An Ode to the Lovers
A Manifesto for Passionate Covenant
Check out tracks 18-25 to catch a vibe while you read. Blessings to Bruno for dropping the heat right on time.
Let me tell you a sad tale of passion left unrealized.
Growing up, romance was treated like a reward, something I was striving for. Something earned through obedience. I wasn’t allowed to live inside of it. It wasn’t something discovered or explored. Not something felt through desire.
As I dreamed of my future, being held tenderly started to feel like a fantasy. That loud yearning in my chest was dangerous and unpleasing to God.
Sexiness, attraction, chemistry. These concepts became things to manage, not embody. Which is wild, when you really think about it.
Longing is human. The way it blooms in each of us is different, yes, but it is far from unnatural. And yet, for so many women, especially those raised in faith spaces, that part of us was trimmed back and disciplined into silence.
When a woman’s longing is treated like a liability, she doesn’t become holy.
She becomes untethered.
We need to long and be longed for. And when that experience is stripped from us, when it is postponed indefinitely as a prize for perfect behavior, cynicism sets in. And our roles within committed relationships can feel more dutiful than alive.
Where is the justice for romance? Where is the fight?
Not the Instagramable, smut-fantasy desire. But that feeling in our gut that makes us feel alive within covenant.
Somehow, that got lost in our Sunday sermons.
A lot of my first romantic experiences were full of contradictions.
Don’t expect too much, but don’t settle for too little.
Be open to surprises, but make sure you maintain your standards.
Be chaste and pure, but also attractive and affectionate.
I had whiplash.
No one told me how to actually engage in real-world romantic companionship—only how to avoid doing it wrong.
So I didn’t really date in high school. I was focused on finding “the one” by the ripe age of fifteen. There was no point in entertaining anything casual if we weren’t discussing covenant and calling.
Which, in hindsight, is wildly hilarious.
I picture the poor boys on the receiving end of my interrogation energy. I rarely wore anything I couldn’t wear to Bible study, and most “normal” teenage activities weren’t on my agenda. A lot of them often mistook me for a member of the faculty.
Casual dating? Fooling around? Adolescent curiosity and awkward exploration? All of that felt beneath me. I was waiting for my destiny to appear in front of me during Biology. (Thanks, Twilight.)
And as a result…chiiiiiile, the delusions I had.
Young Aubrey did not want a boy. She wanted a grown man.
With a plan.
A 401k.
A parenting philosophy.
Above all else, she wanted a man who understood biblical marriage.
Let me pause here and clarify: I don’t think encouraging girls to know their worth is wrong. I don’t think choosing not to date in high school is foolish.
(In fact, I would love it if all three of my little girls chose to be celibate little angels from the ages of 15-25.)
But I think of all of the reasons I, and many others like me, chose not to explore. The ultimate being this idolized, idealized construct of what God had designed love and commitment to look like.
That is a prescription for not just sustained delusion. I’d argue this would be enough to make anyone feel like their individual selves must disappear before entering God’s most elite club.
I wasn’t choosing this restraint freely. I was performing preparedness for an institution I had been taught was the ultimate prize.
When a girl spends her formative years obsessing over an idealized version of covenant, one she is often handed without context, she doesn’t learn how to experience love.
She learns how to rehearse it, which will always collapse under the weight of true intimacy.
It all started on a drive with my mother, as many of these things do.
I credit my mom for so many of the best parts of myself. And as a mother now, I give her more grace than critique. I hope my girls will one day feel free enough to lovingly name the places I missed, too.
For my mom, it was love and sex.
From the earliest age I can remember, she repeated one phrase like scripture:
“Wait for the man God has for you.”
I don’t believe that sentiment was evil. Mommy was sincere in her intent.
But sincerity does not protect a message from distortion.
Because “wait” slowly turned into “suppress.”
And “God has for you” slowly turned into “don’t trust yourself.”
We’d watch princess movies, and when they rode off into the sunset, my mom would subtly affirm that this was the reward realized. The good girl who waited, the faithful heart who was chosen.
Barbie found Ken. Cinderella found her prince. And apparently, Walt Disney had been reading Proverbs.
By the time I was a teenager, I was writing letters to my future husband, a man, a BOY, whom I had not yet met. I prayed over him like he was a deployed armyman overseas, covering him for life’s many battles.
It was a romantic notion, and hindsight is 20/20. Because I can see now that my hopeful preparation was actually an obsession disguised as obedience.
And I gotta tell y’all, the whole time I had Proverbs 31 in my head as this litmus test, this checklist for my preparedness to embody her.
I wanted the “husband known at the gates.”
I wanted to be the trusted wife with “wisdom and kindness on her tongue.”
I wanted to be “clothed in strength and dignity, and praised by my husband, my children, the Lord…
I believed it was my job to prepare my heart in anticipation of a man’s needs before he ever appeared. That God would give me supernatural discernment so I could be exactly what he required.
Like many other girls of my era, I wrote Proverbs 31 on post-it notes everywhere, in the margins of my study Bible, in my Twitter bio, in every journal and crevice of my subconscious.
And I did this with very little understanding of who the scripture was inviting me to be.
It was a prescription, a cure for the wickedness my own skin presented.
Ouch.
I think we often diminish how that kind of shaping affected the modern Christian woman. Especially how we were taught to imagine who God encourages us to be in loving and committed partnerships. And the woman whom Proverbs 31 told us we were not without following its teachings.
Let me be clear: Proverbs 31 ain’t got shit to do with your purity, beloved.
It is not a checklist for sexual purity. It is not a mandate to sew quietly in a corner until a man chooses you. It is not a divine endorsement of domestic performance. It doesn’t demand smallness or invisibility.
And it does not promise a husband as payment for good behavior.
It is a poem, a celebration of a woman who is economically savvy, communally invested, spiritually grounded, and wildly competent.
It is about your unique ability, as a woman, to be your whole self, unapologetically, and be loved for it.
When you decode the agricultural metaphors and ancient economic language, what you see is not a porcelain doll.
You see a woman with agency.
A creative.
A community builder.
A businesswoman.
A partner.
A faithful steward.
A woman whose life reflects devotion.
God is interested in a tapestry far more valuable than patchwork.
And that makes this scripture not just a celebration of a woman’s virtue, but a challenge for us all to consider a lifestyle that is about so much more than what we produce for selfish gain.
When we reduce Proverbs 31 to a chastity badge or a marriage résumé, we flatten something holy into something transactional.
Somehow, knowing all of this, the message still gets stuck here. That all a lifelong commitment has to offer us is a safe, comfy, and boring life. One in which we perform our little white picket fence existence, going to church on Sundays, raising our 2.5 kids, and going to heaven together one day.
For all that talk about faithfulness and virtue…where is the passion?
We preached covenant, but not chemistry.
Commitment, but not curiosity.
Submission, but not mutual fire.
My husband and I did not “remain pure” in the eyes of the church before our wedding ceremony. I remember how taboo that used to feel to me. And that left its mark on me as we walked towards the aisle.
I told my husband shortly after we were engaged, shortly after we moved from our hometown to a city 3 hours away to finish college together, truly alone for the first time in our relationship…that we needed to remain celibate until our wedding.
That was almost 9 months away.
Before this, he and I had been engaging in quite passionate physical intimacy. It was fun, liberating, and truly foreign to me. I felt vibrant in a way that I had no real words for. I learned about the pieces of myself, a self who is actually pretty physically touch-averse, that had needs.
We had taken a trip to Cleveland in college, a secret trip no one knew about. I remember planning it, the Airbnb we picked out together. The restaurants we chose were close by. The concert we attended. The walks around downtown. The movies on the couch.
And yes, all the sex.
We had no money, had to meticulously plan to afford the trip. But when I tell you, we both walked away from that weekend together totally sure that we wanted to do life together…it was beautiful. It’s still a top 3 trip for us both.
We were liberated. No parents or church or voices in our ears. We simply got to be and try to see what it looked like to coexist in such an intimate way.
This, along with all of the other trysts we’d engaged in, replayed in my head over and over and over as I stared at the diamond on my left hand. In the months after Cam proposed, my brother went through a divorce, and I kept questioning what was right, what kind of love God honored.
And I kept wondering about the “right way” to go about things. And so, I felt we needed to re-right the course.
Hence: a 9-month celibacy purgatory.
Cam was a wonderful sport at the time. But man, did that create a nice little wound for our first few years of marriage. For us both. Because the only reason I felt like we needed, like I needed, to do this was to absolve myself of the deep-rooted shame that we weren’t “pure” on our wedding night.
Somewhere, my brain had separated the excitement and pleasures I had allowed myself in our dating life from the Proverbs 31 wife I was called to be. The wild and free woman he had gotten to know had all of a sudden become a buttoned-up Southern Baptist. And he had just committed his life to her.
The change-up was crazy.
We got married, had a honeymoon, and rediscovered the intimacy we had before we had said “I Do”, and I thought the whole ordeal was buttoned up just right.
And then, we came home.
I started my wifely performance. Trying to be sexy, trying to fulfill the things I was meant to. And what I figured out pretty quickly was that I didn’t have the language or the literacy for that character, for that act. And so much of it was focused on what he needed.
I didn’t know my own needs, and I had never asked my partner to help me meet them. I had never considered how Cam found himself attracted to me, nor did I have language for what parts of myself I found attractive.
I had never asked these questions. It wasn’t appropriate before marriage, right? And it certainly wasn’t something I felt comfortable discussing with anyone in my circle.
And so, we found ourselves, as many of the young Christian couples in the western church do, circling a question we dreaded and didn’t want to admit. But it’s real, and I’ll admit it for the rest of us: did we make a mistake?
That’s hard work for two barely twenty-year-olds to confront in the midst of work, college, and brand new adulting. But after these many years of us unpacking and unlearning, I gotta tell y’all: it’s so much deeper than youth and inexperience.
We are selling an experience in the church that lacks depth, and I just don’t believe that’s all that God has for us.
If Biblical marriage is supposed to reflect Christ and the Church, why are we so afraid of passion?
If covenant is sacred, why do we treat chemistry like a liability?
If God created bodies, desire, pleasure, longing—why have we acted like marriage was meant to neutralize them instead of ignite them?
I think much of the confusion stems from a few central teachings that have been handed down to us without much interrogation:
Our understanding of abstinence and adultery,
Our views of roles within marriage, and
Our expectations of one another built on narrow readings of both.
Most of us are simply trying not to sin.
We’re trying to be who we were told we were called to be. But…who is that? Who are we stretching toward? What are we striving for?
The images of marriage we inherit from Scripture aren’t as clean and sentimental as we sometimes pretend. When we read the Bible honestly, without polishing it for Sunday school, we see something far more human. And far more complicated.
Marriage as a contract.
Virgin women as currency.
Land, lineage, and legacy driving decisions more than romance ever did.
Many of the laws in the Old Testament were protective within that world. They were guardrails in a brutal social system where women had no real power, and survival depended on family structure and inheritance. God was working within the structures humanity had built.
But those structures were still ancient. And formed by people who were inspired by God. And our goalpost is entirely different.
Today, we rarely see marriage as a strategic move to preserve farmland. Women are not property to be exchanged; chattel slavery is illegal. And we operate in a world that at least claims to value emotional safety, consent, and personal agency.
Yet, we often cling to marital frameworks shaped for a society that did not have those societal standards. Would it not be natural, then, to read God’s message through the lens of the world we actually inhabit? To discern God’s words and what they were always pointing toward?
This is not a case for moral chaos. It’s an invitation into moral depth.
Honoring God becomes bigger than simply regulating who we have sex with and when. It becomes about honesty, mutuality, sacrifice, integrity.
It becomes about how we treat one another’s bodies and hearts.
These are things scripture speaks about far more than the wedding night technicalities laid out in Mosaic and Levitical law.
If we look at, for example, Deuteronomy 22, I doubt we see most of these actions as something we’d seek to emulate:
“Suppose a man marries a woman, but after sleeping with her he turns against her and publicly accuses her, saying, ‘When I married this woman, I discovered she was not a virgin.’
Then the woman’s father and mother must bring proof of her virginity to the elders at the town gate… and they must spread her bed sheet before the elders. The elders shall take the man and punish him… The woman will remain the man’s wife, and he may never divorce her.But suppose the man’s accusations are true… The woman must be taken to the door of her father’s home, and there the men of the town must stone her to death… In this way, you will purge the evil from among you.”
— Deuteronomy 22:13–21
At face value, this is horrifying. And it should be. The punishment reflects a world where a woman’s virginity determined her economic survival and her family’s honor. It places value on something quite superficial that then informs the value and worth of a person based upon something irreversible in nature, once crossed.
It’s the core of our views around purity and goodness.
But look closer.
Within this brutal system, the law also punished a husband who falsely accused his wife. It regulated deceit. It attempted to curb exploitation in a world where men often had unchecked power. And it publicly vindicated the woman who was wrongfully accused.
What I see in a law like this is not God celebrating sexual policing. I see God meeting a violent system and placing limits on it.
We no longer live within that system, and if we inherit the rule without examining the system it was regulating, we risk building rules that prioritize compliance over flourishing. We set up marriages to exist as bartering tools instead of mutually fulfilling covenants that honor God and the families we build as fruit.
In what modern context would we require “proof” of virginity?
Or stone a woman for sexual history?
We reject those outcomes instinctively. And rightly so.
So the deeper question becomes: what was God moving people toward?
Throughout Scripture, over and over again, we see the same themes rise to the surface: Justice. Mercy. Faithfulness. Mutual care.
Righteous living is alignment with the heart of God. I don’t believe that heart is quite as limited as we’d like to think.
Which is why I find it stunning that nestled within stories of war, exile, prophecy, and redemption, we are given an entire book dedicated to desire.
Song of Solomon. A sweet savor.
Unapologetic, embodied, mutual, erotic celebration of love.
Delight.
I recently began studying this beautiful book through eyes that can see how much God longs for us to experience pleasure. In many ways.
We are so clinical about the experiences God allows us, but I think scripture supports a deeply emotive and sensory being who made us to be in touch with those sides of ourselves as well.
When I first read Song of Solomon, as a teenager, two things were constantly running through my head:
“Are they married??”
“Surely this is a metaphor for something more spiritual. Surely, we aren’t talking about…that.”
Proof of our clinicalness. Because what God would cosign two lovers carrying on like this?
The reality, as I’ve settled into married life and experienced love, is that this is exactly what I long for. The great lover and being the desired. Exploring that desire within safety and mutuality. Enjoying my lover and my lover enjoying me. Friendship, kinship, joy, liberation.
The endorphins that rise and fill me as I type these things are physiological proof: God delights in our delight. God wants us to long for this.
This kind of poetry was not accidentally put here.
God canonized erotic poetry.
I remember being confused, as a teenager, about where this came from. Immediately, I went the allegory route. That felt safer and more comfortable than the idea that God might actually mean…that the tree stood for…and the berries on her…
However, now I see something even more beautiful playing out in these verses. God is showing us a picture of what is later described in Ephesians. This frequently misinterpreted and misquoted verse has sent many a woman into the hallway during Sunday sermons:
“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord…just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her…husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies”
-Ephesians 5:22-28
I know our first reaction to this scripture is within the framework of submission and subordination. Yet, we conveniently omit the call to mutual submission that prefaces this section in verse 21.
I encourage you to see these verses through eyes colored with the Song of Solomon.
The relentless lover lavishes his lover with compliments, gifts, and…erm, gifts…throughout the poem. He is extravagant in the ways he shows his love for her. And I’d liken it to the extravagant way that Christ loves us.
Isn’t mutual pleasure one of the clearest forms of cherished love?
In the same way, the woman is so enamored by her lover. She longs for him desperately, hunts him down even. Determined to experience his love. It reads like the best, most God-breathed steamy romance.
It also encourages us to lean into that kind of pursuit. That is flowing with mutual consideration. And respect. And awareness. And safety. And emotional intimacy. And consent.
For many of us, we battle with our desire to follow these “Godly” rules (as we’ve established above, many of these rules are based on ancient societal norms) and with what our bodies naturally respond to.
And so it becomes difficult, awkward even, to relate naturally within our romantic relationships. We’ve gotta check the boxes first. We cannot simply feel, enjoy, and trust ourselves before learning to trust someone else.
And this addresses consent.
Because when the lie becomes “well, he’s my husband, so it’s my duty—”
Hard stop, sis. Passion that feels like duty isn’t love.
Or at least, not the type we should be in pursuit of.
Instead, we should be in pursuit of this:
“My lover stands above the young men in town.
All I want is to sit in his shade,
to taste and savor his delicious love.
He took me home with him for a festive meal,
but his eyes feasted on me!”-Song of Solomon 2:3-4
I don’t know how we read this and then shame couples for exploring their love. Learning of one another. Yearning for this kind of desire, yet being so afraid ourselves of figuring it out.
How exactly do you expect to know how to feel this way and never discuss or embark upon understanding your partner intimately before your wedding night?
It’s important to God that we know how to be playful and fun and flirtatious.
And I’m sorry, y’all, but I simply don’t believe in a theology that says:
“White-knuckle your desire for years, suppress every curiosity, fear your own body… and then magically wake up on your wedding night uninhibited and ready for mind-blowing intimacy.”
Sexual intimacy is not a reward for rule-keeping. It’s a skill. It’s a language. It’s a practice.
In this passage, I read of a God who tells us it’s natural, a celebration of who he created us to be, for us to express our love.
To call out what we find attractive.
To feel sexy and sexual and embodied.
What I don’t see in this poem is a preoccupation with a ceremony. Rather, it is preoccupied with devotion, longing, and mutual pursuit.
Exhibit B, from the relentless lover himself:
“Oh, get up, dear friend,
my fair and beautiful lover—come to me!
Come, my shy and modest dove—
leave your seclusion, come out in the open.
Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice.
For your voice is soothing
and your face is ravishing.”-Song of Solomon 2:10-14
The man is spitting game, and we should all be taking notes. It is a miscarriage of justice that we never discussed this book in my premarital counseling sessions.
We are rarely honest enough about what it takes to know someone well enough to entrust them with our hearts and our bodies before walking down the aisle. There’s a skill, a muscle that takes time to build, if we can hope to engage in fulfilling lifelong partnerships.
Thankfully, it’s never too late to learn.
A modern relationship that honors God embodies safety.
That’s holy. And it’s really, really sexy.
What’s not sexy? Repression and regret.
The church has often confused control with purity. And then, purity becomes repression instead of integrity, leaving carnage in its wake.
The real issue is our misinterpretation of what pure living looks like to Christ. And to take His words, God’s words, completely out of context and force people to distrust their own discernment is one of the most dangerous ways we can interact in relationships.
Our baseline understanding of love and respect should be our relationship with ourselves. And if we’ve been taught not to trust our own instincts, to kill them off, to bury them…where does that leave us?
It leaves us vulnerable to abuse and to abuse. The side effects will pile up if we aren’t clear about the misdirection we’ve been given. And how they directly oppose the teachings of Jesus himself.
The emotional depth and care we should express toward one another is modeled for us by Christ through many of His interactions with the outcast, the condemned, the imperfect.
Notably, when we look at John 4, we see Him engaging the Samaritan woman at the well.
Now, I love this story for many reasons, one of them being the way this moment goes down. This interaction is not romantic, and I don’t view it in that way. He dignifies her; approaching and engaging her at all as a Jew was a bold move. And when they do speak, he is honest, but without humiliation. He offers truth as an invitation and doesn’t coerce her into anything.
I notice the baseline posture of Jesus. How he sees us before he heals. How he dignifies before he corrects. How he listens before he leads.
There is a genuine, pure love Jesus showed this woman here. And I think instead of reading that conceptually, we often look in the weeds for the ways He redirects and sanctifies. This is intimacy without the need for control. Selflessness modeled for us through emotional interaction.
This moment models for us how God is encouraging us to step outside of what is acceptable, what is deemed “proper,” to show someone they matter. To show someone you’re willing to see their perspective. To show someone that you aren’t a walking rulebook, but a person of multitudes and feelings and depth and empathy.
Seems to me those would be important traits for us to carry out in our romantic relationships. But we’re instead told to give everyone a litmus test of perfection. And anyone who shows up with their own views and history that doesn’t align with our own pious perfection isn’t worthy.
That’s just one lane we lose essence in. Gender roles are another.
In the Ephesians verse I mentioned earlier, I find so much liberation in the reading of the entire letter. It changes our understanding of Paul’s charge to the husband and wife. It helps us to see that, in actuality, he’s spitting some hard truths that are conveniently skipped over in most of our interpersonal interactions.
That word submission. It’s a charged one. And there are a ton of discussions about its origins, its cultural place, and the context for women at the time. But I don’t even think all of that analysis is necessary when we consider: Paul was talking about mutual submission. Before he even talks about the role of the “wife” in scripture, he tells us to submit to one another in love (Eph. 5:21).
My assistant pastor said it really well in a recent TikTok she made:
“If we say we love someone, we actually have to be willing to change our behavior to honor their needs.”
If we are unwilling to make those kinds of changes, to face challenges we don’t want to, to trudge through late night arguements and health battles and personal evolutions that don’t fit our personal agendas…is it really love?
When we do lean into that kind of work, I’ve found, personally, that it is quite the uncomfortable confrontation with the self.
(More on that in my previous blog post)
Submission is not hierarchy. It’s responsiveness, a beautiful display of knowing that gives the other the kind of security that lets them know they can land safely here.
Emotional safety is something more modern, not something we see covered in the Mosaic and Levitical structure we discussed earlier. That system aimed to protect women from ostracization and isolation (which would lead to death).
We need to ask ourselves what the risks to women, to each other, are today. And many of the abuses we suffer today can (and do) happen within marriages.
Many have preached “stay no matter what” without context. And as a result, those same people have cosigned harm within a structure intended to be safe. Christ taught us to love our neighbors, and love doesn’t abuse.
And so I guess, the real question becomes: do we see our lover as our neighbor?
Someone worthy of a love that embodies their needs above our own?
Someone worth our time and sacrifice?
Someone worth learning, and studying, and knowing?
Someone worthy of passionate intimacy?
Aren’t they worth variety and spice and excitement and flirtation; aren’t you worth that? Don’t you want delight? Pleasure? Mutual enjoyment and fulfillment?
Don’t you want your marriage bed to feel like a celebration, not a compliance meeting?
Read Hebrews 13:4 again, but this time not as a warning. As permission.
What if we radically overthrew the system?
What if we encouraged one another to engage in safe sex as an act of care for their partner’s physical and emotional well-being?
What if we taught about the importance of emotional intimacy and mutual submission as a baseline for how we care for one another?
What if we spent time unpacking the harm that’s been done around sexual desire and were clear about the rules of consent? For men and women?
What if we learned to communicate honestly with our partners? Without fear of judgement? What if we created an openness that allowed one another to flourish?
And above all: what if we were less obsessed with rule-keeping and more committed to loving one another well?
There is wisdom, there is discernment, there is that gut feeling that maybe you shouldn’t make that late-night phone call to that number that you know will probably mess up your 5-year-plan. But how much of the behavior we try to avoid is born from secrecy, not desire? From shame, not sin?
How much of the behavior we try to avoid comes to the surface because we refuse to be honest about our desires and needs?
I believe we need to invest time in that. In teaching one another how to care well for each other’s hearts, and when we fall short, learning how to engage better next time. Creating spaces without shame and condemnation to ask honest and real questions in the church. And get a non-church answer, offering practical, realistic wisdom.
Because we don’t stone the non-virgin women anymore. And we don’t force people to marry their assailant. And we don’t exchange brides as bartering chips for land.
Let’s make marriage sexy again, in Jesus Name.
Let’s make our pursuit of holy living an embodied experience that doesn’t exclude our humanity; it engages it.
It sees us with the eyes of our Creator, who made us to feel all of these beautifully complex emotions.
Let’s make our love stories something we can celebrate with wine, like Jesus himself showed up to the party. Let’s allow the love of Christ to flourish in a way that makes others see the beauty and vulgarity and humanness of choosing another person and being dedicated to showing up for them in return, through all of life’s ups and downs.
That kind of love is Christlike. That kind of love is attractive. That kind of love does the work of evangelism without uttering a word.
Biblical marriage, Biblical love, is something we should all want. Especially when you realize good morning texts and sex positions are just as sacred to your covenant as sacrament.
God’s love is not sterile.
It is embodied.
It is joyful.
It is attentive.
It is intimate.
It is altogether wonderful.
That, beloved, is some very good news.
AN: What a way to close out love month. Leave your thoughts, comments, and 🌹 below!
