What the Bible Actually Says About Desire in Marriage — And Why It Might Surprise You

I grew up in a faith environment that had clear things to say about sexuality. What it was for. What it was not for. Where it belonged and where it didn't. The prohibitions were communicated with conviction and consistency.

What was communicated with far less clarity — in my experience and in the experience of most people I've worked with who share a faith background — was the invitation.

The invitation that desire within marriage is not a concession to human weakness. Not a necessary evil to be managed within acceptable limits. Not the lesser, carnal dimension of a spiritual life. But something created, designed, and explicitly celebrated in the text that faith communities often approach with more silence than the text itself warrants.

Brittney and I have had to work through our own complicated relationship with this. The inherited messages about sexuality and the body that we each brought into our marriage — messages formed by genuine faith communities with genuine good intentions — carried a quiet shame that neither of us initially recognized as shame. It just felt like appropriate restraint. Like the natural posture of people who took their faith seriously.

What we eventually discovered is that the restraint we'd inherited was not the full picture. Not even close. And the text we'd been handed as the source of our sexual ethics contains, in one of its most remarkable books, one of the most explicit and joyful celebrations of embodied desire between married partners in all of ancient literature.

A tender moment captured as a couple prepares to share a loving kiss against the backdrop of soft, warm light.

The Book Most Faith Communities Skip

The Song of Solomon — also called the Song of Songs — sits in the middle of the Old Testament and has been making religious interpreters uncomfortable for centuries.

It is eight chapters of unapologetic, sensual, embodied love poetry. The two lovers describe each other's physical beauty in vivid, unhurried detail. They express longing for each other with a directness and delight that feels startling in a sacred text. They celebrate physical desire openly, without qualification, without apology, and without framing it primarily in terms of procreation or duty.

The ancient rabbis debated whether it belonged in the canon at all — not because they doubted its authenticity, but because its content was so explicitly erotic that they worried about how it would be handled. The great rabbi Akiva ultimately defended its inclusion as holy scripture, declaring it the holiest of all the writings.

And yet in most of the faith communities where people grow up learning what the Bible says about sexuality, the Song of Solomon is either quietly skipped, interpreted entirely as allegory about God's love for Israel or Christ's love for the church, or mentioned briefly and moved past without dwelling on what it actually says.

What it actually says is worth dwelling on.

What the Song of Solomon Actually Teaches About Desire

The theological framework the Song of Solomon establishes about desire within marriage is worth naming clearly — because it is significantly more generous and more embodied than most faith-formed adults were ever taught.

Desire is created good. The entire premise of the Song is that the longing between two married partners — physical, emotional, sensory, fully embodied — is something to be celebrated rather than managed. The text presents desire not as a liability of fallen human nature but as an expression of the created goodness of embodied love between husband and wife.

The body is worth celebrating. The lovers in the Song spend significant portions of the text describing each other's physical bodies with delight and specificity. This is not incidental to the text — it is central to it. The biblical vision of married intimacy includes genuine, joyful attention to the physical beauty and desirability of one's spouse. A faith that teaches people to distrust or minimize their embodied experience is not drawing from the full biblical picture.

Desire belongs to both partners equally. The Song does not present a model where one partner's desire is primary and the other's is accommodated. Both the man and the woman express longing, initiate pursuit, describe their desire in vivid terms, and experience genuine delight in each other. According to the Song, embodied desire within marriage is not a male prerogative that a wife graciously meets. It is a mutual, reciprocal, equally celebrated dimension of the covenant between them.

Pleasure is explicitly part of the design. The Song celebrates intimacy for its own sake — for the pleasure, connection, and delight it produces between two people who have chosen each other. The text requires no additional justification. It does not frame intimate pleasure primarily in terms of procreation or duty. It simply celebrates the aliveness and joy of two people who want each other and who have a covenant context in which to express that wanting fully.

What This Means for Nashville Couples Specifically

Nashville is a deeply faith-oriented city. The faith traditions that shape much of its culture have contributed enormously to the city's community life, its generosity, and its sense of moral seriousness. They have also, in many cases, produced generations of married couples who carry more sexual shame than the text that grounds their faith actually warrants.

According to research from the Wheatley Institution, couples who share a unified religious practice report higher levels of relationship satisfaction and emotional closeness than couples without that shared foundation. Faith, when it functions well, creates the relational conditions — trust, commitment, mutual honoring — that make genuine intimate aliveness possible.

What faith communities have often failed to provide is the positive formation that helps couples actually inhabit those conditions. Teaching people what intimacy is not — outside of marriage, casual, self-serving — without teaching them what it actually is at its most alive and generous within marriage, leaves a significant gap that most couples fill with silence, assumption, and the ambient shame of a formation that was incomplete rather than wrong.

The Song of Solomon is the corrective that most faith-formed adults never received. It is the text's own invitation — offered in eight chapters of unhurried, embodied, joyful detail — toward the kind of intimate aliveness that the creator of human sexuality apparently had in mind from the beginning.

Three Specific Implications for Faith-Formed Couples

The shame you're carrying may not be yours to carry. If you grew up in a faith environment and find yourself navigating a complicated relationship with your own desire or your own body within marriage, it is worth asking whether the shame accompanying that experience was actually taught by the text — or was added by a cultural interpretation of the text that was more anxious about sexuality than the text itself is. The Song of Solomon does not support shame about embodied desire within marriage. It celebrates it.

Your desire for your spouse is a feature, not a bug. The theological tradition that takes the Song of Solomon seriously — which is the orthodox Christian tradition, even if it hasn't always been the loudest voice in the room — holds that the desire a married person feels for their spouse is part of the created goodness of the covenant between them. It does not need to be earned, minimized, or apologized for. It needs to be honored, expressed, and cultivated with the same intentionality given to every other dimension of the marriage.

Intimacy within marriage deserves the same intentional investment as every other dimension of your faith life. Faith-formed people are often extraordinarily intentional about their spiritual formation — prayer, scripture engagement, community, service. The Song of Solomon suggests that intimate formation — the deliberate cultivation of desire, presence, and joyful embodied connection within marriage — deserves the same seriousness. A marriage that is spiritually rich and intimately impoverished is not living into the full vision the text actually offers.

A Word About This Work

I'm a person of faith. Brittney and I share that faith as a genuine and important part of who we are. And one of the things I bring to my coaching work with faith-formed couples is a deep respect for the theological tradition they're working within — alongside a genuine conviction that that tradition, read carefully and completely, supports rather than restricts the kind of intimate aliveness most couples long for.

The work I do with faith-formed couples isn't about helping them set their values aside. It's about helping them inhabit those values more fully — including the ones their formation may have left incomplete.

Book a free discovery call and let's have an honest, faith-informed conversation about what a more fully alive intimate marriage could look like for you.

And if you'd like to begin exploring privately, Coelle offers guided audio intimacy experiences designed for individuals and couples who are ready to invest in this dimension of their lives — in a space that honors rather than dismisses the full complexity of who they are.

Scott Schwertly is a Nashville-based sex and intimacy coach, founder of Coelle, and co-host of Do You Feel That? with his wife Brittney.