get married, and have children, how do they get by with no end in sight? “I don't get the pressure. I actually have never felt the pressure. Sometimes I feel like men are pretending when they talk about pressure,” he said.
Does he ever get horny, bored, or feel a need for companionship?
“Ladies always think men need sex as a very important aspect of their lives. A man cannot live his life to the end without sex or you have to be impotent to be disinterested in relationships,” he said. “But I understand that this is not what I want and I'm not going to be fulfilled by getting involved. If you're talking about companionship, I will have my friends and kids. If you're talking about being lonely, I kind of deal well with being on my own.”
For Hannah, she wants to be left alone and not have to respond to so many questions about what the problem is.
“There is no problem. It’s just my choice,” she said.