come away

WHERE WE HAVE BEEN

Last session we built the whole foundation. We learned what kind of book this is, the one they were too nervous to keep and too moved to lose. We traced how shame got installed in the church, and named the men and the centuries who installed it. We looked honestly at the science and the history. And then we opened the poem and met a woman who speaks her desire out loud, a body treated as holy ground, and a charge not to rush the most powerful thing you will ever feel. We ended chapter two's first movement under the banner of love.

Now the poem calls us out of doors. Chapter two turns to pursuit, to being wooed and doing the wooing, to a springtime voice at the window saying arise, come away. And then, as every real love learns, it turns to the night, to the ache of reaching for someone who is not there, and the search through the dark streets to find them.

This is the session where the ancient poem meets the modern world, because how do we pursue each other is a question every generation has to answer, and ours is answering it in a way no generation before us ever has, on screens, through apps, in a culture that has quietly forgotten how to court. So we are going to talk honestly about dating, and online dating, and flirting, and sexting, and hookup culture, and the influencer mirror we all now stand in front of. And we are going to let an ancient love poem show us what we have lost, and what is worth fighting to get back. This session is about coming away, and about seeking and finding.

LET US READ IT TOGETHER

Read this aloud, slowly. Listen for the springtime call, the tenderness of the pet names, the sharp little warning about the foxes, and then the ache of the search in the dark. She speaks most. He answers.

Now let us walk back through it, slowly, from the voice on the hills.

ARISE, MY DARLING, AND COME AWAY

The movement opens with her ear, not her eye. Listen. My beloved. She hears him before she sees him, coming over the hills, and the whole passage is lit with springtime, winter past, rains gone, flowers up, birds back, and a voice at the window saying arise, come away with me.

And do not rush past the springtime, because it is some of the most sensuous nature writing in all of Scripture, and every image is doing double work. See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land. The fig tree ripens its early fruit; the blossoming vines spread their fragrance (2:11 to 13). Read it as a body waking up. The frozen ground thawing, the first blossoms, the sap rising in the vines, the fig putting out its early green fruit, this is the earth doing exactly what desire does when it comes back to life after a long cold season. The Hebrew poets knew that human longing and the turning of the year run on the same clock, so the poet lets the whole landscape become an image of two people whose winter is ending. And notice the fig especially: a fig tree fruits quietly, the small green figs forming hidden among the leaves before they ever show, a perfect, tender image of desire ripening in private before it is ready to be seen. The message under all of it is the one the whole session turns on: the cold is over. It is time for life to begin again.

There is a tender picture of pursuit here, and I want to hold it up against a lie a lot of us were handed. For a whole generation of Christian marriage teaching, think of the enormously popular Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, and its companion Captivating, the model was the man as the sole pursuer, the initiating hunter, the warrior who fights for the beauty, and the woman as the one who waits to be rescued and found. Now, there is something real in that, many people, of every gender, long to be pursued. But watch what the text actually does. Yes, he comes leaping over the hills to call her out. But she is the one narrating it, admiring him, drinking him in as he approaches, and in the very next breath she will call him back to her (2:17). Pursuit here is not a hunter and a prize. It is mutual. He longs to be admired as much as she longs to be pursued, and she does both: she is pursued, and she pursues.

Hear this if you have ever felt like the wrong kind of person for wanting to be chased, or for wanting to do the chasing. Both men and women long, equally and deeply, to be pursued, to be wanted, to have someone come over the hills for them. The Song knows nothing of a world where only one of them gets to feel that. The rigid men initiate, women receive script is not the Bible's script. It is a cultural overlay, and it has left a lot of good men exhausted and a lot of strong women silenced.

HOW WE PURSUE NOW: DATING, THEN AND NOW

The Song is, at its heart, a courtship, two people finding their way toward each other. So this is the natural place to stop and ask an honest, urgent question: how does a whole culture handle pursuit and desire, and how is ours doing? Because the answer, right now, is: not well. And if we are going to teach the Song's vision of two people running toward each other, we have to be honest about the strange landscape our young people, and our newly single people, are actually running across.

First, a piece of history almost no one knows: dating, as we practice it, is only about 150 years old. In the world that first sang this Song, there was no dating. There was a short betrothal, arranged with families and community, and a marriage entered relatively quickly, the couple often moving into sexual union as the marriage itself began (this is part of why, as we saw last session, the clean modern line between before and after marriage is partly ours, not theirs). For most of human history, courtship happened inside community, supervised, family embedded, brief. As recently as colonial America, courting couples practiced bundling, a betrothed pair permitted to spend the night in the same bed, often with a bundling board between them, so they could talk and grow close under the family's roof and watch. The point is: pursuit was social. It had witnesses, structure, and a short runway to commitment.

Then everything changed. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, as the historian Beth Bailey documented in From Front Porch to Back Seat, courtship moved out of the family parlor and into the anonymous public world of the automobile, the movie theater, the restaurant. Dating was born: private, unsupervised, and increasingly disconnected from family and community. For a century that worked, more or less. And then, in the last fifteen years, it changed again, more radically than in the entire century before.

Dating today begins on a screen. Most relationships now start on an app, Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and the sociologist Michael Rosenfeld's research shows that online is now the single most common way American couples meet, having overtaken friends, family, church, and work. There are real goods here. Bumble was built so that women message first, an intentional design meant to give women safety and control after generations of unwanted, aggressive male attention. That instinct, protect the woman, give her the first move, is genuinely good. (Interestingly, Bumble has since softened the rule, partly because many women reported that always having to initiate became its own exhausting burden, Rosenfeld and others have found real fatigue and anxiety among women carrying the whole weight of pursuit.)

But something has gone quiet. We are living in what The Atlantic named the Sex Recession (Kate Julian, 2018). Young adults today are dating less, partnering later, and having less sex than any recent generation. Pew Research (2023) found only about a third of adults under 30 are currently in a committed relationship, and the share of young adults reporting no sexual activity in the past year has climbed sharply. Think about how strange that is: the most sexually permissive culture in human history is producing some of the loneliest, least partnered young people we have ever seen. The apps promised infinite choice, and infinite choice turned out to feel like a slot machine, endless swiping, disposable matches, a paralysis of options where no one is ever quite chosen because someone better might be one more swipe away.

And there is a deeper loneliness under the dating loneliness, one the therapist Esther Perel names better than anyone. We are asking, she says, one relationship to carry a weight no relationship was ever built to bear. We have asked the modern marriage to do the work that an entire village used to do. For most of human history, a person's needs for belonging, meaning, purpose, community, counsel, and intimacy were spread across a whole web, extended family, neighbors, clan, church, guild, village. Now we have dismantled the village and handed the entire load to one person.

No wonder people feel like they are failing at love. We are not failing at love; we are asking a single human being to be an entire village. The Song's vision of one great, chosen, exclusive love is real and worth everything, but part of protecting it is rebuilding the village around it, so that your partner is your beloved and not your only source of every human good. A love asked to be everything will buckle. A love set inside a community of friends and family and purpose can actually breathe. (Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity, 2006; The State of Affairs, 2017.)

Part of what has gone quiet is pursuit itself. Desire, courtship, the willingness to risk reaching for another person, these are not automatic. They have to be cultivated, taught, modeled, and blessed. When a culture stops teaching pursuit, when it hands young people screens instead of skills and shame instead of encouragement, desire withers on the vine. And that costs us. It costs us connection, marriage, children, and joy.

So let me say plainly where I stand: I am someone who will advocate for bringing dating culture back. I encourage young people to date. I encourage divorced people to date. I encourage the wounded to risk reaching again, not recklessly, but really. Pursuit is not predatory when it is rooted in respect. Being wanted is not oppression. Two people, both awake, both reaching, both willing to risk, that is what the Song shows us, and it is worth fighting for in a culture that is slowly forgetting how. The Song's picture of healthy desire is not a hunter and a fortress. It is two lovers running toward each other.

One guardrail before we go on, because I never want to trade one pressure for another: encouraging pursuit is not the same as preaching that everyone must partner to be whole. Purity culture already made that idol, the spouse as the finish line, the single life as a waiting room, and I refuse to hand it back to you in nicer packaging. Some of you are single by circumstance, some by choice, some for a season and some for a lifetime, and every one of you is already a whole person, right now, unpartnered. (We will come back to this properly in Session Six, because the Bible is far more honest and generous about the single life than the church usually is, Jesus himself was single, and Paul called it a gift.) So hear the encouragement to reach as an invitation, never a verdict. Reaching is worth blessing. Never reaching is not a failure.

TWO HOPEFUL TURNS: SPEED, AND CROSSING LINES

Two developments in how people are pursuing each other now are worth naming, because one is a quiet correction to the app problem, and the other is a wound the church needs to repent of.

The return of the room: small, intimate, in person dating. After a decade of swiping, a lot of people are exhausted by the screen, and a counter movement has grown up all over the world: speed dating and small, curated, in person events. It started as a novelty (the original SpeedDating was created in the late 1990s by a rabbi, Yaacov Deyo, precisely to help Jewish singles meet face to face), and it has since exploded into a global ecosystem, speed dating nights, singles dinners, slow dating clubs, hobby based meetups, matchmaking salons, and a whole wave of intentionally phone free events from London to Mumbai to New York. Why is this good? Because it puts pursuit back where the Song puts it, in a room, in real time, with a real body across the table. You cannot smell someone through an app; you cannot feel their presence, read their body, or catch the spark that only fires in person (remember the science of attraction from earlier, half of it is chemistry that simply does not travel through a screen). These smaller, more intimate gatherings are, in a real sense, a rediscovery of what the ancient world had all along: courtship inside community, with witnesses and structure and a short runway to something real. If the apps left you hollow, this is a genuinely hopeful turn. Get in a room.

Crossing lines: cross cultural, interracial, and interfaith dating, and a hard word to the church. Now the wound. For a very long time, large swaths of American evangelicalism were quietly, and sometimes loudly, opposed to dating across racial, ethnic, and cultural lines. It was dressed up in spiritual language, be ye not unequally yoked, warnings about different backgrounds, concern for the children, but underneath much of it was plain cultural prejudice wearing a Bible verse as a costume. Bob Jones University, to take the most notorious example, banned interracial dating among its students until the year 2000. Let that land: a Christian institution enforced a ban on Black and white students dating each other into the twenty first century, and defended it as biblical.

It was not biblical. It was wrong, and it was sin, and I will say so plainly. Let me show you from the text. The unequally yoked passage (2 Corinthians 6:14) is about being bound to unbelief and idolatry, a spiritual mismatch, not about skin color, nationality, or culture; reading race into it is a grotesque distortion. And Scripture pushes the other way, hard. Moses married a Cushite, an African, woman, and when Miriam and Aaron used it as the occasion to challenge him, Miriam was struck with a skin disease (Numbers 12). (Scholars debate how much the marriage itself was the issue versus a pretext for a power struggle over Moses's authority, but notice the direction the story runs: the one who objected to the cross cultural marriage is the one who ends up disciplined, not Moses.) Ruth, a Moabite foreigner, marries Boaz and becomes the great grandmother of King David, and is named, a foreigner, in the genealogy of Jesus himself (Matthew 1). Rahab, a Canaanite, is in that same line. The whole trajectory of Scripture is outward, every tribe, tongue, and nation gathered into one people, and it ends, in Revelation, with a wedding feast for a bride from every nation. The gospel is the most boundary crossing love story ever told. A church that told people they could not cross a cultural line to love someone had it exactly backwards.

I have lived on the other side of this. I spent years working in Africa, in cultures very different from the one I was raised in, and I will tell you what crossing those lines actually does: it enlarges you. It exposes how much of what you called biblical was really just American, or the way my family did it. Cross cultural love, done with real respect, real humility, and real willingness to be changed, is not a threat to faith. It is one of its truest expressions. If you love someone across a line the world, or the church, told you not to cross, hear me: the Song's God is the God who struck Miriam for exactly that objection. Cross the line. Love the person. Just do it with honor.

WHY WE DATE THE WAY WE DATE: ATTACHMENT STYLES

Here is one of the most useful things a person can understand before they ever go on another date: you do not come to love as a blank slate. You come carrying a pattern, a way of bonding that was laid down in you long before you could choose it, in your very first relationships, and that pattern quietly runs a great deal of how you pursue, panic, cling, or flee in every relationship since. Psychologists call it your attachment style, and once you see yours, a hundred confusing things about your dating life suddenly make sense.

The science goes back to John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the mid twentieth century, who studied how infants bond with caregivers, and it was carried into adult romance by researchers like Hazan, Shaver, and, in the popular, very readable book Attached, Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. The finding is remarkably consistent: adults tend to bond in one of a few recognizable patterns.

• Secure (roughly half of people). Comfortable with closeness and with independence. Can say what they need, trust their partner, handle conflict without catastrophizing, and do not play games. Secure daters make relationships look easy, not because they are lucky, but because their nervous system learned, early, that love is safe and available. The good news the research insists on: security can be learned. Even if you did not start here, you can grow toward it.
• Anxious (the activated system). Craves closeness, fears abandonment, reads danger into small silences, tends to protest, to text again, seek reassurance, activate hard when a partner pulls away. The anxious person's superpower is deep devotion; their trap is losing themselves in the other, mistaking anxiety for love, and staying too long in relationships that starve them.
• Avoidant (the deactivating system). Craves independence, feels smothered by too much closeness, pulls back exactly when things get serious, keeps an escape hatch open, often idealizes an ex or a fantasy partner to keep the real one at arm's length. The avoidant person's superpower is self sufficiency; their trap is confusing distance with strength, and going cold precisely when love asks them to stay.
• Disorganized, or fearful avoidant (the hardest, often rooted in early trauma). Wants closeness and fears it, comes close, then panics and bolts, then aches for what they pushed away. This one usually needs real healing work, and it deserves compassion, not judgment.

Now here is the pattern that ruins more dating lives than any other, and I watch it constantly in the counseling room: the anxious and avoidant trap. The anxious person and the avoidant person are drawn to each other like magnets, and then torture each other. The anxious one reaches; the avoidant one pulls back; the reaching intensifies; the pulling back intensifies; and each one's worst fear is confirmed by the other's behavior. It can feel like the most passionate, consuming relationship of your life, the highs are dizzying, but the passion is often just two nervous systems firing alarm bells at each other. Real, sustainable love usually looks calmer than that, not more chaotic. If a relationship feels like a roller coaster of longing and relief, that is not a sign it is meant to be. It may just be your anxiety dating their avoidance.

There is a therapy built precisely for this dance, and it is worth knowing by name because it is the most researched, most effective couples therapy we have. The psychologist Sue Johnson developed Emotionally Focused Therapy, the whole model in her book Hold Me Tight (2008), on the insight that adult romantic love is an attachment bond, and that most couple conflict is not really about the dishes or the sex or the money. It is about one terrified question underneath: Are you there for me? Can I reach you? Do I matter to you? Johnson calls the anxious and avoidant loop the Protest Polka, one of a few recurring demon dialogues: one partner pursues, criticizes, escalates, protests, not out of meanness but out of panic at the disconnection; the other withdraws, shuts down, goes silent, retreats, not out of coldness but out of feeling like a failure who can never get it right. And here is the trap: the more one pursues, the more the other withdraws; the more one withdraws, the more the other pursues. Each person's coping move is the exact thing that triggers the other's worst fear. It is a loop that feeds itself, and both people end up alone, doing a dance neither one chose.

The way out, in Johnson's model, is not better fighting techniques. It is learning to hear the attachment fear under the anger or the silence, to recognize that the raging pursuer is really crying I cannot reach you and I am terrified, and the stonewalling withdrawer is really saying I cannot do this right and I am drowning. When couples learn to reach for each other underneath the loop, what Johnson abbreviates A.R.E.: Are you Accessible, Responsive, and Engaged?, the polka stops. Watch for this: it is the beating heart of the wound we walk into in Session Four, when the beloved knocks at the door (5:2) and gets, for one fatal second, a hesitation instead of a hand. That whole tragedy is a Protest Polka in miniature. (And a companion voice worth naming here: Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love (2011), teaches couples to build what he calls a couple bubble, a mutual agreement to have each other's back so completely that both nervous systems can finally rest. Two people who regulate each other, who become each other's safe harbor, are doing, in the language of neuroscience, exactly what the Song's his left arm is under my head describes.)

Why does this belong in a Song of Songs study? Because the woman in this poem is a portrait of secure attachment, and you can see it. She reaches when she is apart from him, she gets up and searches the streets, healthy protest, but she does not disappear into him; she keeps her own voice, her own vineyard, her own mine before his. She wants him fiercely and she is a whole self without him. That is the goal, not the absence of longing, but longing held by a self that does not collapse. The most loving thing you can do for your future relationships is to understand your own pattern, and to grow, deliberately, toward security. You are not doomed to your style. You can heal it.

SCREENS, TECHNOLOGY, AND SEXUAL ETHICS IN A DIGITAL AGE

We cannot teach how we pursue now honestly and skip the device in your hand, because for most people under fifty, courtship, flirtation, and even sex itself now travel partly through a screen. So let me be a professor and a pastor about this, without panic and without naivete.

Let me first give you the framework, because the technology will keep changing and the principles will not. Every new tool, the app, the DM, the disappearing photo, the video call, and now AI, poses the same four questions, and if you carry them you will navigate the next invention too: (1) Is it honoring, does it treat the other person as a whole soul, or as a body to consume? (2) Is it consented, freely, soberly, on both sides, and revocably? (3) Is it safe, physically, and in terms of permanence and power, who could hold this over whom later? (4) Is it building intimacy, or replacing it? Hold those four, and you can think clearly about tools that do not even exist yet.

And they are coming fast. We now live in a moment of deepfakes, anyone's face can be grafted, without consent, onto sexual images, a genuine violation that the law is scrambling to catch up with, and a real danger especially to women and teenagers; AI companions and chatbots engineered to simulate romance and desire, which can feel like connection while quietly training a person to prefer a partner who makes no demands, has no needs, and is not real, the ultimate replacement of intimacy rather than building of it; and an entire economy designed to monetize your loneliness. The ethical spine of this whole study, is this drawing me toward a real, whole person, or away from one, has never mattered more. A machine can now counterfeit being known. It cannot actually know you. Only a person can do that, and only a person is worth handing your heart to.

The monetizing of the body: OnlyFans and the thirst trap economy. Consider how fast this happened. OnlyFans launched in 2016 as an ordinary content subscription site; then the 2020 pandemic hit, and it exploded, from a few hundred thousand creators to well over a million in a single year, and by 2025 the platform had paid out something on the order of twenty five billion dollars to creators. Sit with that number. In under a decade, intimate self display became a mainstream, monetizable form of labor, not a subculture on the fringe but an app on millions of ordinary phones. And it has a feeder system: the thirst trap, the sexually suggestive post on Instagram or TikTok that builds an audience and funnels it toward paid explicit content elsewhere. Here is the mechanism, named plainly, the free feed becomes a shop window, and a desirable body becomes a product with a monthly price. I am not here to hand you a verdict on every person who has ever made that choice under real economic pressure; I am here to name what the system is doing, because it is the objectification machine from Session One, now pointed at your own image and offering to pay you to run it on yourself. The question the Song keeps asking cuts straight through it: is your body a self to be known, or a product to be sold to strangers who will never know you at all?

And the apps keep specializing. It is worth knowing the landscape has moved past Tinder. Feeld, an app built explicitly for open couples, non monogamy, and kink, has moved what used to be hidden into the mainstream app store, a signal, whatever you make of it, that the whole architecture of how people arrange desire is being renegotiated in public. We will take up the honest conversation about monogamy and the spectrum in Session Five; for now, just notice how quickly the ground is shifting under a culture that no longer agrees on what dating even is for.

Sexting and sending intimate images or video. Couples ask me about this constantly, is it wrong for two committed people to send each other sexual texts, photos, videos? Here is how I think about it, using the same honest framework we use for everything. Between two committed, consenting adults, erotic words and images across distance can be a genuine expression of desire and playfulness, a way to keep the fire lit across the miles, to banter and pursue when you cannot be in the same room. Scripture itself is a book of erotic words sent between lovers; the Song is, in a sense, the original sext. So I am not going to hand you a rule that says the medium is automatically sinful.

But, and this is a large but, I have to tell you the two real dangers, because I have sat with the wreckage of both. First, permanence and control. Anything sent to a screen can be copied, saved, forwarded, hacked, or weaponized later, in a breakup, in a custody fight, in a betrayal. An image you send in love today can become a weapon in someone else's hand tomorrow, and you cannot get it back. That is not a moral panic; it is a fact of the technology, and the young especially need to hear it plainly. Second, and this is for the single: sending intimate images of yourself to someone who has not committed to you is, almost always, handing your body to someone who has not earned your trust, and the walls and windows principle we will learn in Session Four applies to devices too. So the honest counsel is: within a committed, trusting bond, handled with wisdom about permanence, this can be part of a couple's playful erotic life. Outside of that, or handed to someone who might not be safe with it, the risk is real and the regret is common. As always: is it permissible? is it beneficial? is it consuming? And add a fourth for the digital age: is it safe, and is it truly consented to, on both sides?

The influencer mirror. Now the harder thing, because it shapes everyone, not just the sexting. We now live our whole lives in front of a curated, filtered, algorithmically perfected image of what a body and a life and a love are supposed to look like. Instagram, TikTok, the endless scroll of influencers, it is the advertising problem from last session, turned up to a thousand and pointed directly at your self worth. Here is the mechanism, and it is the exact opposite of the Song's: comparison always breeds discontent. The Song's lovers heal each other's shame by particular praise, you are the mare among the stallions, there is no flaw in you, seeing this real person and delighting in them. The influencer mirror does the reverse: it hands you a million airbrushed strangers to measure yourself and your partner against, and guarantees you will always fall short, because the images are not real, they are filtered, posed, sponsored, and often literally digitally altered. A generation is growing up believing that the fake is the norm and their own real body and real relationship are the deficient exception. There is a name for what this does to a person. Psychologists call it self objectification, the framework is objectification theory, Fredrickson and Roberts, 1997: when a culture trains you to see your own body constantly from the outside, as an object to be looked at, scored, and ranked, you begin to monitor and grade yourself the way a stranger would, all day, and the research links that habitual self surveillance to anxiety, depression, disordered eating, body shame, and, tellingly, diminished sexual pleasure, because you cannot be present in your own body's delight when part of you is standing outside it, grading the picture. That is the exact opposite of yada, the fully present knowing we are building toward. So this is not vanity or oversensitivity; it is a documented harm, and it is directly at war with everything this book teaches. Part of becoming a whole sexual being, in this exact moment of history, is learning to put the mirror down, to stop grading your body and your love against a machine engineered to make you feel you are never enough, and to climb back inside your own skin.

HOOKUP CULTURE AND THE ALCOHOL QUESTION

I want to look honestly at the world our young people are actually dating in, because a lot of you are raising them, mentoring them, or living in it yourselves, and pretending it is not there helps no one.

The sociologist Kathleen Bogle (Hooking Up, 2008) and the journalist Laura Sessions Stepp (Unhooked, 2007) documented the shift on campuses from dating to hooking up, physical intimacy, often up to and including sex, detached from relationship, commitment, or even much conversation. The defining features, as the researchers describe them, are that the depth, the frequency, the location, and even the feelings are treated as irrelevant. It is intimacy stripped of everything intimacy was for. And here is the honest, non panicked read: study after study finds that hookup culture leaves a lot of people, especially young women, though not only them, feeling emptier, not freer. Peggy Orenstein's research (Girls and Sex) documents how girls in this culture are trained to prioritize everyone's pleasure and no one's own, to perform desire they do not feel, and to disconnect their bodies from their hearts as a survival skill. That is not liberation. That is a new script, just as constricting as the old purity one, pointed in the opposite direction.

And the whole culture rehearses that script on screen every night. Look at what reality television has done to courtship: The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, Love Island, Married at First Sight, Too Hot to Handle, a show whose entire premise is a cash prize that shrinks every time contestants so much as kiss, desire literally repriced as a poker chip; Naked Attraction, where contestants pick a date from full nudity before a single word is spoken. Whatever else these shows are, they train tens of millions of us to see dating as a competition and sex as either the withheld prize or the opening transaction, desire turned into content, coupling turned into strategy, the human heart turned into a game with a rose ceremony. It is the influencer mirror in motion, and it is the precise counterfeit of the Song's unhurried, mutual, no cameras delight. Notice what it does to your own expectations. Then turn it off and go find a real person.

In fairness, the same screens are also, occasionally, telling better stories, and it is worth knowing they exist, because they show the culture reaching, however imperfectly, for what the Song already has. The series Normal People (2020) was widely praised for depicting intimacy where consent is spoken and ongoing and the tenderness is real. Bridgerton (2020) put female pleasure at the center of its romance and modeled explicit verbal consent, even as it also, honestly, botched a consent scene worth discussing. Films like Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) convey scorching desire almost entirely through looking and longing, which is the Song's own poetics of anticipation, and the biographical drama Masters of Sex dramatizes the very researchers whose work underlies this whole study. I am not handing you a viewing list or pretending any of it is Scripture. I am noting that when the culture's storytelling is at its best, it stumbles toward the exact things the Song teaches, consent, mutuality, longing, being truly seen, and away from the game show counterfeit.

And we have to talk about alcohol, because it is the fuel of the whole thing. The plain, sobering fact taught in every human sexuality course: a very large share of college sexual encounters, and the majority of campus sexual assaults, involve alcohol, often heavy alcohol, on one or both sides. This matters for the deepest reason of all: consent requires a mind that is actually present. We will go deep on consent and assault in Session Four, but plant the seed here. A culture that ties sex to being drunk has built a machine that manufactures encounters no one can fully consent to and half the participants cannot fully remember, and then acts surprised at the wreckage. The average teenager loses their virginity in the back seat of a car while consuming alcohol, I tell my students, and not one of them would tell you it was the best sex of their life. Hold that against everything this study teaches: the Song's vision is presence, two people fully awake, fully choosing, fully there. Sex that requires you to be absent from your own mind to go through with it is the exact opposite of what the body was made for.

None of this is a lecture to shame anyone who has lived it, many of you have, and there is no condemnation here. It is an honest map of the landscape, so that when we hold up the Song's alternative, mutual, awake, chosen, unhurried, particular love, you can feel why it is not a restriction but a rescue.

MY DOVE, ONE OUT OF THOUSANDS

He gives her a name here, and it is one of the tenderest in the book. My dove. Yonati. In the Song, the dove, yonah, is the bird of a peaceful, settled love: gentle, faithful, a bird that mates for life. When he calls her his dove, he is naming the season they are in, not the frenzy of a chase, but the deep peace of belonging to each other.

But there is a detail here most people never hear, and it lands every time I teach it. There were regions in the land literally known as the Valley of the Doves, one near Jericho, and cliffs on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee, where thousands upon thousands of doves nested in the caves and the clefts of the rock. Picture that: a whole rock face alive with the sound of thousands of doves. And out of all of them, he says, my dove. One. He looked at a mountainside full of thousands of them, and he picked one, and he called her his.

That is what love does. It does not say you are the only person on earth who could ever be loved, that is a fairy tale, and it collapses the first time you feel a flicker of attraction to anyone else and panic that the magic is broken. Real love says something better and sturdier: out of all of them, out of every other possibility, I choose you, and I keep choosing you, and you are my one. To be chosen like that, singular, out of a multitude, on purpose, again and again, is one of the deepest things a human being can be given. Most of us are starving for exactly it. And notice: this is the direct answer to the app problem from Part Two. The screen offers infinite doves and lets you choose none. The Song offers the thing your soul actually wants, to be the one dove, chosen out of the thousands, and kept.

THE LITTLE FOXES, AND WHY LOVE ACTUALLY DIES

Right in the middle of all this springtime tenderness comes a strange, sharp little verse about foxes, and it is one of the most quietly important lines in the book, because it names, in one image, how love actually dies.

First, a piece of the ancient world that adds real weight. The Hebrew is shual, fox or jackal, and in the love poetry of Egypt, the poetry the Song shares a family with (recall Michael Fox's work from last session), foxes and jackals were a stock image for lustful outsiders, prowling lovers, the ones who slip in from outside to raid a vineyard that is not theirs. So when the Song says catch the little foxes, part of what it means is: guard this love from the outside threats that would raid it, the wandering eyes, the third parties, the prowlers.

But there is a second, closer danger, and this is the counseling truth I have watched play out for twenty years. The verse says the little foxes, and it says they ruin the vineyards that are in bloom. It is rarely the great catastrophe that ends a love. It is the small thing, the little fox that slips in and gnaws the root while everything above ground still looks like it is flowering. Kill the root, kill the whole vine. And here is what I have seen, offered as my own clinical observation and not as a hard statistic: the number one little fox that eats away at women in a marriage is bitterness; the number one little fox that eats away at men is resentment. They start small, a slight not spoken, a hurt not named, a disappointment swallowed, and left alone in the dark, they gnaw the root until the whole vine dies, and no one can quite say when it happened.

There is hard research under this image, and it is some of the most important marriage science ever done. John Gottman spent decades in what couples called the love lab, watching thousands of relationships, and became able to predict divorce with startling accuracy, not from the big blowups, but from the small corrosive patterns. He named four of them the Four Horsemen of a dying relationship: criticism, attacking the person, not the problem; defensiveness, never taking responsibility; stonewalling, shutting down and withdrawing; and, the single deadliest, the one that best predicts divorce, contempt: the eye roll, the sneer, the sarcasm, the joke made at your partner's expense, the slow drip of disrespect. Contempt is the little fox. It rarely announces itself as a catastrophe. It gnaws quietly, disguised as humor, until one day the root is dead. And the reverse is just as true: Gottman found that the couples who last are the ones who tend the small things, the daily habits of turning toward each other, the little repairs, the small kindnesses, the bids for connection answered instead of ignored. A bid is any small reach for attention, look at that sunset, a hand on the shoulder, a sigh that invites a what is wrong. And Gottman's numbers here are startling and worth memorizing: in his research, the couples who were still thriving years later had turned toward each other's bids about eighty six percent of the time; the couples who fell apart had turned toward them only about thirty three percent of the time (Gottman, The Relationship Cure, 2001). That is the whole ballgame, hidden in a hundred tiny moments a day that no one thinks matter. Turning toward, even clumsily, even tiredly, is how you catch the fox before it reaches the root. The health of a love is decided in the little foxes, caught or uncaught, and in the little bids, turned toward or turned away, long before anyone files anything. Catch them early, together, while the vineyard is still in bloom.

MY BELOVED IS MINE

She answers all of it with the line of belonging: My beloved is mine and I am his. And notice the order, she says mine before she says his. Even in belonging, her voice leads. (Hold onto that order; we will watch it reverse in Session Four, on the far side of a wound, and the reversal will mean everything.)

Then watch the verbs, because the poem is doing something careful. Earlier he was gazing at her through the window (2:9). Now he is browsing among the lilies. The word is a grazing word, a feeding word, and in the tender code of this poem it is an image of his mouth on her, of him kissing her breasts, which the Song will call lilies again in the next chapter. The point, said plainly and without a blush: this is exploratory. Sex here is not a transaction with one destination. It is grazing, lingering, unhurried tasting. This is the poem's picture of foreplay, and it treats it not as a warm up to the real thing but as itself a way of knowing. (We will open the whole body, and the whole practice, in Session Three. Here, mark the posture: unhurried, exploratory, mutual.)

THE ONE MY HEART LOVES

Now the mood turns. From the bright hillside of chapter two we drop into the dark, a woman alone in her bed, reaching for someone who is not there. Four times in four verses she calls him the one my heart loves, and four times she says the same ache: I looked for him. I did not find him. The repetition is the point. This is what longing actually sounds like from the inside, the same thought, circling, unable to rest.

And notice what she does with the ache. She does not lie there and wait. She gets up. She goes out into the city, through the streets and the squares, in the middle of the night, a woman alone, looking. This is the same woman we have known since chapter one, longing does not make her passive; it puts her on her feet.

There is real psychology here worth naming, because it reframes longing itself. Attachment researchers describe what they call protest behavior, when we lose contact with someone we are bonded to, a healthy attachment system activates, driving us to seek, to reach, to reestablish closeness. That drive is not weakness or desperation; it is the bond doing exactly what a bond is for. Her getting up to search the streets is not neediness. It is love, awake and unwilling to lose. Contrast it with the alternative so many of us learned instead, to go numb, to protect ourselves by pretending we do not want what we have lost, to lie still in the dark and feel nothing. The Song commends the search, not the numbness. When you lose connection with someone you love, the healthy thing is to reach, honestly, out loud, not to armor up and disappear.

She runs into the watchmen on their rounds (we will meet them again, and this time they will wound her, in Session Four, but here they are just the ordinary world going by while she asks the only question that matters to her: have you seen him?). And then: Scarcely had I passed them when I found the one my heart loves. I held him and would not let him go. She finds him, grabs on, and will not let go. There is nothing timid in her. When she loses him she searches; when she finds him she holds on for dear life.

Here is why the poem puts this dark room right before the wedding and the praise of the next session. You cannot skip the longing to get to the love. The ache of reaching in the dark and not finding the person you love is not a defect in love. It is part of it. Anyone who has been separated from someone they love, by distance, by a fight, by death, by the slow drift of a marriage gone quiet, knows this room. The Song does not pretend it away. It walks straight through it, and comes out into a wedding.

DO NOT RUSH IT, AGAIN

There it is again, the same refrain we studied in chapter two, word for word (the second of three times, with the last coming in 8:4). She turns to the young women a second time and says: do not rush this; do not force it before its time. The poet places it here on purpose, right after the intensity of the night search and the finding, as if to say: you have just watched me nearly come apart with longing and then hold him and refuse to let go. So hear me. This thing is powerful. Do not awaken it before you are ready to carry it.

We taught this refrain fully last session, so we will not linger. But mark that its return here, framing the whole movement of pursuit and searching, is the poet's quiet wisdom to a culture like ours, a culture of instant swipes and disposable matches and intimacy detached from presence. Love this strong is worth waiting for, and worth not faking. The turtledove will come. The winter really does end. But the deepest thing cannot be rushed, cannot be manufactured, cannot be downloaded. It has to be allowed to awaken, in its own season, and when it does, it is worth everything you waited for.

YOUR SEXUAL PHILOSOPHY, PART TWO

Last session you named the script you inherited. This week, add the piece this session raises: your philosophy of pursuit and desire.

• How do I believe two people should find each other? After everything this session raised, the apps, hookup culture, the lost art of courtship, what do you actually believe about how healthy pursuit and dating should work? What would you teach a younger person you love?
• What is my relationship to the mirror? Whose images have shaped how you see your own desirability, and what would it mean to reclaim your desire from the machine that profits from your discontent?

Keep your answers. We build on them again next week.