By Oluwafunke Allen
Content note, upfront: today’s post talks directly about sexual language between spouses — what’s said, not just what’s done. If today’s not the day for that, no hard feelings, see you next week. If it is, keep reading.
Here’s a question I get asked in hushed tones, usually near the end of a session, after the “real” topics have already been covered: “Is it okay for us to talk like that with each other? In bed, I mean. Doesn’t that cheapen it?”
My answer surprises almost everyone. No, it doesn’t cheapen it. The silence is usually what’s cheapening it.
Where the fear actually comes from
Most of us were raised on a very tidy division: holy language belongs in church, and the other kind belongs to the world — to films, to secular music, to people who don’t take their faith seriously. Nobody sat us down and said this explicitly, but the message landed anyway: a truly godly marriage bed is a quiet, reverent, faintly formal place. Bold, playful, explicit language between husband and wife feels like smuggling something worldly into something sacred.
I want to gently take that assumption apart, because it isn’t holding up the way we think it is.
What’s actually in your Bible already
Song of Solomon 1:2 opens the entire book with the woman saying, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.” That’s not a shy verse. That’s a woman, married, initiating, specific,unembarrassed. Song of Solomon 6:3 has her declaring, “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine” — language of possession and desire, plainly stated, no euphemism doing the work for her. This entire book of Scripture — an entire book, eight chapters, canonised, preached from, sitting right there between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah — is a married couple speaking to each other with longing, specificity, and appetite, and God didn’t flinch at including it in His Word.
If Song of Solomon can be Scripture, plainly desirous language between a husband and wife was never the problem. The problem was that most of us have never actually read the book we claim to build our theology on.
So what makes language “holy” versus “cheap,” if it isn’t the words themselves
It isn’t the vocabulary. It’s the container. The exact same word, the exact same directness, means something entirely different depending on who it’s spoken to, why, and inside what covenant.
Spoken as performance, borrowed from something you watched, aimed at getting a reaction rather than actually seeing your spouse — that’s where it goes hollow. Spoken between two people who are actually known by each other, inside a covenant, with real attention behind the words rather than a script recited from somewhere else — that’s the same vocabulary, doing completely different, sacred work.
1 Corinthians 7:1-9 (MSG) is refreshingly blunt about all of this — Paul doesn’t reach for euphemism, he tells married couples plainly that their bodies belong to each other and that withholding isn’t spiritual restraint, it’s a problem to be corrected quickly. The tone of that whole passage is not delicate. It’s direct, because Paul understood something we’ve since lost: directness inside a covenant is not the enemy of holiness. Evasiveness is
far more often the actual threat, because evasiveness is what leaves both spouses guessing, performing, or quietly starving.
What this looks like practically
Start with permission, out loud, before you start with vocabulary. A short, unglamorous conversation — “I’d like us to be able to talk more openly with each other, is that something you’d want too?” — does more to make explicit language feel safe and sacred than any amount of confidence attempted without that groundwork first.
Let your own voice do it, not a script borrowed from somewhere neither of you would want to admit to. The words that actually land are the ones that sound like you, specific to your spouse, not generic lines imported from somewhere that was never built with covenant in mind.
And remember the container is doing more work than the content. The same sentence, said to build up the one person who has your whole covenant, is not the same act as that sentence detached from relationship, attention, or commitment. Context is not a technicality here. Context is the entire theology.
The line I want you to keep
You do not have to choose between reverent and honest with your own spouse. Song of Solomon didn’t. The most sacred marriage bed in Scripture is also the most direct one written down. Silence was never the safer, holier option — it was just the more comfortable one.
There’s more of this — including the part of my own story where I had to unlearn this exact fear — in the book.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below for more of this, every week.
— Funke
