desire that endures

WHERE WE HAVE BEEN

Four sessions in, look at the ground. We built the foundation, followed the lovers into the springtime of pursuit, stood at the wedding and opened the whole body to praise and blessing, and then, last session, went into the dark. The missed doorway, the withholding, the watchmen who wound, the affairs and abuse and endings, and the long road back.

Now the poem does something quietly astonishing. It does not just recover. It matures. The couple that survived the night comes back into the light as a deeper thing than the young lovers of chapter one. This session runs from a fresh burst of praise, through a strange dance, to the single most important thing a woman says in the whole book, a line that reaches all the way back to the third chapter of Genesis and reverses a curse. And it lands on the truth our youth obsessed culture buries. The best desire, the best sex, the best knowing, is not behind you. It is ahead.

So this session is about endurance, desire that has been tried and tested and is stronger for it. And it is about the honest, adult conversation almost no church will have out loud. What do we do with the fact that we keep wanting more, and that human beings come in a stunning variety of ways of wanting at all?

LET US READ IT TOGETHER

Read this aloud, slowly. Listen for how much older and deeper this love sounds than chapter one. A man who looks again and is overwhelmed, a woman dancing and unashamed, and the settled certainty of two people who have been through everything and chosen each other still.

Now let us walk back through it, slowly.

HE LOOKS AGAIN

The first thing to notice is that he is praising her again. We already had the great head to toe praise, the wasf, back at the wedding in chapter four. Now, chapters later, on the far side of the whole night of rupture, he does it again, and that repetition is the entire point. This is not new love discovering her body for the first time. This is old love choosing, deliberately, to look again.

Hold that, because it is one of the quiet miracles of a long relationship, and almost no one is taught to expect it. The danger in every marriage is not that you will stop loving. It is that you will stop looking. You will decide you already know what she looks like, already know what he will say, already have the other person filed and finished. And the day you finish knowing someone is the day the marriage starts to die. He refuses to finish knowing her. He looks at a woman he has known for years and is overwhelmed. "Turn your eyes from me; they overwhelm me." After everything. That is what endurance looks like. Not the absence of familiarity, but the choice to keep being astonished inside it.

John Gottman gave this a name and made it a practice. He calls it building Love Maps, the ongoing, deliberate work of knowing your partner's inner world. Their current worries and hopes, who their friends are now, what is stressing them this month, what they are dreaming about, how they have changed. His research found that couples with rich, updated Love Maps weather crisis and keep desire alive, while couples who stopped updating, who are still married to the person their spouse was ten years ago, drift into strangers sharing a mortgage. The lover in the Song is a master Love Mapper. Chapters and years in, he is still studying her, still finding new country in a person he has known forever. That is not a talent. It is a habit, the discipline of never deciding you are done learning someone. Keep asking. Keep updating the map. The person across your table is not the person you married. They are a moving, changing country, and the joy is in the endless exploring. (John Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, 1999.)

And listen to the images he reaches for now. "Beautiful as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem, majestic as an army with banners." He compares her to cities, to whole capitals, to Jerusalem the holy city, and to an army in battle array. This is not the soft, tender praise of the honeymoon. This is praise with weight and awe in it. Mature desire does not shrink its beloved down into something safe and managed. It stands in awe of a whole, formidable person. He is a little overwhelmed by her, and after all these years, that is the compliment of his life.

THE DANCE OF MAHANAIM

One of the strangest and most beautiful verses in the book, and most people read right past it. Three treasures are buried here.

First, this is the only place in the entire poem where the woman is given a name, or something like one. The Shulammite, most likely "the woman from Shulem or Shunem," a village in the north, marking her again as a working woman of ordinary origins. But some scholars hear more. Shulammite is strikingly close to the feminine form of Solomon, both built on the root shalom, peace, wholeness. It is as if the poem is saying their love has fused them into a matched pair, the Solomon and the "Solomoness," two who have become, in the deepest sense, one. Even her name, this late, is a picture of union.

Second, the dance. She is dancing, and the onlookers cannot look away, and there is a frank, celebratory eroticism in it. Her body in joyful motion, watched and admired and unashamed. Whatever else it is, this is the Bible depicting a woman dancing, sensual and free, and treating it as good. Sit with how far that is from what most of us were taught a "godly woman" was allowed to be.

THE SECOND PRAISE, AND WHY HE STARTS AT HER FEET

Now comes the third and most frankly sensual wasf in the book, and a detail tells you where this couple has arrived. The wedding praise in chapter four began at her eyes and moved down, starting at the face, the safest, most romantic place. This praise, chapters later, begins at her feet and moves up. The sandaled feet, the graceful legs, the curves of her thighs, upward. This is a bolder, more embodied, more unmistakably erotic gaze, the praise of a man who has known this body for years and is not shy about any inch of it. Mature desire is not less physical than young desire. Handled well, it is more. More frank, more particular, more at home in the flesh, because the shame has been burned off by years of being safely known.

And here is the pastoral point couples forget at the cost of everything. He never stopped saying it out loud. Years in, wounds behind them, he is still narrating her beauty to her face. Remember the death of relationships, the silence, the assuming the other already knows. The enduring couple keeps speaking the desire, keeps praising, keeps refusing to let the words dry up. Desire that endures is, in large part, desire that is still being spoken.

Bob Goff built a whole beloved book around the title that says it best, Love Does. His point is deceptively simple and exactly right. Love is not only a feeling you have. It is a thing you do. Feelings come and go, rise and cool, betray you on a bad Tuesday. But love, the kind that endures, is a verb. It shows up, it acts, it keeps narrating her beauty to her face when the feeling is quiet and the day was long. This is the piece under "many waters cannot quench love." The love the many waters cannot drown is not mainly an emotion, emotions drown easily. It is a practice, a daily decision, a thing done again and again until it becomes who you are. The Song's enduring lovers are not lucky people who kept feeling twenty two. They are people who kept doing love long after the first fever passed. (Bob Goff, Love Does, 2012.)

HIS DESIRE IS FOR ME

We have arrived at what I believe is the single most important sentence a woman speaks in the entire Bible about her own body and her own worth. It looks small. It is enormous. To see why, hold two verses side by side, separated by the whole Hebrew Bible.

Go back to Genesis 3, the garden, the fall, the curse. When the consequences are pronounced over the woman, God says, "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you" (Genesis 3:16). For centuries that was read as a life sentence over every woman. Her longing bent toward a man who would dominate her. It named the whole broken order. Desire twisted into dependence, love twisted into rule.

Now hear the Song. "I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me." Look what has happened to the sentence. In Genesis the desire flows from the woman toward the man, and the man rules. In the Song the vector is reversed. Now it is his desire that flows toward her, and there is no ruling anywhere in it. The Song of Songs takes the exact grammar of the curse and turns it around. Where the fall said "your desire will be for him, and he will rule you," redeemed love says "I am his, and his desire is for me." The domination is gone. What is left is mutual belonging and a man whose longing is aimed, gladly, at the woman he could never dominate.

And there is one more thing hidden in the exact words of 7:10, and it completes an arc that runs across the whole book, the third and final form of what scholars call the possession refrain. Watch how the same idea evolves in three steps. In chapter 2, young love says it claiming him first. "My beloved is mine, and I am his" (2:16). Mine leads. In chapter 6, on the far side of the wound we walked through last session, the order reverses into self giving. "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine" (6:3). Now his leads, and we caught that reversal in Session Four. And now here, at 7:10, the final step, and notice what drops away entirely. "I am my beloved's, and his desire is for me." The words "he is mine" are gone. She no longer needs to claim him at all. There is no anxious grasp left, no scoreboard of belonging, only pure, restful self giving and the settled certainty of being wanted. From mine, then his, to his, then mine, to simply his, and secure. That is the maturing of love in three refrains. From possessing, to being possessed, to a security so complete it no longer has to hold on. (The three refrain progression is noted by Exum and Longman.)

Do you feel the weight? A woman, in Scripture, claims that her lover's whole longing is turned toward her, and she says it not with anxiety but with joy. Most people are taught to experience a partner's sexual desire as a nuisance, a demand, a burden. This woman experiences it as a gift. That is what desire looks like when the curse has been undone. Not a claim one person makes on another, but a longing each is glad to be the object of.

MANDRAKES, OLD FRUIT AND NEW

And now, this matters, she initiates. Again. From the first line of the book to here, she has been the one who names desire out loud. "Come, my beloved, let us go to the countryside. There I will give you my love." She plans the getaway, summons him from the routine, takes the lead in her own pleasure. This late in a long love, she is still the pursuer as much as the pursued.

And notice what grows at the door. Mandrakes. In the ancient world the mandrake was believed to be an aphrodisiac, its forked root thought to resemble the human body, eaten across the Near East to stir desire and fertility. It shows up in Genesis 30, where Leah and Rachel actually bargain over a handful for exactly this reason. So "the mandrakes send out their fragrance," right as she leads him away to make love, is playfully, knowingly frank. She is setting a scene. There is intention here, anticipation, and a woman not embarrassed to want to want.

But the deepest line is the last. "Every delicacy, both new and old, that I have stored up for you." New and old. Here, in one phrase, is the entire secret of desire that endures. She offers him fruit that is familiar, the old, the known, the tried and true of a long love, and fruit that is new, surprise, novelty, something not yet tasted. This is the reconciliation of the war we named last session, between the erotic and the domestic, novelty and security. The mature lover does not have to choose. She keeps both on the table. The deep comfort of being fully known, and the live spark of still being surprised. A marriage dies when it becomes all old fruit, familiar to the point of numb. It also cannot survive on all new fruit, novelty with no roots. The couple that lasts learns her exact art. New and old, stored up, at the door, offered freely.

THE EROTIC AND THE ENDURING

Let me say plainly, out of the counseling room, what the poem is dramatizing, the heart of what I have spent my life teaching about long love.

Most people believe desire is something that happens to you, a spark you either have or do not, a flame that naturally dies, and when it dies you either settle for a comfortable partnership with the erotic switched off, or go looking for the spark somewhere new. That belief has ended more marriages than almost anything, and it is wrong.

David Schnarch argued something more demanding and more hopeful. Eroticism is not primarily about your body or your partner's body. It is about "where your head is at." His line. "If sex drive is the instinct that preserves the species, then eroticism is the experience of sexual pleasure for its own sake," and it is "about where your head's at more than what your genitals do and what shape your body is in." The great erotic organ is not between your legs. It is between your ears, and it does not have to age or fade at all. Which means a couple in their sixties can have an erotic life a couple in their twenties cannot imagine, because eroticism runs on presence, self knowledge, and the capacity to be fully seen, and those things do not decline with age. They deepen.

And the counterintuitive engine, the thing Esther Perel built her work on and Schnarch named before her. Desire needs a gap. You cannot desire what you are completely fused with. This is why the differentiation of Session Four is the secret to lifelong passion. Two people melted into one comfortable undifferentiated blob have killed the very distance across which desire leaps. But two people who stay distinct, still their own selves, still slightly mysterious, keep the space desire lives in. The "new and old" the woman offers at the door is the exact prescription.

I say it to couples this way. It is not perfection, it is not even orgasm, it is connection. People imagine some wild, exotic eroticism they are missing. Ask the most satisfied long married people I know what the height of it actually was, and the answer is almost never a technique. It is a moment. "When she looked at me and I knew, all the way down, that she wanted me." That is eroticism at its peak, the electric certainty of being wanted and known at the same time. And that is available to you at eighty in a way it was never available at twenty two.

THE AGING BODY

Because the best is ahead, we have to talk honestly about sex and aging, a subject the youth worshiping culture treats as either invisible or a punchline. It is neither.

Sex does not end at fifty, or sixty, or eighty. Desire and the capacity for pleasure continue across the whole lifespan. Bodies change, menopause and vaginal dryness for women, slower and less reliable erections for men, but every one of those changes is workable, with lubricant, with medication, with patience, and above all with the presence and knowledge that only long love provides. Older couples often report higher sexual satisfaction than younger ones, precisely because the performance anxiety is gone and the knowing is deep. The body ages. The eroticism, which lives in the mind and the bond, does not have to.

Dating after divorce or loss, later in life. Many of you will love again after fifty, sixty, seventy, after a divorce, after burying a spouse, and I want to bless that plainly, because the church and the family often make it awkward or shameful ("at your age?"). It is not shameful. It is human and good. The desire to be chosen, touched, and known does not expire. If you are dating again later in life, do it with the wisdom you have earned and without apology.

And here I want to hold up a genuinely complicated mirror, because it makes a real point and refuses a cheap one. There is a well documented phenomenon of older European women, many of them widowed or divorced, sixty and beyond, traveling to places like The Gambia and coastal Kenya and forming romantic and sexual relationships with much younger local men. On one level it says something the West desperately needs to hear. Older women are still sexual, still hungry to be desired and touched, and that hunger is not ridiculous or shameful, a truth our youth obsessed culture erases so completely that these women had to cross an ocean to have it honored. But I will not hand you the liberating half and hide the rest, because that would be a lie. These relationships are shadowed by brutal economic inequality. The men are often desperately poor, the "romance" is entangled with money, migration hopes, and survival, and the same coastlines carry documented sexual exploitation, including of minors, which is an unambiguous evil. So hold both. The longing is real and worthy of honor, and this particular way of meeting it is knotted up with power and poverty in ways no one should romanticize. The lesson I actually want you to take is the clean one. Desire later in life is real and good, and to meet it, when you can, in ways that honor everyone's full dignity rather than trading on someone's desperation.

And the thing nobody wants to say about nursing homes. Here is a fact that scandalizes people and should not. Rates of sexual activity, and, sobering, of sexually transmitted infections, are rising among older adults, including in senior communities and nursing homes. Why? Because older people are still sexual beings, of course they are. Because after a spouse's death or a divorce they form new relationships. Because erectile medications made sex possible again for many older men. And because a generation that never got comprehensive sex education never learned that STIs and condoms still matter after menopause, when pregnancy is no longer the worry and protection often gets dropped. This is not a joke about "randy grandpas." It is a public health blind spot created by the exact silence this study exists to break. We were so busy pretending older people do not have sex that we failed to give them the health information they need. They are sexual beings, all the way to the end. Honor it, and inform it.

WANTING MORE: THE HONEST CONVERSATION

Now we come to the part almost no church will teach out loud, and I am going to teach it, because avoiding it is exactly the dishonesty this study exists to undo. The Song is, in part, about the fact that we keep wanting more. Desire, by nature, reaches. So we ask the honest adult question. What do we do with a wanting that does not stop? Which means talking, without flinching and without hype, about monogamy, and about the whole spectrum of what human beings have actually done with desire.

First, let me clear away a lie I myself used to teach. For years I told rooms "science proves monogamy is God's design," that the chemicals bond you to one person, therefore one person is the plan, therefore the Bible has always been a monogamy book. I have to be honest with you the way I have promised. That is not what the Bible actually shows, and I was overstating it. Read the text plainly. The heroes of Scripture, Abraham, Jacob, David, and yes, Solomon, whose name is on this very Song, were not monogamous. Solomon is credited in 1 Kings 11 with seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Polygamy is not a shocking exception at the margins of the biblical world. It is woven straight through it, in the lives of its greatest figures, largely without apology. And it is not just the Bible. Across the majority of human cultures ever documented (the anthropologist George Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas is the standard reference), some form of polygamy has been permitted more often than strict lifelong monogamy. We have to stop pretending "one man, one woman, for life" is a simple, obvious, universal fact everyone always understood and only modern people question. It is not. It never was.

the "one man, one woman" concept as a recent construction

Here is a claim that surprises people, and it is important. The elevation of "one man, one woman, for life" into the defining, boundary marking doctrine of Christian orthodoxy, the hill to die on, is much more recent than most evangelicals assume. Yes, monogamy has deep roots in the church. But the particular modern American version, where "biblical marriage" as one man and one woman becomes a culture war banner, written into denominational statements and constitutional amendments as the line separating the faithful from the world, largely crystallized in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, in reaction to feminism, no fault divorce, and especially the movement for gay marriage. And here is the deeper historical irony, documented by the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz (Marriage, a History). Marriage for romantic love, the whole idea that you marry the person you are in love with, is itself a modern invention, only a couple of centuries old. For most of history marriage was an economic and political arrangement between families. Love was a bonus, if it came at all. So the thing many defend as the timeless, unchanging "biblical" model is, in significant part, a Victorian and modern construction wearing ancient clothes.

Let me put a finer point on how recent this really is, because it surprises people who assume "the Baptist position" is ancient. Trace the actual documents. The Southern Baptist Convention's confession of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message, was first adopted in 1925 and revised in 1963, and in neither of those versions did it define marriage as "one man and one woman." That specific definitional language was added in the year 2000 revision, which declared marriage "the uniting of one man and one woman," added precisely as the culture war fights over gay marriage were heating up. In other words, the sentence many treat as the timeless Baptist bedrock is younger than the minivan. The same era produced the wave of "Defense of Marriage" laws (the federal DOMA, 1996) and state constitutional amendments, a political and denominational codification of a definition that had simply never needed spelling out before, because the question had never been live. This does not, by itself, settle whether the definition is right. But it explodes the claim that it is old. It is, in its hardened modern form, a product of the last fifty years, forged in reaction to feminism, no fault divorce, and the movement for gay marriage. And a doctrine forged in reaction, defined by what it is against, tends to be brittle in a way that a conviction chosen and understood on its own terms is not.

Why does it matter that I tell you all this? Because a monogamy defended by a lie is fragile, and a monogamy chosen with open eyes is strong. If the only reason you are faithful is that you were told everyone always was and God zapped it into the DNA, then the first time you learn the actual history, or feel the actual pull of "wanting more," the whole thing wobbles. But if you understand that human desire genuinely reaches, that the spectrum is real, that people across history and culture have arranged love every way imaginable, and you choose monogamy anyway, on purpose, for reasons you actually believe, then you have something durable.

the modern arrangements, named honestly

And it is not only history and other cultures. It is happening now, in your own city, and an honest study will name it plainly rather than pretend it away. Researchers have found that more than one in five single Americans has tried some form of consensual non monogamy at some point in life (Haupert et al., 2017), so this is not a fringe of a fringe. It comes in many forms. Swinging (couples who recreationally swap partners), open marriage and polyamory (multiple ongoing relationships), and newer, more specific arrangements the culture has names for now, including "hotwifing," in which a husband encourages and takes erotic pleasure in his wife having other partners. I am not going to sneer at the people in these arrangements or pretend they are all miserable. Some will tell you it deepened their honesty or their marriage. But I will name the two honest tensions. First, the one we keep hitting. Jealousy, the reef almost all of these break on eventually, because the bonding chemistry we have studied does not care about the rules you negotiated. And second, in something like hotwifing, a gender question worth sitting with. Is this genuinely her free desire and agency, or is she being "shown off" as his possession, arousal built on ownership? The answer differs couple to couple, and the difference matters enormously.

There is even a small movement that flips the usual script and argues monogamy itself is the risky choice. The writer Abbey Mackay, of the "Evolving Love Project," has an essay literally titled "The Risk of Monogamy," making the case that betting all your relational and sexual needs on one single human being is the real gamble. I want to steelman that, because it is not stupid. It is a lot to ask of one person, and the couples who thrive are precisely the ones who do not demand their spouse be their everything (remember Perel's "marriage replacing the village" from Session Two, that overload is real). But here is where I land, and why I still choose the one. The answer to "one person cannot be your everything" is not more sexual partners. It is a fuller life, deep friendships, community, meaningful work, God, around a sexually exclusive center. You solve the overload by widening the village, not by opening the bed.

One real, respected, unconventional example, so this is not abstract. Warren Buffett, one of the most admired men in America, lived a genuinely non standard arrangement. He married Susan in 1952. She moved away in 1977 to pursue her own life but they never divorced and stayed devoted. She introduced him to Astrid Menks, who moved in with him. The three were close enough to sign cards together, and after Susan died in 2004, Warren married Astrid. I do not hold it up as a template. It grew organically, out of real pain and real love, and it was theirs. I hold it up to make one honest point. Committed love does not always fit the tidy single script, and real people you respect have walked stranger roads than the sermon admits. Which is exactly why I want your monogamy chosen, with open eyes, not assumed.

polygamy across cultures, an honest look

Let me look honestly at polygamy where it actually lives, because reflexive condemnation is not the same as understanding. The Mormons (LDS) practiced plural marriage openly from the 1840s until the church officially renounced it in 1890 under enormous U.S. government pressure (a smaller number of fundamentalist offshoots continue it, some abusively). Their theological rationale drew on the very biblical patriarchs we just named. If Abraham and Jacob had multiple wives, and they were righteous, how can it be inherently sinful? Which is, honestly, not a stupid argument from the text, whatever else you make of it. And across much of sub Saharan Africa, where, as many of you know, I spent years working, polygamy has been a longstanding and legal part of many cultures, and it is worth understanding why rather than just recoiling. In subsistence and agrarian economies, plural marriage often functioned as economic cooperation, as a way to care for widows (a man marrying his deceased brother's wife so she and her children were not destitute, which is, note, a practice the Bible itself commands in Deuteronomy 25), as kinship building between clans, and as survival in high mortality settings. When Western missionaries arrived and demanded that a new convert with three wives divorce two of them to be baptized, they often created a worse injustice, abandoning women and children to destitution in the name of "biblical marriage." That was cruelty dressed as holiness, and honest missiologists have wrestled with it ever since.

So where do I land, and what do I actually believe? I land here, and I offer it as conviction, not a rule I am imposing. The Song does not point toward the crowd. It points toward the one. Its entire momentum, the seal we reach next session, "set me as a seal upon your heart," "many waters cannot quench love," is the momentum of two people who have chosen each other, wholly and exclusively, and found in that chosen exclusivity not a cage but the very depth that made the love unquenchable. And I will tell you honestly what I have watched, having researched the whole spectrum including the arrangements the church pretends do not exist. I will not pretend those people are monsters, and some will tell you it improved their relationship. But the reef almost all of them break on is the same one. Jealousy. You can negotiate every rule and communicate endlessly, and then desire hits a nerve of comparison and possessiveness that human beings are simply wired for, and someone gets hurt in a way the rules did not predict. Once you have bonded, really bonded, chemically, over years, into "one flesh," most people find they cannot share the beloved without something tearing. Monogamy, in this reading, is not a fence God built to keep you from joy. It is the container in which the deepest joy, the fully known, decades deep, curse reversed knowing of one other person, actually becomes possible. You give up the many to gain the depth of the one. I think it is the best trade a human being can make. And I think you should make it freely, knowing exactly what you are choosing, or not at all.

One tender, real world version of this I want to name gently, because I have watched it. Some people coming out of a painful divorce, often women who were badly hurt by a man, find themselves drawn toward dating an established couple rather than another single person, because it feels safer, lower stakes, less like handing your whole heart to one man again. (The community has a name for the sought after third, a "unicorn," and for the couples looking, "unicorn hunters.") I understand the instinct completely. After betrayal, an arrangement where you are not the whole emotional world of one person can feel like a place to breathe. But hear me kindly. The "safety" is often an illusion, because the structure is inherently unequal. The couple shares the history, the home, the finances, the years, and when jealousy comes, and we just said it comes, the third person is almost always the one who gets hurt and pushed out. A heart looking for safety after a wound deserves real safety, not the appearance of it. Handle yourself with the tenderness you would offer a friend in the same place.

DIGNITY, HONESTY, AND THE HARD PASSAGES

We cannot teach a whole study on sexuality and stay silent about the people this conversation has wounded most. Our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender neighbors, many of whom are sitting in rooms like this one, and many of whom the church drove out. I am going to be honest about where I stand, honest about where faithful Christians still disagree, and honest about the text. I have chosen an affirming posture. I will tell you why. And I will not pretend the disagreement is settled or the sincere people on the other side are fools. This is holy ground. We walk it with our shoes off.

First, some definitions, because most of the fighting happens in a fog of confused terms. These are four different things.

• Biological sex. The anatomy and chromosomes you are born with (and even here nature is more varied than the tidy binary suggests; intersex people, born with bodies that do not fit the neat male or female template, are real and more common than most assume, though the exact prevalence depends heavily on how broadly you define it and estimates vary widely).
• Gender identity. Your internal sense of being male, female, both, or neither. For most people this matches their biological sex (cisgender); for a small number it does not (transgender).
• Gender expression. How you present, clothing, mannerisms, which cultures police heavily and which varies enormously across time and place.
• Sexual orientation. Who you are romantically and sexually drawn to.

These are independent axes. Confusing them ("a feminine man must be gay," "a trans person is just gay and confused") is where a lot of cruelty comes from. Precision here is itself an act of love.

On orientation and the science. The researcher Alfred Kinsey gave us a scale, from 0 to 6, that was the first widely known argument that orientation is not a clean either or but a continuum, with far more people somewhere in the middle than anyone admitted. The overwhelming consensus of every major medical and psychological body is that sexual orientation is not a choice, is not a disorder, and cannot be changed by willpower, prayer, or therapy. So called "conversion therapy" has been condemned as ineffective and actively harmful by essentially the entire mainstream medical world, and it left a trail of devastated, sometimes suicidal, people. Whatever you conclude theologically, that much is settled. No one chooses their orientation, and trying to torture it out of them is a documented harm.

On gender, and going deeper than definitions. I gave you clean definitions a moment ago, but our transgender neighbors deserve more from this study than a tidy vocabulary box, so let me go further and be honest about where I can and cannot take you. Some people experience a persistent, painful mismatch between their body and their internal sense of self. The clinical name is gender dysphoria, and for those who live it, it is not a fashion, a trend, or an attention seeking pose. It is a real and often anguished experience, and the suicide and self harm numbers for trans people who are rejected, especially by their families and churches, are heartbreaking, while the same numbers fall dramatically where they are loved and supported. That much the data makes plain. Where faithful people genuinely divide is the harder question of how one should respond to dysphoria, and here I will do what I have done all session, tell you the honest range rather than a slogan. The affirming pastoral voice (Austen Hartke, Transforming, 2018, himself a trans Christian) reads Scripture's own gallery of people who did not fit the binary, the eunuchs Jesus speaks of approvingly in Matthew 19, the Ethiopian eunuch baptized without hesitation in Acts 8, Isaiah 56's promise to eunuchs of a name "better than sons and daughters," and argues that God's family has always had room for those who live outside the neat categories. The traditional but compassionate voice (Preston Sprinkle, Embodied, 2021) affirms the dignity and full humanity of trans people and condemns the cruelty, while holding that biological sex is a God given given to be received. I hold the affirming, dignity first posture, and I will tell you why it matters more than the abstract debate. Whatever you conclude, the trans person in your life is your neighbor, made in the image of God, and the first thing owed them is not a position paper but love, safety, and their own dignity. Get that order wrong and no theology you land on will be worth much.

Where I stand, and why. I read the Bible's deepest sexual ethic the way this whole study has read it. Covenant, fidelity, consent, self giving love, and the refusal to exploit, not primarily a matter of anatomy. Reading it that way, I cannot find a good reason to deny a gay or lesbian person the same covenanted, faithful, self giving love the Song celebrates for everyone else. I have watched too many LGBTQ people driven from the church, into shame and despair and sometimes into the grave, by a message that told them their very capacity to love was an abomination. And I have watched the "fruit" of the affirming path be, for many, the recovery of faith, wholeness, and life. Jesus said you know a tree by its fruit. So I land as affirming, with open hands, holding it as I hold everything in this study. Firmly enough to teach it, loosely enough to keep learning, and with full respect for the faithful people who land elsewhere. If you disagree with me here, you are welcome, and I mean that. What I ask is only that whatever you conclude, you conclude it having actually looked, and that you never again treat a gay person as anything less than a whole human being made in the image of God.

The cost of this conversation, Jen Hatmaker and Rob Bell. Lest anyone think this is cost free, consider what happened to those who said it out loud in evangelical spaces. Jen Hatmaker, a beloved, bestselling Christian author and speaker, said in 2016 that she had come to an affirming position, and almost overnight LifeWay pulled her books from its shelves, speaking invitations evaporated, and a large part of her audience turned on her. Rob Bell, one of the most influential evangelical pastors of his generation, was effectively excommunicated from the evangelical mainstream ("Farewell, Rob Bell," a prominent pastor tweeted) after his book Love Wins questioned traditional teaching on hell, and his later openness on sexuality finished the estrangement. I name them because this is not an abstract debate. There is a price for saying what I am saying, and the people who paid it were often the most thoughtful and gracious voices in the room. That, too, tells you something about the system.

Bisexuality and the fluidity of desire. One more honest piece, because you asked and because it is real. The researcher Lisa Diamond (Sexual Fluidity, 2008) documented, over years of longitudinal study, that desire, especially women's, can be more fluid than the fixed gay or straight binary suggests. Some people's attractions shift across a lifetime, and bisexuality (genuine attraction to more than one gender) is real, common, and too often erased by both sides. And it is the fastest growing piece of this whole picture. Gallup's tracking (2025) shows bisexual identity, concentrated heavily among young women, is now the single largest and fastest rising category within the LGBTQ population, with something like a third of women under thirty identifying as LGBTQ, most of them as bisexual. Read that carefully. It is a shift in how openly people are naming a fluidity that was surely always there, muffled by shame. The dating apps report the same thing from their side. Bi and queer women are among their fastest growing users. Whatever you make of it theologically, it tells you the neat two box world many of us were handed never described reality. It only described what people felt safe to say out loud. This shows up in the culture in various ways, including the increasing openness of some women to same sex experience or curiosity, and the fantasies and arrangements (like threesomes) that sometimes follow. I will say about all of it what I have said about everything. Fantasy and curiosity are part of the human erotic imagination and not automatically sinful to have. The questions are the ones we always ask. Is it drawing you toward your partner or away? Is it mutual, consented, honest? Is it building your covenant or eroding it? And the same reef we named with open marriage applies. What looks like harmless novelty often runs, in practice, straight into jealousy and hurt once real bonding is involved. Handle your own heart, and your partner's, with great care.

The marriage no one prepares you for, mixed orientation marriages. Here is a situation that is far more common in rooms like this one than the church has ever admitted, and one purity culture manufactured at scale. A gay, lesbian, or bisexual person who, formed by a world that told them their orientation was sin, married someone of the opposite sex in good faith, and years in finds themselves in a mixed orientation marriage. Two people who love each other, often with children and a whole life built, and an orientation that was never going to change no matter how hard anyone prayed. If that is you, or someone you love, hear me carefully, because glib answers do real damage here. There is no single right ending, and anyone who hands you one is selling something. Some of these marriages, with radical honesty, therapy, and mutual choice, find a way to stay, built now on truth rather than on a secret, which is the only foundation that ever holds. Some, painfully, cannot, and end with as much grace as two people can manage. What ruins people is not the hard situation itself. It is the secrecy and shame that purity culture wrapped around it, the years of hiding, the belief that the truth would end everything. The way through is the same as everywhere in this study. Bring it into the light, get honest and skilled help, refuse to let anyone shame you for a bind you were set up for, and make whatever decision you make together, in truth, with the dignity of both people fully honored. This is holy, tender ground, and it deserves a real conversation, not a verse hurled from across a room.

CONTRACEPTION, AND THE MARKET FOR DESIRE

Let me get very practical, because a study that stays in the poetry and never touches the pharmacy has failed you. Two people building a life have to make real decisions about pregnancy, protection, and the body, and the silence around these, as always, is where trouble grows.

the history of contraception, and the church's long war on it

Here is something almost no one is taught. The idea that birth control is a modern, faithless rebellion against God's design is simply false. Contraception is ancient. The Egyptian medical papyri, thousands of years old, record actual contraceptive recipes. The Greeks and Romans prized an herb called silphium so effective and so sought after that they harvested it to extinction. Human beings have been thoughtfully spacing and planning their children for at least six thousand years. This is not a modern rebellion. It is a continuous, documented human practice.

And the church's opposition has a specific, and specifically modern, history. For most of Christian history contraception was broadly frowned on (tied to Augustine's procreation only ethic). But the sharp modern battle lines were drawn in the twentieth century. The American crusader Anthony Comstock got laws passed in 1873 making it a federal crime to mail contraceptive information. Margaret Sanger (a complicated figure, genuinely heroic on contraception and genuinely entangled with the ugliness of the eugenics movement, tell the whole truth) fought those laws and opened the first birth control clinics. And it was not until 1965 (Griswold v. Connecticut) that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws banning contraception even for married couples. Let that land. It was illegal in some states for a married couple to use birth control within living memory. The Catholic Church formalized its opposition in Humanae Vitae (1968). Most Protestants, including most evangelicals, made peace with contraception decades ago. The point for us. Family planning is a matter of conscience, wisdom, and mutual agreement between two people (and, if it matters to you, before God), not a shame handed down from outside.

the methods, the burden, and the market

The methods, briefly and honestly, because everyone should know their options. Hormonal (the pill, patch, ring, shot, implant), the IUD (highly effective, long acting), barrier methods (condoms, the only method that also prevents STIs), fertility awareness methods, sterilization (vasectomy for men, tubal ligation for women), and emergency contraception. Each has real trade offs your doctor can walk you through.

And a justice point worth naming. The burden has fallen overwhelmingly on women. The female pill arrived in 1960 and transformed the world. The male pill has been "five years away" for fifty years, stalled by a mix of biology (stopping millions of sperm is harder than stopping one egg a month) and, honestly, a pharmaceutical and cultural assumption that contraception is women's work and women's risk. Women have carried the side effects, the daily discipline, and the moral scrutiny for two generations. A more honest and equal future would share that load.

The market for desire, Ro, Hims, Hers, and the telehealth revolution. Something new is worth naming, because it is reshaping how people relate to their own bodies. The rise of direct to consumer sexual health companies (Hims, Hers, Ro, and their competitors) that will ship you erectile dysfunction medication, hormonal birth control, testosterone, "libido" supplements, and premature ejaculation treatments after a quick online questionnaire. There is genuine good here. It has removed shame and gatekeeping, letting people, especially men too embarrassed to see a doctor, get real help. And there is a real shadow. The commodification and recreational use of sexual enhancement (Viagra as a party drug, testosterone as a lifestyle product), the medicalizing of every normal fluctuation of desire into a condition with a subscription, and the same old advertising machine now selling you a pill for a "problem" it also taught you to feel. Use the tools. They can genuinely help. But run them through the study's questions. Is this restoring a good thing, or manufacturing a discontent to sell me the cure?

And the medication conversation almost no one has, SSRIs and your sex drive. This one is for a lot of you in this room, and the silence around it has caused real, needless anguish. Many people recovering from purity culture carry anxiety, depression, or the scrupulosity OCD we named in Session One, and many are (rightly, helpfully) on an antidepressant, usually an SSRI. Here is the thing your bulletin never mentioned. SSRIs very commonly dampen sexual desire, delay or block orgasm, and can blunt genital sensation. This is one of the most frequent side effects in all of medicine, and yet people experience it, tell no one, and conclude something is wrong with me or something is wrong with my marriage, when the actual culprit is a pill doing a known, documented thing. Two other common ones. Some hormonal contraceptives can lower libido in some women, and blood pressure medications (beta blockers) can affect arousal and erection. Hear the liberating point clearly. If your desire or your orgasm changed after you started a medication, that is a medical conversation, not a moral failure and not a verdict on your love. These effects are often adjustable, a different dose, a different drug, a timing change, an added medication, and no one should white knuckle through a flattened sex life in shame when a ten minute talk with the prescriber might fix it. Do not stop a psychiatric medication on your own. Do bring the sexual side effects to your doctor as the legitimate, treatable issue they are. The body God made and the medicine that helps your mind are not enemies, but they need you to be honest with the person who can actually tune them.

ABORTION AND TEEN PREGNANCY

I am not going to skip the hardest topics, and I am not going to tell you what to conclude. I am going to model how to hold them honestly, which is what this whole study is for.

Abortion. This is the most morally and politically fraught issue in American life, and I refuse to be glib about it in either direction. Let me hold the honest tension. On one side, many faithful people believe that human life bears the image of God from conception, that the unborn are the most vulnerable neighbor, and that protecting them is a profound moral duty, and that conviction deserves respect, not caricature. On the other side, the Bible never directly addresses elective abortion (the one text often cited, Exodus 21:22 to 25, actually treats the loss of a pregnancy differently from the death of the mother, which complicates the simple "the Bible clearly says life begins at conception" claim); the historic Jewish tradition has generally held that the mother's life and wellbeing take precedence and that ensoulment is not at conception; and a compassionate ethic has to reckon honestly with rape, incest, fatal fetal anomaly, threats to the mother's life, and the reality that criminalizing abortion has never actually made it rare, only more dangerous. What I will say without hedging is this. Whatever your convictions about the law and the morality, the shaming of women who have had abortions, treating it as the unforgivable sin, a scarlet letter, is its own grievous wrong, and it has driven countless women from the church and from grace. There is no sin outside the reach of the God of second chances, and a great many women in your pews carry this quietly and in pain. Whatever you believe about the ethics, lead with that grace. And if this is your story, hear it. You are not beyond love. You never were.

Teen pregnancy. Here the data is actually hopeful and instructive. U.S. teen pregnancy has fallen dramatically over the last three decades, and the research is clear about why. Not abstinence pledges (which, recall Session One, did not work), but better access to contraception and comprehensive sex education. The places that taught kids the most had the fewest teen pregnancies. The places that taught only "do not" had the most. This is the whole thesis of the study made flesh. Knowledge in the light protects. Silence in the dark does not. And for the teen who does become pregnant, or the family walking through it, the answer is support, honesty, and options, not shame, which only compounds a hard situation with a cruelty.

SEXUAL HEALTH: STIs, HPV

Because the Song's ethic is care for the beloved's whole self, and because our world includes their health, let me give you the plain, de stigmatized facts the church almost always skipped.

Sexually transmitted infections are common and largely preventable. The CDC's most recent estimate is roughly 26 million new STIs a year, about one in five Americans has an STI on any given day, with just under half of new infections among people 15 to 24. (Encouragingly, reported chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis cases have declined three years running as of 2024. Discouragingly, congenital syphilis has surged, which prenatal testing would prevent.) That is the ordinary landscape, not a statistic about "those people." Shame is the enemy of prevention. It keeps people from testing, from disclosing, from getting treated. So let us replace it with knowledge. Most STIs are curable (chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, trichomoniasis, treatable with antibiotics), and the ones that are not are now highly manageable. HIV, once a death sentence, is today a controllable chronic condition with medication, and here is the fact that has transformed everything and that everyone should know. U equals U, "Undetectable equals Untransmittable." A person on effective HIV treatment, with an undetectable viral load, cannot transmit the virus sexually. That is settled science, and it has done more to dismantle HIV stigma than any slogan ever could. Add PrEP (a daily or injectable preventive that stops transmission before it happens), and HIV becomes one of the great medical management achievements of our era. And HPV, human papillomavirus, the most common STI, which most sexually active people will encounter at some point and which causes most cervical cancer and several others, now has a vaccine that prevents the dangerous strains. Every parent should know it exists and talk to their pediatrician. It is, quite literally, a cancer vaccine, and shame about sex has kept some families from a lifesaving tool.

Know your status. Use protection until you and a committed partner have both been tested. Tell the truth. That is not the opposite of romance. It is what caring for a beloved's whole self actually looks like in our world.

Let me tell one story here, because it makes the whole point without a lecture. On November 7, 1991, at the height of his career, the basketball legend Magic Johnson stood at a podium and told the world he had tested positive for HIV. A generation remembers the shock of it. But notice what his story actually became, and get the facts right, because almost everyone gets them wrong. Magic Johnson did not "die of AIDS." He never developed AIDS at all. More than thirty years later he is alive, healthy, a grandfather and a businessman, his virus undetectable, managed with a single daily pill. His life is a testimony to two truths this study keeps insisting on. First, the sober one. Sex has real stakes, and unprotected sex carries real risk. He has been open that his diagnosis came out of a period of sleeping around without protection, and he has spent decades urging young people toward safety precisely so they do not learn it the hard way. Second, the hopeful one. An HIV diagnosis is not a death sentence and not a mark of shame. It is a manageable medical condition, and the person carrying it is a whole human being worthy of dignity and love. Magic Johnson turned the most feared diagnosis of his era into three decades of advocacy that saved lives and dismantled stigma. That is the posture. Clear eyed about safety, and utterly refusing shame. Protect your body because it is precious, and never let anyone tell you a diagnosis makes you less beloved.

INFERTILITY, ADOPTION, THE BODY AFTER BIRTH

The Song locates desire, love, and new life all under the same tree (we will see it explicitly next session, 8:5). So we have to speak, tenderly, about the place where the making of life becomes its own kind of ache, because for a great many couples, it does.

Infertility. One of the most silent, isolating griefs there is. Roughly one in six couples worldwide struggles with infertility (WHO), and the church, obsessed with warning young people not to get pregnant, is often catastrophically unprepared to sit with the couple who desperately want to and cannot. Here is what I have watched. Infertility does not just grieve. It transfers. The disappointment, the monthly cycle of hope and loss, the invasive treatments, the cost, the sense of a body that has "failed," and it lands, hard, on the marriage and the sex. Sex that becomes a scheduled, clinical, ovulation tracked task loses its eros entirely. Couples describe feeling like machines, and the bedroom fills with pressure and grief instead of play. If this is you, hear two things. It is not your fault, and it is not a punishment (the old cruelty that read barrenness as divine judgment is a lie the Bible itself overturns, again and again, in the stories of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah). And protect your marriage and your eros through it. Keep some sex that is not about making a baby, keep the play alive, get support, grieve honestly together. The longing for a child is holy. Do not let it consume the love that longed for one.

Adoption and other paths. For many, the road to a child runs through adoption, fostering, donor conception, or surrogacy, each with its own beauty and its own real complexity (and adoption especially deserves honesty. It is a profound good and it begins in a loss for the child and often the birth mother; the healthiest adoption stories hold both). The point I want to leave you. A family is made, not merely born, and the love that raises a child is every bit as real as the biology that conceived one.

Birth, labor, and the body and marriage after. And for those who do conceive, nobody prepares couples for what birth and the newborn season do to a body and a sexual relationship. Childbirth is a physical trauma the body needs real time to recover from. The postpartum months bring exhaustion, hormonal upheaval, sometimes postpartum depression, and a profound reorientation of a woman's body toward the baby. Here is the honest, rarely said thing. The bonding hormones of nursing and mothering, oxytocin again, can leave a new mother feeling her deepest physical intimacy needs met by the baby, and a new father can feel, strangely and shamefully, rejected and displaced by his own child. This is normal, it is temporary, and naming it out loud dissolves a great deal of its power. New parents need enormous patience with each other, a slow and pressure free return to intimacy, and the knowledge that this season is a passage, not the new permanent state. The garden is not gone. It is just, for a season, holding a very small third person.

PORNOGRAPHY

Two last honest sections, because a comprehensive study cannot pretend the edges do not exist.

Pornography. "Wanting more" in our moment almost always runs into a screen, so we have to talk about it honestly, not with panic, not with a culture war sermon. The mechanism that matters is the chemistry we have traced all study. You bond to whatever you have sex with. Oxytocin does not know the difference between a person and a pixel. This is not folk wisdom. It is the pair bonding neuroscience. The neuroscientist Larry Young (The Chemistry Between Us, 2012) has mapped how the same oxytocin and vasopressin reward circuitry that bonds mates in monogamous species (his famous work on prairie voles) is the circuitry human sexual arousal recruits, which means the brain bonds to the stimulus paired with orgasm, whatever that stimulus is. The most honest way to state the mechanism is this. The brain conditions. It learns to fire its reward system (chiefly dopamine, driven hard by endless novelty, what researchers call the Coolidge effect) in response to whatever is paired with orgasm. Do that with a screen, over and over, and you can train your desire to respond to the device and the novelty rather than to a real, familiar, breathing person, which is why heavy pornography use can quietly dull arousal toward an actual partner and escalate toward ever newer material. That is the real cost. Not that it "breaks a rule," but that it can reroute the very machinery that was built to knit you to a living human being, and, in the internet age, it exposes people, including the young, to a firehose of images that trains desire in genuinely distorting directions. Run your three questions on it. Permissible? Beneficial? Consuming? And know that the most commonly reported consequence of pornography use is not exotic. It is shame, the very shame in the dark this whole study exists to bring into the light. I will not hand you a rule. I will tell you the mechanism and the cost, and trust you, as an adult, to steward it, and to bring it into the light rather than let it grow in the dark.

And the honest complication, not all of it is the same thing. I have to be a truthful teacher and admit the category "porn" is not monolithic, because the culture has shown us it is not. When Fifty Shades of Grey, a book that literally began as Twilight fan fiction, sold more than 150 million copies and became a film franchise, it revealed something the church would rather not know. An enormous number of ordinary people, women especially, were starving for permission to explore desire, fantasy, and even kink. That hunger is not the enemy. It is a signal. (I will also tell you the honest critique, because it matters. Many readers and the BDSM community itself pointed out that Fifty Shades actually models bad consent, possessiveness and control dressed up as eroticism, which is precisely why we need a better conversation about desire, not a more shamed one.) The same signal shows up in the rise of audio erotica, apps like Dipsea and Quinn, built around story, imagination, and emotional context rather than raw explicit image, and marketed largely to women. Notice what that whole market is telling us. For a great many people, the most compelling erotic content is narrative and relational, closer, in a strange way, to what the Song of Songs actually is (a story, in words, of two people wanting each other) than to the disembodied image firehose. I am not baptizing any of it wholesale. Run the same three questions. But I will not let us pretend the entire landscape is one thing. The ache underneath it, to imagine, to desire, to feel wanted, is a good ache the culture is monetizing because the church refused to bless it.

DO NOT AWAKEN LOVE, A THIRD TIME

The movement closes the way the earlier ones did. The woman turning to the young women, giving the charge a third and final time (2:7, 3:5, and here at 8:4). Do not awaken love until it desires. The repetition is the teaching. But hear it differently now, this late, from a woman who has been through everything. The wedding and the wound, the empty doorway and the way back, and now this mature, curse reversing, best is yet to come love. When she says "do not rush it," it is not the nervous warning of someone afraid of desire. It is the hard won wisdom of someone who knows what is on the other side of the waiting, who has tasted the deep thing and is telling the young. This, what I have, is what you are waiting for. Do not trade it for a cheap early version. Let it mature. It is worth every year.

And notice the tender, aching wish that opens the passage. "If only you were to me like a brother, then I could kiss you in the street and no one would despise me." In her world, siblings could show public affection lovers could not. She is wishing she could love him openly, everywhere, without the world's disapproval, the same longing so many carry, to have their love simply, publicly allowed. (Hold that thought against everything we said about the people whose loves the world has not allowed.) And then, having wished it, she stops wishing and rests in what she has. "His left arm is under my head, and his right arm embraces me." The banner of love, from Session One, come all the way around. Held. Secure. Home.

YOUR SEXUAL PHILOSOPHY, PART FIVE

This session raises the hardest questions, so this week's philosophy work is the bravest. Add the piece this session raises. Where you actually land, and why.

• Where do I actually land, and why? Pick one of this session's hard topics (monogamy, orientation, contraception, abortion, the aging body). Write, honestly, where you land and the actual reasons, from Scripture, from evidence, from compassion, not the slogan you inherited.
• Who have I wounded, or watched be wounded? Name one person or group the church's teaching on sexuality has cost. What would dignity require of you toward them now?

Keep your answers. We finish the capstone next week.