The Handbook Nobody Gave Us

On sex, shame, and the images that shape a man before he knows he's being shaped.

The First Image

I was five, maybe six years old.

It was late evening at my aunt's place in the countryside. The children had been sent to bed at nine, as they always were. But I couldn't sleep — too wired from the day, from playing, from whatever keeps a small boy's mind running long after his body should have surrendered. I wanted to be in the living room. Not because I particularly wanted to be with the adults. I just wanted to feel a little older than I was.

So I crept in quietly.

My aunt and her husband were watching television. An old set, the kind that showed everything in black and white. They didn't notice me at first. And then I saw what was on the screen.

A man with a moustache. Two women — one brunette, one blonde. A sauna. Bodies touching. And then something I didn't have words for: a woman lying down, the man on top of her, the other woman somewhere beside them, all of it moving in a way that felt simultaneously confusing and impossible to look away from.

I didn't understand what I was seeing. But I understood that something was happening between that man and those women. Something electric. Something that felt permanent in a way I couldn't explain.

My aunt noticed me and sent me back to bed quickly. I remember a flush of shame, a retreat under the covers. But the image stayed. A year or so later I dreamed about it — a small boy pressing himself against another child, enacting something he'd witnessed without understanding it.

Nobody explained what I had seen. Nobody sat down and said: that's not how it works. That's not what love looks like. That's not what a woman wants, or what a man is. The image was simply filed away, uncontested, into the part of the brain that stores first impressions as permanent facts.

And so my sexual education began. Not with a conversation. With a stolen image on a black and white screen.

I would spend the next thirty years catching up.

The Handbook

I grew up without a father. My mother had no relationships after I was born — none that I ever saw. The only models I had were relatives whose dynamics I observed from the edges, without context or explanation. What I understood about men and women came from television.

Beverly Hills 90210. Saved by the Bell. Whatever was on. The message was consistent: the man should be confident, handsome, financially sorted. The woman should be beautiful, desirable, slightly unattainable. Desire was a chase. Love was a destination. And somewhere between those two things was a territory nobody mapped for me.

By secondary school, pornography had filled in most of the gaps with its own version of the map. The education was thorough, if catastrophically inaccurate. A man's worth was measurable. His size was decisive. His performance was everything. I absorbed this the way children absorb everything — completely, uncritically, as though it were simply the way things were.

I was ashamed of my body before I had any reason to be. A careless remark about a small naked boy had lodged somewhere in childhood and become a governing belief: your body is something to be embarrassed about. I carried that into every locker room, every early attempt at closeness, every moment of wanting someone and not knowing what to do with the wanting.

I remember watching my classmates transform, almost overnight, into the characters they had seen on screen. Suddenly there was a Zack Morris in every classroom — charming, effortlessly cool, always in control. A Slater. And, inevitably, a Screech. The films had provided the roles, and the children simply stepped into them, because nobody had offered anything more honest to step into. The social order of an entire school year arranged itself around borrowed fiction.

The same happened with sex. When one boy found a stack of pornographic magazines under his parents' bed and brought them to school the next morning, something shifted quietly in a whole corridor of young people. The boys laughed and looked. The girls blushed and looked. Some part of every young brain registered it as strange. Another part registered it as information. As instruction. As: this is apparently what this looks like.

Nobody corrected that impression.

This is the handbook nobody gives you. It writes itself — from stolen images, schoolyard myths, films where love is always cinematic and never complicated.

I was in tenth grade — Christmas party, an empty classroom while everyone else was in the hall — when I understood, for the first time, that the handbook had a real-world application. She was intelligent and kind. What I remember most honestly is that what drew me wasn't her. It was the possibility itself. The act, not the person. I hadn't learned yet that these were supposed to be the same thing.

I don't think my story is unusual. I think there are men in their twenties, thirties, forties and beyond still operating from a handbook written before they could read, who have never spoken about it out loud. Not to their partners, not to their friends, not even to themselves.

We don't talk about this. Which is precisely why it keeps running.

Earning My Place

I lost my virginity at university. A dance teacher, a few years older than me — third or fourth year when I was in my first. It was sex in its most purely physical sense. Not a beginning of something. More like a door opened onto a room I'd been pressing my ear against for years.

We had started in her bed. Her roommate wanted to sleep. So somehow, over the course of a couple of hours, we had migrated to the bathroom floor — hard tiles, no dignity whatsoever — and I was still going, because stopping felt like admitting something. My body was exhausted. There was a burning sensation in places I won't describe in clinical detail. And somewhere in the back of my skull, while I was lying on that bathroom floor at some ungodly hour, a thought surfaced with startling clarity:

Is this what it's supposed to feel like?

And then, quieter: What am I doing wrong?

I went home the next morning with a complicated mixture of pride and confusion. I filed the confusion away somewhere I wouldn't have to look at it. That was a mistake I would repeat, in various forms, for the better part of a decade.

There is a Rolling Stones song I still can't listen to without something stirring in the back of my mind. A man's voice asking a series of questions about himself — am I hard enough, am I rough enough, am I enough. Questions that circle the same wound from different angles without ever quite naming it. I heard that song years later and recognised it immediately. Not the music. The questions. I had been asking them since that bathroom floor, without realising that was what I was doing.

There was a girl from the dance faculty I would invite over. There was my roommate's ex-girlfriend — beautiful, lonely, available in the way that felt like coincidence but probably wasn't. The first time, we both drank until it was easier. The times after that, I was sober enough to know exactly what I was doing and not honest enough to examine it.

I was in love with someone else the entire time. A girl from the theatre faculty, a year above me. We were close in the way that feels almost romantic, but stops just before the line. She was in a relationship. I stayed in the almost, and used other people's bodies to manage the ache of it.

In bed, I developed a strange pride in stamina. An hour sometimes. Forty-five minutes regularly. I could last until my joints ached and my body had long since stopped cooperating, and I called this giving.

It was about control. If you don't finish, you can't fail. If you don't arrive, you can't be judged for the journey.

Every time a girl responded, every time her breath changed, every time her body said yes — there was a small internal verdict being delivered: you have earned your place here. Checkbox ticked. The boy who had grown up without a father, without anyone telling him that his body was fine and his presence was enough — that boy was, briefly, acceptable.

And when the body finally gave out — when exhaustion won, and I stopped without arriving — it felt something like what a mountaineer must feel when he turns back a few metres from the summit. Not a catastrophe. Just the particular disappointment of a man who almost made it, who can see the top from where he stopped, and who has to walk back down knowing he'll have to try again.

I was twenty years old and conducting a performance review. In bed. This is not, looking back, the most elegant approach to intimacy.

The Disappearing Act

At a certain point, I noticed they had developed feelings I wasn't going to return. I could see it — in how they looked at me, in small things they said, in the way the arrangement had quietly changed its nature. And I said nothing. I didn't have a conversation. I didn't show up honestly and say: I can't give you what you're starting to want.

I simply disappeared. A greeting in the corridor, nothing more. As though nothing had happened. What I felt in those corridor moments was not cruelty — it was embarrassment, something close to shame, hidden behind the performance of distance. I didn't know how to be honest, so I became unreachable instead. It is much easier to be cold than to be true.

I think about my roommate's ex-girlfriend sometimes. She wrote me a song — sat in my bed with a guitar and played it, something she had written, and I sat there receiving it while already planning my exit. I don't know exactly what she felt afterward. But I think about the confusion of it — the specific uncertainty of someone whose feelings were just beginning to take shape, who had made herself vulnerable enough to write a song, and who was then, without explanation, quietly set aside. Not rejected with words. Just removed from the picture, as though the picture had never existed. She deserved a sentence at least. She got a greeting in the corridor. That is its own kind of cruelty, even when it isn't intended as one.

The Worst of It

The anxiety followed me for years. Not always — there were easier times, better connections, moments where the machinery wasn't running. But the fear had taken root somewhere deep, and it had a specific trigger: caring.

With a woman I didn't particularly care about, everything was relatively fine. No performance review, no questions circling in the back of my skull. But the moment I started to care — the moment her opinion began to matter — something seized up. A warning light came on somewhere behind my eyes. Don't fail here. Not with this one.

And of course, the moment you think that, you have already handed yourself a significant disadvantage.

I tried to sleep with women before developing feelings for them. Get the first time out of the way while it was still low-stakes. It worked sometimes. It also meant I was perpetually a few steps behind my own heart, trying to outrun something that always caught up.

The worst of it came in one particular relationship — one I stayed in far too long, almost three years, the kind that grinds you down so slowly you don't notice until you're already dust.

What kept me there is something I'm only now honest enough to say clearly: I needed to be needed. She had a way of performing helplessness at the right moments — small things she couldn't manage alone — and then, when I helped, she would say things that landed somewhere very deep. That I looked like a young Greek god. That I was unlike other men. And some part of me, the part that had grown up without a father telling him he was enough, drank all of it.

I knew, somewhere in the second year, that I needed to leave. I thought it clearly, many times, in almost exactly these words: I'll help her move into her new apartment. I'll sort out a few things she can't manage alone. And then I can move on with a clear conscience. I thought this for another year. The apartment got sorted. New things appeared that needed sorting. We were both dependent on something the other provided — she on my stability, me on her admiration — and dependency is very good at finding reasons to continue.

In that relationship, the anxiety became something physical. There were evenings where my body simply refused. Not tiredness, not indifference — fear, wearing a physical costume. She suggested pomegranate juice. I tried it. I tried other things. At some point, I tried medication that men take when they have given up asking why and just want the symptom to go away. The medication worked, in the narrow technical sense. But you cannot medicate your way out of a relationship that is making you disappear.

What made it worse was the feedback loop. She would sense my anxiety. Her sensing it made me more anxious. My increased anxiety confirmed her fear. Round and round, two people making each other worse while telling themselves they were trying to make things better.

I want to say something directly to any woman reading this: when a man's body doesn't cooperate, it is almost never about you. It is almost always about something he is carrying that predates you entirely — a fear of failure installed long before you arrived. The question worth asking is not what is wrong with me or even what is wrong with him — but what is he afraid of right now, and does he feel safe?

A woman who asks that question, and means it, and is patient with the answer — she changes something. Not immediately. But over time, she changes something fundamental.

I know this because it happened to me.

What Nobody Tells You

The images we absorb before we have language for them don't just inform our desires. They become our desires. Or at least, they become the template over which real desire has to be laid — carefully, painfully, over many years. The problem isn't that boys see things they shouldn't. The problem is that nobody sits down afterward and explains what they saw.

Pornography removes all the difficulty. Nobody hesitates, nobody needs reassurance, nobody lies awake afterward wondering what any of it meant. It is desire with all the humanity removed — and for a boy with no other reference point, it gets filed away as the standard. As what real men do and what real women want. Real desire, it turns out, is mostly humanity. It asks you to be uncertain, to care about the outcome in a way that makes you vulnerable. These are not weaknesses. They are the whole point.

Most men I know — or suspect I know, because we don't talk about this — are carrying some version of this. The handbook written before we could read. The shame installed so early it feels like personality. The fear of failing at something nobody properly taught us. We perform. We disappear. We measure ourselves against benchmarks that were always fiction. And we pass some version of the same confusion on to the next generation, because nobody told us, so we don't know what to say.

What parents owe their children is not a lecture about biology. It is something simpler and considerably harder: the sight of real love. A man and a woman kissing in the kitchen. Laughing together in bed on a Sunday morning. Treating each other with tenderness in the ordinary moments — not the cinematic ones — so that tenderness becomes the template, instead of whatever appears on a screen before anyone thinks to explain it.

And when a child stumbles across something pornographic — because they will, they always do — someone should sit down and say: that is not what this is. Real intimacy is slower, stranger, more awkward and more tender and more worth it. And the fact that you looked is not something to be ashamed of. You are just a person trying to understand something that nobody explained.

Nobody said that to me.

And nobody tells you this either: a relationship is always a mirror. Not a flattering one. The kind that shows you, with uncomfortable accuracy, exactly where you have not yet done the work. The relationship only changes when you do. Not them. You. This is one of the most resisted truths in all of human experience, because it is so much easier to redecorate a partner than to renovate yourself.

I am forty-five years old and I am saying all of this now — to my son, when he is old enough, and to whoever else needed someone to say it.

Just Her

I am in a relationship now that has lasted seven years. And I am still learning.

At the beginning, the old machinery ran hard. I was uncertain in ways I hadn't been for a long time — uncertain whether I was wanted for who I was or for what I could provide, uncertain about her past, uncertain about myself in the specific way that comes from caring deeply about someone and not yet trusting that the ground will hold.

For a period, my left arm didn't move properly. I couldn't raise it fully. The doctors found nothing wrong. The body had simply decided to protect my heart by limiting my reach. I am not making this up. The body keeps its own accounts, and it had been keeping mine for thirty years.

I notice my own patterns now in a way I couldn't before — the occasional pull toward old images, group scenarios, borrowed bodies, the kind of fantasy that offers stimulation without the inconvenience of another person's actual feelings. Fantasy is safe. It requires nothing. Nobody in a fantasy gets hurt or asks you to be more present than you feel capable of being. For a long time, I didn't question any of it. Those images were just there, familiar furniture in a room I'd been living in since I was six years old.

And then something shifted that I didn't expect.

Before we met, I spent some time genuinely alone after leaving that long bad relationship — not filling the space. Some evenings I cried myself to sleep. I stopped talking to almost everyone. And in that silence, I started to do something I can only describe as making room. In the evenings, as I fell asleep, I would try to feel the presence of someone beside me. Not a face, not a body type. Just an energy. Someone whose presence felt like: you can stop performing now.

I practised feeling that until it felt real.

When we met, she arrived for our first date on a longboard. Worn-out tracksuit bottoms, a stretched retro t-shirt, beaten-up Vans. Slightly out of breath, no makeup, not trying to make an impression — as though she'd decided she was done with all of that and had just come outside to play. And in that completely unstudied version of herself, I recognised the energy I had been practising. Not her face. Her. The quality of her.

I was nervous — properly nervous, the kind that sits in the chest — and at the same time, for the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt no pressure to be anything other than what I was. She had arrived exactly as she was, and somehow that gave me permission to do the same. Something settled in me that evening that hadn't settled in a long time. Not excitement, though that was there too. Something quieter. Something that felt, strangely, like relief.

The sexual uncertainty didn't disappear overnight. It came and went — good stretches and hard ones, evenings where everything was easy and evenings where the loop started again. It still does, sometimes. These things don't resolve cleanly. They shift.

But something is genuinely different. I find myself now, when I let my mind wander, thinking about her. Not a scenario, not a group, not an image borrowed from somewhere else. Just her. The specific, real, ordinary version of her — the way she moves past me in the kitchen and touches my back without thinking about it, the way she sometimes climbs on me from behind just because she felt like it, the way she can make the whole room feel different just by being in it.

For a man whose erotic imagination was shaped by a black and white television screen, and then spent years using fantasy to avoid the risks of closeness — this is not nothing. This is, quietly, everything.

Not healed. Not finished.

Shifting.

The handbook nobody gave us turns out to be something we have to write ourselves. Slowly. Honestly. Usually about a decade later than would have been useful.

But we write it.

***

This is No-Mad Max. The author is still writing his handbook. I write about the things men carry but rarely say out loud. You can also find me on Substack and Medium.