when the beloved is gone

WHERE WE HAVE BEEN

Three sessions in, here is the ground we have walked. We opened the greatest song and heard a woman speak her desire out loud. We followed the lovers into the springtime, into pursuit and the ache of searching. We stood at the wedding and watched them praise each other's bodies without shame. And we arrived at the center of the book, the consummation itself, with a voice from heaven blessing the whole thing. Eat, drink, drink deeply, lovers.

If the study ended there, it would be a beautiful lie. No real love stays in the garden. Sooner or later every couple meets the night we are about to walk into. This session, the poem turns dark. The lover knocks, and for one small, human moment she hesitates. By the time she opens the door he is gone. She goes out into the streets to find him, and this time the men who are supposed to protect her wound her instead. This is the Song being honest about what the rest of Scripture never hides either. Love this real is not spared the dark.

And this is where I have to tell you why I can teach this particular session at all. You already know some of my story. I am a sexuality teacher and a former counselor whose own first marriage ended. For a long time I believed that disqualified me from ever standing in front of a room like this again. I have come to believe the opposite. Henri Nouwen gave me the words for it, back in Session One. The wounded healer. The wound, faced and healed and told honestly, is not the disqualification. It is the qualification. The Song puts a beaten woman in the street and a missed lover at an empty door on purpose, so that those of us who have lived it would know that God's own love poem does not flinch from our exact ache. I am not going to flinch from it either. I will keep my own most exposing details for the room where I actually teach. Some things are for a face, not a page. But I will not pretend to you that I am teaching this session from the outside. I am teaching it from inside the wound, healed enough to be of use.

And yet watch where it goes. Out of the rupture comes the most extraordinary thing. She does not curse him or write him off. She turns to the women around her and, asked what makes him so special, she praises his body head to toe. It is the only time in all of Scripture a woman does that for a man. And the session ends where the wound is finally answered, with the oldest words of belonging in the book. I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine.

LET US READ IT TOGETHER

Read this aloud, slowly. Listen for the knock in the night, the hesitation, the empty doorway, the search that turns violent, and then, out of all of it, the praise, and the belonging that closes the wound.

Now let us walk back through it, slowly, from the knock in the dark.

I SLEPT, BUT MY HEART WAS AWAKE

We are on the other side of the wedding now, and the poem does something that surprises everyone who thinks the love story ended at the consummation. It keeps going, into ordinary married life. And the very first thing it shows us there is a missed connection in the middle of the night.

"I slept, but my heart was awake." That line alone is worth sitting with. It is the state so many people live in inside a long relationship. Physically present, going through the motions, asleep to the ordinary rhythm of the days. And yet somewhere underneath, the heart still awake, still listening, still longing. She is half asleep, and then she hears it. A knock.

And listen to how he calls to her. He stacks up every tender name he has for her, all at once, at the door in the dark. "My sister, my darling, my dove, my flawless one." This is not a man who has stopped loving her. This is a man standing in the night dew, drenched, asking to be let in, calling her by every name that means she is precious to him. The love is fully alive on his side of the door. Hold that, because what happens next is going to be a very small thing with very large consequences.

THE SMALL HESITATION

Here is the moment the whole session turns on, and it is heartbreakingly small. He is at the door. And she is comfortable. "I have taken off my robe, must I put it on again? I have washed my feet, must I soil them again?" It is not rejection. It is not cruelty. It is the smallest, most human hesitation there is. I am already settled. I am tired. Do I really have to get up.

Every long relationship knows this moment. It is almost never a dramatic refusal that does the damage. It is the small hesitations, repeated. The not tonight. The maybe later. The turning over in bed. None of them is a sin. Each one is understandable. But stacked up over years, they teach the other person something. That reaching for you is a risk, that the door might not open. And slowly the knocking stops.

And then the worst of it. She does get up. She goes to the door, hands dripping with myrrh, ready now. "I opened for my beloved. But my beloved had left. He was gone." The most desolate four words in the chapter. She hesitated one moment too long, and when she finally opened, the doorway was empty.

And notice what the Song does not do here. It does not rush her to a lesson, or scold her for the delay, or tidy the ache into a moral. It just lets her sink. That matters, because Scripture has a whole language for exactly this, and the church largely lost it. The language of lament. A full third of the Psalms are laments. Raw, unresolved cries into the silence. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Psalm 22). And darkest of all, Psalm 88, which ends with no comfort at all, only the line "darkness is my closest friend." The Bible gives us permission to grieve the empty doorway without pretending it isn't empty. If you are in the dark right now, the missed connection, the withdrawn spouse, the silence where a voice used to be, you do not have to skip to the happy ending to be faithful. You are allowed to say, with the Psalms and with this woman, he was gone, and my heart sank. Lament is not the absence of faith. It is faith, refusing to lie about the dark.

Hear this carefully, because it is the pastoral heart of the whole scene. One person reaches, the other hesitates, and the moment passes. Do that enough times, in either direction, and you wake up one day in a house with someone you no longer know, and neither of you can say exactly when the knocking stopped.

STANDING ON YOUR OWN TWO FEET

Before we go into the wound, I have to give you the single most important concept in the therapy room for surviving the night we are walking through. Without it, the rest of this session is just sad. With it, it becomes a map. The word is differentiation, and once you have it, you will see it everywhere in this book.

Differentiation is a term the therapist David Schnarch built a whole body of work on, borrowing it from family systems theory. Here is his definition: "Differentiation involves balancing two basic life forces, the drive for individuality and the drive for togetherness." Picture a tightrope. On one side is the pull to be a self, to stand alone, to be your own person. On the other side is the pull to be connected, to belong, to be part of a "we." Differentiation is the ability to walk that rope. To hold on to yourself and stay in relationship at the same time. To be close to someone without disappearing into them. To be your own person without walling them out.

Now hear why this is the exact skill this session requires. Differentiation is the ability to hold on to your sense of self when your partner is away, or hesitating, or wounded, or gone. It is the difference between "I am okay, and I am reaching for you," and "I am nothing unless you open the door." When the beloved goes missing, when the knock comes and the doorway ends up empty, the differentiated person can survive the night without collapsing, without either desperate clinging or icy withdrawal. Not because they care less. Because their whole self is not staked on the other person's response in that one moment.

I want to show you what the lack of it looks like, because you will recognize it. Here is a scene I have watched a hundred versions of. A wife comes to her husband, wanting him, and he says, not tonight, I'm tired. The next night she tries again, and he says, I'm too busy. And finally he says, why don't we just not, for a while. And now she is standing there with a decision to make inside her own head. The undifferentiated response is to hear it as a verdict on her. It's because I'm not good enough, it's because I had a baby eight months ago, it's because there is something wrong with me. The differentiated response is harder and truer. No. I am okay. I can stand on my own two feet. He is clearly carrying something right now. His no is information about him, not a sentence on me. Same rejection. Two completely different people receiving it, because one of them has a self that does not evaporate the moment the door does not open.

Schnarch says some things about this that are humbling. He says we emerge from our family of origin at roughly the highest level of differentiation our parents achieved, so some of us started behind. He says we tend to marry someone at our own level of differentiation, which is why the growth in a marriage usually has to happen in both people at once. And he puts it on a scale from zero to a hundred, where most of us are sitting somewhere around a thirty. The great differentiated souls of history, he would point to people like Mandela, or Corrie ten Boom, or Viktor Frankl, got into the eighties. And by his reckoning only one person ever hit a hundred, and they crucified him for it.

Here is the freeing part, and the reason this is not cold. The goal of differentiation is not to need each other less. It is to be able to love each other without losing yourself, which turns out to be the only way to love anyone for the long haul. The opposite of differentiation is fusion, two people melted together until neither can breathe. The breathless "I can't live without you," the couple who does everything together and has no separate self left, the love that swallows two people into one, the movies sell that as the height of romance, and it is actually its slow death, a suffocation dressed up as closeness. Real intimacy requires two people who are still there. Two distinct selves who choose each other, again and again, rather than two halves clinging because neither is whole. And that leads to the truest thing I know about giving yourself to another person. You cannot give a self you do not have. The most generous thing you can bring to any relationship is not your total dissolution into it. It is a whole self, freely offered. I say it bluntly. The goal of marriage is not that you die in each other's arms six months apart because neither of you could exist alone. If I died today, I would want my wife to grieve me ferociously, and to live. That is not a failure of love. That is what love between two whole people looks like.

WHEN THE EMBRACE IS WITHHELD

The empty doorway opens onto one of the hardest, most necessary teachings in this whole study. I have to be tender here, and honest, because I have lived this one.

Back in the first session we stood under the banner of love. The arm under the head, the picture of desire answered and a person held safe. And I told you we would have to come back and name its shadow. This is where we do it. Because what happens to a person when the arms are withdrawn? When the banner over the marriage is no longer love but obligation, or fear, or a cold and endless withholding?

First, the plain truth about desire between two people, because the culture lies about it. In nearly every couple there is a higher desire partner and a lower desire partner, an initiator and a responder, and over the arc of a real relationship those roles flip back and forth with seasons, stress, health, and hurt. The lie we were all handed is that men always want it and women never do. It is simply false. Clinically, low desire, what the manuals call Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, is now understood to occur about equally in men and women. I have sat with more women than I can count who said some version of, "I must have married the only man in America who doesn't want sex." There are a great many marriages where the woman is the one starving. The gender myth doesn't just insult men. It leaves the higher desire woman convinced she is a freak. She is not. She is common. She was just never in the script.

And the gap itself, one wanting more, one wanting less, is not the enemy. The enemy is when the gap can no longer be talked about, when it stops being a conversation and becomes a scoreboard. Two people can want differently for a lifetime and thrive, if they can keep opening the subject. The rupture comes when the wanting goes underground. When one person buries their desire for years because they are sure they will be judged for it, and the other reads every "not tonight" as a rejection too painful to name, and both of them slowly stop reaching. That is the withholding the Song is about to expose. Not a villain. Two people who quit talking.

And here is the shape it almost always takes, the dance we named in Session Two, now doing its worst work. Sue Johnson's Emotionally Focused Therapy calls it the Protest Polka. One partner becomes the pursuer, bringing it up, pushing, criticizing, escalating, not out of cruelty but out of panic at the growing distance. The other becomes the withdrawer, going quiet, shutting down, avoiding, not out of coldness but out of feeling like a failure who can never satisfy. And the tragedy is that each one's move triggers the other's deepest fear. The pursuer's push confirms the withdrawer's terror, I can never be enough for you, so he retreats further. The withdrawer's retreat confirms the pursuer's terror, I can't reach you, I don't matter to you, so she pushes harder. Around and around, until two people who genuinely love each other are more alone inside the marriage than they would be outside it. What looks like a fight about sex, or frequency, or effort, is almost never about that. Underneath, both people are asking Johnson's one desperate attachment question.

The withholding is not the disease. It is the symptom of two people who have stopped being able to answer that question yes, and who, tragically, are each reaching for the other in the exact way that pushes the other away. This brings us to one of the most misused passages in the Bible, and we have to handle it with great care.

Eugene Peterson, in The Message, renders the whole passage in a way that pulls its teeth as a weapon and hands it back as the gift it was meant to be. "The marriage bed must be a place of mutuality, the husband seeking to satisfy his wife, the wife seeking to satisfy her husband. Marriage is not a place to stand up for your rights. Marriage is a decision to serve the other, whether in bed or out" (1 Corinthians 7:3 to 4, MSG). Read it twice. The verse that has been used to demand has, at its heart, the exact opposite instinct. Not a place to stand up for your rights. A husband quoting "do not deprive me" to pressure his wife has, by Peterson's plain rendering, already broken the verse he is quoting.

In my first marriage, I was a sexuality teacher and a counselor who nonetheless felt, for years, that I had to earn sexual affection from my wife. That I had to perform well enough, be good enough, get it right enough, to be wanted. Many of you know that exact ache from the inside. The sense that intimacy is a reward you have to qualify for, and that you are perpetually falling short. It does something to a person. It is one of the loneliest feelings there is, to long for your own spouse and feel held at arm's length.

I am not telling you that story to assign blame. Withholding is almost never simple villainy. It usually grows out of real hurt, exhaustion, resentment, or wounds that were never addressed. But I am telling you it is real, and it does real damage, in both directions, and we do no one any favors by pretending otherwise.

what rejection does to a body

This is not only emotional. Rejection registers in the brain as literal pain. In landmark research, the neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger (2003) put people in an fMRI scanner and had them experience social rejection. The same brain region that lights up for physical pain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, lit up for the pain of being excluded. Later work (Kross, 2011) found that intense romantic rejection activates the very same regions as physical injury. When your body longs for connection and is turned away, again and again, it is not "being dramatic." It is being hurt, in the most literal, neurological sense.

Something in us withers when it reaches and is refused enough times. We stop reaching. We go quiet. We protect ourselves by wanting less, and slowly a person can starve right there inside a marriage, dying of a thirst they have stopped even naming.

The Song's answer to all of this is not obligation. It is not "give in." It is rekindling. Turning back toward each other. Naming the hurt in the light so it stops silently running the relationship. Choosing, carefully and truly, to want again and to be wanted. The arms are meant to come back under the head. The banner is meant to be love.

THE EROTIC AND THE DOMESTIC

There is a piece of this that is nobody's fault and everybody's problem, and if we do not name it, the whole session tips into blame. It is this. Desire and domesticity are, quietly, at war. The very things that build a stable, loving home, familiarity, routine, safety, knowing every inch of each other, are not the same things that build heat. Heat wants novelty, mystery, a little distance, the not yet known. Home wants closeness, predictability, the fully known. Most couples do not have a desire problem. They have a this is what happens problem, and no one warned them.

Watch how it goes. In the beginning, foreplay is unhurried. The couple lingers. Everything is exploration. Then life closes in, jobs, kids, exhaustion, and the research is brutal. Over the years, foreplay in long marriages often shrinks to somewhere between five and fifteen minutes, and sex becomes efficient, functional, a task between two tired people. Nothing is wrong with either of them. The erotic just quietly got crowded out by the domestic, and neither of them noticed until the room went cold.

And here is why this belongs in a session about the beloved going missing. The gap that opens when the erotic dies is exactly the gap where an affair is born. I have heard it in the counseling room more times than I can count. Someone in an affair says, "I finally met my soul mate." And what they actually mean, almost always, is that they felt the erotic charge again, the being wanted, the being seen, the mystery, and mistook the feeling for a person. Here is the truth I say back to them, gently. You had that exact thing with your spouse, in the beginning. You did not run out of love. You ran out of eros, because sex had become monotonous and quick, and then someone new made you feel it again, and you thought you had found a soul mate when what you had found was your own starved desire, pointed at a stranger.

The therapist Esther Perel built her whole first book, Mating in Captivity (2006), on exactly this tension, how to keep desire alive inside the domestic security of a committed home. Her insight, and Schnarch's before her, is counterintuitive and important. A little differentiation, a little separateness, is erotic. You cannot desire what you are completely fused with. Desire needs a gap to leap across. The couples who keep the fire lit are not the ones who eliminate all distance. They are the ones who stay two distinct people, who keep some mystery, who can still surprise each other. This is where Session Three's "learn your spouse" and this session's "differentiation" turn out to be the same medicine. The lover who is still a self, still slightly unknown, still worth pursuing, is the lover you keep wanting.

And lest you think "keep desiring your spouse on purpose" is a modern therapist's idea grafted onto the Bible, it is a command in the Wisdom books, and Eugene Peterson's Message renders it without a shred of embarrassment. Proverbs, on staying awake to your own long marriage: "Enjoy the wife you married as a young man! Lovely as an angel, beautiful as a rose, don't ever quit taking delight in her body. Never take her love for granted!" (Proverbs 5:18 to 19, MSG). And Ecclesiastes, on the whole embodied life together: "Seize life! Eat bread with gusto, drink wine with a robust heart. Oh yes, God takes pleasure in your pleasure! Relish life with the spouse you love each and every day" (Ecclesiastes 9:7 to 9, MSG). Read those two lines and let them undo a lifetime of suspicion. Don't ever quit taking delight in her body is not permission grudgingly granted. It is an instruction. And God takes pleasure in your pleasure may be the single truest sentence in this entire study. The work of keeping desire alive is not a concession to the flesh. It is obedience to a God who delights in your delight.

WHEN THE BED GOES COLD

Before we follow her into the street, let me put on my clinician's coat for a few minutes, because "the beloved is gone" is not always a dramatic departure. Far more often it is a slow, quiet cooling that no one names until it's a crisis. And a great many of you are living in some version of it right now. So here is the honest, professional map of how sex actually goes wrong in a marriage, and how to spot it early, because a problem named in the light is a problem that can be fixed.

The dry spell, and desire discrepancy. The single most common sexual complaint I have heard in decades of practice is not some exotic dysfunction. It is this. We've stopped, and neither of us knows how to start again. The bed goes cold, after a baby, after a betrayal, after years of the little foxes, after one too many nights of the missed doorway from Part Two. And underneath it is almost always desire discrepancy. One partner wants more, one wants less, and the gap has become a silent, shameful scoreboard instead of a conversation. Remember from Session Two and from the differentiation we just learned. The gap is not the enemy. The silence about the gap is the enemy. Couples who can keep talking about wanting differently stay alive. Couples who go quiet, and let each "not tonight" harden into a verdict, are the ones who wake up strangers.

I have a name for the version of this I've watched most often, because I've pastored a lot of high powered couples. DINS. Double Income, No Sex. Two people with big careers, a beautiful house, a full calendar, and a marriage they have quietly stopped tending. So busy building the life that they forgot to build the love inside it. The culture is literally making shows about this exact ache. The Netflix series Sex/Life (2021) is a whole hit built on a suburban mother lying awake fantasizing about the passion she used to have, which is just Esther Perel's thesis with a soundtrack. If that is your marriage, hear me. The cold is not a verdict. It is an invitation. I have led vow renewals for couples fifteen, twenty, twenty five years in, couples who had drifted into the DINS fog and decided, on purpose, to turn back toward each other, and I will tell you it is one of the most beautiful things I ever get to do. Standing two people who know each other's every flaw back up in front of the people they love, to say I choose you again, with my eyes open this time, that is not sentimental. It is defiant. It is a couple refusing to let a good life quietly replace a great love. You do not need a ceremony to do it. But you do need to decide it, out loud, together. The marriage is worth being fought for.

How to spot a sexual problem early. Here are the honest warning signs I tell couples to watch for, because most people miss them until they've calcified. Sex has become a dead, dutiful obligation or has gone entirely absent. And note, planned sex is not the problem. For busy couples and for the responsive desire partners we just met, deliberately protecting time for intimacy is often the cure, not the disease. The red flag is joyless obligation, not a spot on the calendar. Other signs: one or both of you feels relief when it doesn't happen; you've stopped all nonsexual touch, the hand on the back, the real kiss, because it "might lead somewhere" and you don't want it to; one of you is consistently "too tired," and it's become a pattern rather than a season; resentment has quietly replaced desire; or you simply can't remember the last time you felt truly wanted, or truly wanted them. None of these means the marriage is over. Every one of them means it is time to talk, or to get help, before the cold sets like concrete.

The specific dysfunctions, named without shame. Because we don't say these words in church, people suffer for years thinking they are uniquely broken. They are not. Low desire (clinically, Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder) occurs about equally in men and women. The "man always wants it" myth leaves a lot of higher desire women feeling like freaks and a lot of lower desire men feeling like failures. Erectile difficulty is enormously common, and now very treatable (we will talk about the Viagra and telehealth world in Session Five), and it is far more often about anxiety, exhaustion, or relationship stress than about "manhood." Orgasmic difficulty, trouble reaching orgasm, or reaching it too fast (premature ejaculation), or not at all (anorgasmia), is common on all sides and almost always improvable with knowledge, patience, and sometimes therapy. Remember Reed's pathway from Session Three. Orgasm is something you surrender to, not something you force, which is exactly why performance pressure and anxiety are its great enemies. And pain. Some people, especially women, experience sex as physically painful (vaginismus, dyspareunia, and other conditions), and I have to say this as plainly as I can. Pain during sex is never something to grit your teeth through in silence. It is a signal, it is common, it is treatable, and enduring it quietly out of duty or shame only deepens the body's association of sex with dread. A good physician or pelvic floor therapist can help. Get the help. The body made for pleasure is not supposed to hurt, and you are not "less spiritual" for saying so.

Sexual addiction, the real thing, distinguished from the fake accusation. We also have to name compulsive sexual behavior, sometimes called sexual addiction, a genuine pattern in which sex or pornography becomes a compulsion a person cannot stop despite mounting harm to their life and relationships. It is real, and it deserves real help, specialized therapy, sometimes twelve step support. But I add two honest cautions, because this label gets misused in both directions. First, purity culture pathologized normal desire. A young man who masturbated was told he was an "addict," which is nonsense and cruel, and it drove a generation into needless shame. A high sex drive is not an addiction. Second, and more darkly, "sex addiction" has been weaponized by the powerful, invoked as a soft, sympathetic excuse by men caught in serial abuse or infidelity, a way to relabel predation as illness and dodge accountability. So hold both truths. Genuine compulsive sexual behavior is real and treatable and deserves compassion. And it is not a get out of jail card for people who used their power to harm others. Which brings us, hard, to the street.

THE WATCHMEN WHO WOUND

She goes out into the night to find him, exactly as she did back in chapter three. But watch what is different this time. In the earlier search, the watchmen were harmless. She passed them, asked her question, moved on. This time the same watchmen beat her, bruise her, and strip away her cloak. The world that was neutral before turns violent now.

Most scholars read this whole scene as a kind of dream, a nightmare of vulnerability, which makes it truer, not less true, because it is the shape of what the heart feels when love goes missing. When you have lost connection with the person you love, the whole world starts to feel dangerous. The people who are supposed to protect you wound you instead. You go looking for love and get beaten by the very system that was meant to guard you.

Now I have to stop and name something, because the way this verse has been taught is itself a wound. There is a famous, beloved pastor's study of this book, you may have done it, that reads the watchmen beating her as God disciplining her. In that reading, she was cold to her husband, so God sent the guards to rough her up and teach her a lesson, and the takeaway for women is, when your marriage is not right, expect no blessing and no protection. I want to say this as clearly as I know how. That is not the gospel. That is spiritual abuse with a Bible verse taped to it. It takes a wounded woman and blames her for her own beating. It makes God the one holding the club. And it is exactly the theology this study exists to answer.

Read it honestly and it says the opposite. The Song puts a beaten woman in the street precisely to tell the truth that the watchmen are not always kind. That sometimes the ones on the walls, the ones whose whole job was to keep you safe, are part of the wound. And here is where it lands for a lot of us. When a marriage breaks, or even wobbles, the wounded are often wounded twice. Once by the rupture itself, and again by the people who were supposed to protect them and instead judged, gossiped, exposed, or abandoned them. The friends take sides. The church has opinions. The family weighs in. The small group that prayed with you now whispers about you.

This book does not pretend the watchmen are always safe. Sometimes the institution that should have guarded you is the thing that struck you. That is not your sin. That is their failure, and the Song is honest enough to say so out loud.

WHEN THE WATCHMEN ARE WOLVES

The Song's image of watchmen who wound points at something bigger than a bad marriage, and we have to name it out loud, because our own generation has watched it happen again and again in the very institutions that claimed to guard the sacred. Sometimes the watchmen on the wall are not just careless. They are wolves.

Look honestly at the last two decades of the American church and its adjacent halls of power. Ted Haggard, who led one of the country's largest churches and the National Association of Evangelicals while thundering against sexual sin, fell in a scandal of secret sex and drugs. Ravi Zacharias, perhaps the most celebrated Christian apologist of his generation, was revealed after his death to have been a serial sexual abuser who used his ministry's money and fame to prey on women, a betrayal so vast his own organization had to dismantle his legacy. Mark Driscoll, a megachurch pastor famous for domineering, hyper macho teaching about sex and male authority, left a trail of spiritual abuse and bullying. Robert Morris, founder of one of the largest churches in America, resigned in 2024 after a woman came forward about the years of abuse he had inflicted on her when she was a child, abuse the system around him had failed to reckon with for decades. He was later indicted and, in 2026, pleaded guilty. Bill Hybels, who built Willow Creek into one of the most influential churches on earth and taught a generation of pastors how to lead, resigned in 2018 after a long line of women described years of alleged misconduct, comments, unwanted advances, an alleged affair, and an independent panel of respected evangelical leaders concluded the allegations were credible (Hybels denies them to this day). And that is only the church. The wider culture gave us Jeffrey Epstein and the network of powerful men who trafficked and abused girls with near impunity for years, protected by wealth and status, the darkest possible example of the watchmen becoming the predators. Add the parade of senators, celebrities, coaches, and executives whose public morality masked private predation, and a pattern emerges that Scripture named long ago.

I want to be precise here, because a sloppy version of this argument is easy to knock down. Not every fallen leader fell the same way, and honesty is the whole point of this study. Some, Haggard, Zacharias, Morris, preached sexual righteousness in public while committing sexual sin or abuse in private. That is the cleanest and sharpest form of the pattern. Others abused a different kind of power. Mark Driscoll's documented offenses were bullying and spiritual domination, not a secret sex life. And the prosperity gospel empires of figures like Paula White and Benny Hinn drew their scandals mostly from money, political entanglement, and the manipulation of desperate people's faith rather than from sexual hypocrisy. I name the distinction on purpose. The through line is not that every one of them was a sexual predator. It is that unaccountable religious power, wrapped in a theology that puts the leader above question, reliably curdles. Sometimes into sexual abuse, sometimes into financial exploitation, sometimes into the crushing of the people underneath. The sexual version is the one this study is most concerned with, and it is real, and it is not rare.

Here is the pattern, and it is the exact one we traced back in Session One. What is forced into the dark does not disappear. It festers, and it comes out sideways, and someone gets hurt. Almost every one of these men built a public platform condemning sexual sin while living a secret, predatory life. That is not hypocrisy as a character flaw. It is the predictable output of a system built on secrecy, silence, and judgment, Brene Brown's three ingredients for shame, combined with unaccountable power. When you tell everyone to hide their sexuality in the dark, and you hand certain men enormous, unchecked authority, and a theology that says the leader is above question, you have built a machine that manufactures abusers and protects them. The watchmen of the walls become the thing the walls were supposed to keep out.

And notice who gets wounded twice. In nearly every one of these cases, the victims who came forward were disbelieved, silenced, blamed, paid off, or driven out, while the institution circled the wagons to protect the powerful man and its own reputation. That is the watchmen beating the woman in the street all over again. The Southern Baptist Convention's own commissioned report (the 2022 Guidepost investigation, "Abuse of Faith") documented exactly this. Leaders who kept a secret list of accused abusers while publicly claiming they could do nothing, and who treated survivors as threats to be managed rather than wounded people to be helped. This is the sin the Song exposes by refusing to pretend the watchmen are always kind.

So what do we do with this? Three things. First, we tell the truth. No more protecting the institution over the abused, no more "touch not the Lord's anointed" used to shield predators from accountability. Real reverence for God demands that we name and stop those who abuse in his name. Second, we believe and center the wounded, which does not mean abandoning fairness (see the next box), but means ending the reflexive instinct to disbelieve the victim and defend the powerful. Third, we build accountability and light into every place we hand someone power, because unchecked authority plus enforced secrecy is, every single time, a recipe for exactly this. The answer to the watchmen becoming wolves is not fewer walls. It is light on the wall, and someone watching the watchmen.

And we have to name the ideology that trains the wolves. Toxic masculinity. Let me be careful, because the phrase gets thrown around lazily and it does not mean "masculinity is bad." It names a specific, harmful script. That a real man suppresses tenderness and fear, dominates rather than serves, resolves things by force, treats anything "feminine" as weakness, and measures himself by sexual conquest and control. The American Psychological Association, drawing on forty years of research, concluded that this rigid "traditional masculinity ideology" is, on the whole, harmful, to the men who carry it and everyone around them. And the church has produced its own textbook example. Mark Driscoll, whose ministry ran on a hyper masculine gospel of a "fighting" Jesus and "emasculated" men, who wrote crude misogynist screeds under a pseudonym, and who taught that a wife owes her husband sex, even framing a husband's wandering as the fault of a wife who withheld. That is not strength. That is the wolf's ideology with a Bible verse taped to it, and it has wounded a generation.

Now hear the astonishing thing, and let it land. The Song of Songs hands us the exact opposite model of manhood. Look at how the man in this poem actually behaves. He does not command her. He praises her, line by adoring line (4:1 to 7). He does not demand. He pursues, leaping over the hills to reach her (2:8). He does not claim ownership. He calls himself hers, "I am my beloved's" (6:3), the same words she says of him, perfectly mutual, no hierarchy. He receives her desire as a gift, not a debt. He delights, he serves, he adores, he waits. That is the biblical picture of a strong man, and it is the demolition of everything toxic masculinity teaches. His glory is not in dominating the woman but in cherishing her so completely that she becomes more fully herself. If you want to know what godly manhood looks like, do not look at the loud men selling it. Look at the lover in this Song.

HARASSMENT, CONSENT, AND THE LAW

Since we are being honest about power and sex, let me put on the professor's hat and give you the plain language map of sexual harassment, consent, and the law, because a lot of people, especially those raised in a purity bubble, were never actually taught where the lines are, only that sex was scary.

Consent is the foundation of the entire modern sexual ethic, and it is simpler than people pretend. Consent is a freely given, sober, ongoing, and revocable yes. Break that down. Freely given, not coerced, pressured, or extracted through power. A boss, a pastor, a teacher, a coach cannot get true consent from someone under their authority, because the power itself contaminates the yes. Sober, a person too intoxicated to think clearly cannot consent, which is why the alcohol and sex machine we named in Session Two is so dangerous. Ongoing, a yes to one thing is not a yes to everything, and a yes yesterday is not a yes today. Revocable, anyone can say stop, at any point, and stop means stop, full stop. Notice how much this overlaps with the Song's own vision. The woman freely opens her own garden (4:16). Everything good about sex lives inside that free, glad, ongoing yes. Everything evil about it lives in its absence.

Sexual harassment, in law and in decency, is unwelcome sexual conduct. Comments, advances, coercion, the trading of sexual favors for advancement ("quid pro quo"), or a "hostile environment" that makes a workplace or school degrading. The #MeToo movement (which exploded in 2017 after the Harvey Weinstein revelations, though the phrase was coined earlier by the activist Tarana Burke) did something historic. It made visible how routine this had been, how many powerful people had used sex as a weapon of power, and how long the silence had protected them. Whatever its excesses, its core was righteous. It dragged predation into the light, which is the whole project of this study.

And the law matters, so know it. Marital rape is a crime (it was not, shamefully, criminalized in all fifty U.S. states until 1993, a reminder of how recently the law itself treated a wife's body as her husband's property). The age of consent exists to protect children, and an adult who crosses it is committing a crime, not having a "relationship." There is no such thing as a consensual sexual relationship between an adult and a child, and any framing that suggests otherwise is predator's language. Sexual exploitation of anyone under your authority is both a firing offense and, often, a crime. I teach this not to make sex frightening, but because a person who genuinely understands consent and the law is both safer and freer. Freer to enjoy the garden fully, precisely because they know exactly where its walls are and why they're there. The walls are not there to keep you from joy. They are there to keep the wolves out.

AFFAIRS

We cannot walk through a session about the beloved gone missing, the missed doorway, the withholding, the wounding, without naming the thing that most often grows in that soil. Affairs. Betrayal. The breaking of the covenant. The Song does not narrate an affair, but it places us exactly where affairs are born, in the gap between two people who have stopped opening the door. It would be a cheat to walk past that gap in silence.

So let me be honest and careful at once. I am not here to hand you a lecture on a sin you already know is a sin. The shame based version, the version that just says "don't," has never once stopped an affair, and it leaves the wounded with nothing but a scarlet letter. I am here to tell you the truth about how it actually happens, because understanding is the only thing that has ever helped anyone prevent it or heal from it.

Affairs almost never begin with sex. They begin with an unmet longing and an open door. Esther Perel, who has spent her career sitting with couples after infidelity, puts it in a line I have never been able to improve on. An affair is often the sentence the relationship could not say out loud, the thing that was missing, gone looking for a place to be heard. In the counseling room I watched the same shape over and over. One person stops getting up when the other knocks, not out of malice, just out of exhaustion and hurt, and the knocking moves somewhere else. To someone at work who listens, to a screen, to an old flame who reappears. Most affairs are not primarily about desire for a new body. They are about the ache to be wanted, seen, and reached for, gone looking for a door that will open.

The marriage therapist Shirley Glass gave us the clearest picture of how it starts, and it is not with lust. It is with walls and windows. In a healthy marriage, the couple has a window between them, they see into each other, and a wall around them that keeps the rest of the world out. An affair begins, almost always innocently, when someone opens a window to an outsider (a growing, deepening, "we just talk" friendship) and quietly builds a wall against their spouse (stops telling them the real things). Reverse the walls and windows, start confiding in a stranger the things you no longer tell your partner, and you are already most of the way there, long before anyone touches anyone. This is why emotional affairs are affairs. The betrayal is not first in the body. It is in where you took your heart.

The culture keeps dramatizing exactly this soil. The runaway hit The Hunting Wives (May Cobb's 2021 novel, a Netflix phenomenon in 2025) is a lurid soap about wealthy, church going Texas wives whose polished, respectable, Bible Belt surface hides a churn of affairs, obsession, and secrets, and it resonated with millions precisely because it names something real. When a community makes desire unspeakable, desire does not die. It goes underground and turns destructive. That is our Session One thesis wearing a cocktail dress. The answer the Song offers is the exact opposite of the Hunting Wives world. Not desire policed into a respectable silence where it festers, but desire brought into the light, spoken, and blessed inside a covenant. The tragedy of the repressed and secretive marriage and the glory of the open, honest one are the two roads this whole session sets before you.

That is not an excuse. Betrayal is a real rupture and it does real, documented damage. But the numbers matter, because the culture inflates them into hopelessness. The best research we have, the General Social Survey, tracked over decades, finds that somewhere around 20 to 25 percent of married men and 10 to 15 percent of married women report having been unfaithful at some point. Include emotional affairs and the number climbs. That is real and sobering. It is also not the "everybody does it, half of all marriages" figure the movies sell you. Most people, most of the time, keep their covenant. Betrayal is common enough to take seriously, and rare enough that despair is a lie. (The older pastoral counseling literature, Carder included, cites much higher figures, 50 to 65 percent of men, but those are dated and methodologically shaky. The GSS numbers are the honest ones.)

WHEN THE WOUND IS ABUSE

I have to slow all the way down now, and go carefully, because for some of you this is not a topic. It is your life. The Song put a woman in a street where the men who should have protected her beat her instead, and I will not walk past that image without naming the thing it names. Abuse. If this is too much today, skip to Part Nine and come back when you are ready. There is no wrong way to protect yourself here.

Let me start with the truth that the numbers force on us. Abuse is not rare, and it is not a Hollywood plot. It is everywhere, and it does not care about your income, your zip code, your church, or your race. By the CDC's national survey (NISVS), roughly one in four women experiences completed or attempted rape in her lifetime, and roughly one in six men is sexually abused before the age of eighteen. Sit with that second one, because we almost never say it. Men are abused too, and most of them never report it, because the shame runs into a second lie, I'm supposed to be the strong one, and so the wound just goes deeper and deeper in the dark, unspoken for decades. (Women's figure: CDC and NISVS. Men's "one in six before 18": the 1in6.org and Dube et al. research. Whatever the exact number, the reality is vast, and the point does not change.)

And I have to name the culture we live in, because the Song names it by putting a beaten woman in the street with no one held accountable. We live in a world that still, routinely, wounds the abused a second time. A young woman goes to a party, has too much to drink, is assaulted while people film it, and somehow the conversation turns to what she was wearing, what she drank, why she didn't say no clearly enough. We have built entire moral and legal machines around the question "well, did she actually refuse?" as if the absence of a no were the presence of a yes. It is not. Consent is not the failure to resist. It is a free, glad, sober yes, and anything less is not consent, and the shame belongs to the one who took, never to the one from whom it was taken.

This is also the place I have to come back and finish what I started in Part Four, about 1 Corinthians 7. That verse, "do not deprive one another," has been used to tell abused spouses, overwhelmingly wives, that they owe their bodies on demand, that they have no right to a no. Hear me with everything in me. That is not what the text says, and using it that way is itself a sin. Every serious treatment of sexual ethics says the same two things, and I will make them rules. Never do anything your partner does not want to do. Never bring anyone else into the marriage bed. "Mutual self giving" cannot exist without a real, live, respected no, because a yes that cannot become a no was never a yes. Marital rape is rape. The Bible was never a permission slip for it.

Scripture itself is not squeamish about this. It tells the story of Tamar (2 Samuel 13), a king's daughter raped by her own half brother Amnon, and the text does not soften it. "Being stronger than she, he violated her." And Tamar's cry is one of the most important sentences in the Bible for anyone who has been assaulted. "This kind of thing is not done in Israel. Where could I ever carry my shame?" She names it as the outrage it is. She does not blame herself. The Bible puts her rage and her ruined future on the page, in the holy text, and refuses to look away, which means your story, if this is your story, is not too dark for Scripture either.

domestic violence, and the question everyone asks wrong

I have to speak directly about domestic violence, physical, sexual, emotional, and financial abuse inside a relationship, because it is staggeringly common (roughly one in four women and one in seven men experience severe intimate partner violence in their lifetime, per the CDC's NISVS), and because the church has too often made it worse, telling battered women that "God hates divorce" more than God hates their husband's fist, sending them back to be hurt again in the name of submission and covenant. Let me be as clear as I have been about anything in this study. Abuse is a breaking of the marriage covenant by the abuser, and no one, no one, is obligated by God to remain in a relationship that is destroying them or their children. Safety first. Always. The God who struck the watchmen from the story did not send that woman back to be beaten again.

And here is the question everyone asks, usually with judgment in their voice. "Why does she stay? Why do they go back?" It is the wrong question, asked the wrong way, and answering it honestly is one of the most important things in this whole session. People return to abusive relationships not because they are stupid or weak, but because of forces most outsiders never see.

• The cycle of abuse. Abuse rarely runs at a constant boil. It moves in a cycle, tension building, then the violent incident, then a "honeymoon" phase of profuse apology, tenderness, gifts, and promises ("it will never happen again, you're the love of my life"). That honeymoon is chemically and emotionally intoxicating. It floods the victim with exactly the bonding and relief they were starving for, and it teaches the deepest lie. The loving person is the real one, the violence was an aberration. It is not. The cycle is the relationship.
• Trauma bonding. The intermittent alternation of cruelty and kindness creates one of the strongest attachments known to psychology, the same mechanism seen in hostages, cults, and coercive control. The unpredictability itself deepens the bond. This is not weakness. It is the nervous system doing what abuse trained it to do.
• Fear, and the deadliest moment. The most dangerous time for an abused person is when they try to leave. Violence very often escalates at exit, and abusers know it. Staying can be a rational survival calculation, not a failure of nerve.
• Economics, children, isolation, and shame. Abusers typically cut their victims off from money, friends, and family precisely so leaving feels impossible. Add children, housing, immigration status, and a lifetime of being told the abuse is your fault, and "just leave" reveals itself as the naive advice of someone who has never been trapped.

So we replace the accusing question, why does she stay, with the right ones. What is he doing to make leaving so dangerous and so hard? And how do we make it safe for her to go? If this is your life, or someone's you love, please hear me. It is not your fault, love is not supposed to hurt your body, and there is help. A domestic violence hotline, a shelter, a trusted person, a plan. The way out exists, even when the fog of the cycle hides it. You are worth an escape.

DIVORCE

I have to say the next word plainly, because too many teachers will not, and their silence has crushed people. Divorce.

I do not teach divorce as the unforgivable sin, and I will not, because Scripture does not, and because I have lived it. Some of you know my story. I was a sexuality teacher with a study on this very book nearly finished, and my first marriage ended in divorce. For a long time I felt disqualified, like a man who had lost the right to teach any of this. I pulled the study. I went quiet. I believed the watchmen when they told me, in so many words, that I was done.

I want to tell you what I know now that I did not know then. A divorce is a death, and it should be grieved like one. A wise friend who had been through it told me, in the middle of mine, something I have never forgotten. "I would not wish divorce on my worst enemy, even when it is the right thing." Even when leaving is the healthy, necessary, right decision, something real dies, and it deserves to be mourned, not rushed past. It is not nothing. Something real and covenantal tears, and pretending otherwise helps no one. But it is not the end of your worth, your calling, or your capacity to love and be loved. The God of the Bible is the God of second and third chances. Of Jacob the cheat, and David the adulterer and worse, and Peter who denied him three times to a servant girl and was handed the whole church anyway. There is no wound in your history that puts you outside the reach of a redemptive story. Not even this one.

And here is the honest number, because despair feeds on bad statistics. You have heard that half of all marriages end in divorce. That figure is a myth, a projection from the 1970s that never came true. The real rate for first marriages today is closer to forty percent, and it has been falling for decades, especially among younger couples who marry later and more deliberately. I do not say that to minimize the pain of the marriages that do end. I say it because hopelessness is not a fact. Most marriages last. And the ones that do not are not the end of the human being who walked through them.

If you are divorced, hear me. You are not disqualified. From love, from teaching your children what love is, from being used by God, from standing in a room like this and telling the truth. I am living proof, standing here, teaching the very study I once believed I had lost the right to teach, married now to a woman who is the great gift of my life. The story was not over. Yours is not either.

SHE PRAISES HIM ANYWAY

Now watch what she does, because it is astonishing, and it is the turn the whole session has been waiting for. She has been through the missed doorway, the empty room, the beating in the streets. And the women around her ask, almost skeptically, what makes him so special anyway? Why are you still out here in the dark looking for him?

And instead of cursing him, instead of listing his failures, she praises him. Head to toe. "My beloved is radiant and ruddy, outstanding among ten thousand." His head, his hair, his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, his arms. "His body like polished ivory decorated with lapis lazuli," his legs like pillars of marble. She describes him exactly the way he described her at the wedding, part by part, lovingly, unhurried. And there is a quiet Hebrew richness in the images she reaches for. Ivory and lapis lazuli are not just "pretty." They are the materials of temples and thrones, the precious stuff of sacred and royal things. She is describing his body the way you would describe something holy. And she ends: "he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, this is my friend."

Stop and see how remarkable this is on two levels. First, structurally. This is the only extended, head to toe praise of a man's body spoken by a woman in all of Scripture, the reverse of the wasf we studied last session. In a book already famous for a woman's voice, here is its boldest moment. A woman, in pain, publicly, unashamedly, praising the body of the man she loves. Second, that last word. Not "my lover." My friend. Under all the desire, the deepest thing she names is friendship. The person she wants is the person she likes. When the heat is stripped away by the wound, what's left holding is the friendship, and that turns out to be the thing that pulls her back toward him.

Here is the teaching, and it is hard and beautiful at once. In the middle of the rupture, she chooses to remember what she loves about him. That is not denial. She is not pretending the door was not empty. She is doing the deliberate, gritty work that actually rebuilds a love. Turning her attention, on purpose, back toward the good. Marriages die when two people become expert witnesses for the prosecution, cataloguing each other's every flaw. They heal when someone dares, even wounded, to say out loud again what is still lovely about the other. Remember Gottman's finding from Session Two, that contempt, the sneer and the eye roll, is the single best predictor of divorce. Praise is the exact opposite of contempt. She models the way back, and it starts with praise chosen in the dark.

I AM MY BELOVED'S

And now the wound closes. The friends, moved by her praise, offer to help her look. "Where has he gone? We will look with you." Her praise has turned a skeptical crowd into a search party. That is what naming the good out loud does. It gathers help instead of taking sides. The watchmen wounded her. Her friends, hearing her love, become allies. The same community that can wound you twice can also, when you speak love instead of bitterness, become the ones who help you find your way home.

And she answers with the words that are the emotional home of the entire book. "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine." We heard a version of this back in chapter two. But hear how it has changed. In chapter two, in the first flush of young love, she said it the other way. "My beloved is mine and I am his," claiming him first. Now, on the far side of a rupture, having lost him, and searched for him, and been wounded looking, she says it differently. "I am my beloved's" comes first now. The self giving comes before the claim. This is what love sounds like after it has been through something. Less "you are mine," more "I am yours." Not less passionate. More rooted.

This is the possession refrain, and it is where the poet chooses to end the movement. Not in the wound, but in belonging reclaimed on the other side of it. The doorway was empty for a night. It is not empty now. Love this real is not spared the dark, and it is not destroyed by it either. It goes down into the garden, and it finds its way home.

YOUR SEXUAL PHILOSOPHY, PART FOUR

This session went into the dark, so this week's philosophy work is tender. Add the piece this session raises. Your philosophy of rupture, repair, and staying a self.

• What do I do with my own wounds? Name a place your sexuality or your capacity for intimacy was wounded, by another person, by a teaching, by a choice. Not to relive it, but to ask: what would tending it in the light, rather than hiding it, actually look like for me?
• How do I want to love on the far side of the dark? Differentiation, repair, and "I am my beloved's" before "my beloved is mine." Write, honestly, what it would mean for you to stay a whole self in your closest relationship and keep reaching for the other. Where do you tend to collapse (fuse) or wall off (flee), and what would the third way look like?

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