By Oluwafunke Allen
A gentle note before we start: this one names some teaching many of us grew up trusting completely. Naming it isn’t an attack on the people who taught it — most were repeating what they’d been handed too. Keep reading if today’s the day for that. Before I could write a single honest sentence about marriage and intimacy, I had to go back and unlearn eleven things church culture taught me with total confidence, most of them never once checked against the actual text. Some of you recognize these instantly. Others will feel a flicker of “wait, is that not true?” halfway through. Both reactions are the whole point of this post. Let’s clear the ground, one myth at a time.
“Sex is dirty” and “good Christian women endure it”
Start with the two that do the most damage, usually together. Neither survives contact with Scripture. Hebrews 13:4 calls the marriage bed undefiled — not tolerated, undefiled. And the book that gives us our clearest picture of married intimacy, Song of Solomon, is written substantially from the woman’s own voice, and she is not enduring anything. She’s delighting, specifically and without apology. God designed the female body with an organ whose sole biological function is pleasure. A Designer who does that on purpose was not building a woman meant to tolerate her own marriage bed. He was building one meant to enjoy it.
“Sex is only for procreation” and “talking about it is unspiritual”
Song of Solomon never once mentions children — not a single verse. 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 discusses the marriage bed entirely in terms of mutual fulfilment, with no reference to reproduction at all. Sex was designed for bonding, healing, communication, joy, and covenant renewal, children being one good purpose among several, never the only one. And if silence around the subject were actually holy, God would have written Song of Solomon a great deal shorter. He didn’t. The body He designed deserves the dignity of honest conversation between two people who’ve covenanted to care for each other — silence is what’s actually been causing the harm, not the conversation itself.
“Effortless if you waited” and “wanting it makes you less godly”
Purity before marriage is a genuine gift to a covenant. It does not, however, delete the learning curve — communication, patience, and real knowledge of each other’s bodies are still required regardless of your history, and expecting otherwise is a setup for needless shame. As for initiating: 1 Corinthians 7:4 hands a wife authority over her husband’s body, which only makes sense if she’s an active participant, not a passive one. A woman’s desire inside her own marriage was never immodesty. It’s covenant love, expressed through the body God gave her on purpose.
“Spiritual Christians don’t feel desire” and “ownership runs one direction”
Scripture treats sexual desire as an entirely normal part of being human — even Jesus was tempted in every way we are, without sin, which tells you desire and sin are not the same category. And the verse most often quoted to argue a husband owns his wife’s body actually says the opposite: 1 Corinthians 7:4 is fully reciprocal, wife yielding to husband and husband yielding equally to wife. That’s mutual gift, not one-sided possession, running in both directions.
“God cares mostly about the rules” and “marriage cures lust automatically”
The biblical vision of sexuality is relationship-focused, not rule-focused — Ephesians 5:25-33 compares marital love to Christ’s self-giving love for the Church, not a checklist to be satisfied. The rules exist to protect something valuable; keeping only the rules while missing the relationship they’re protecting was never the point. And a wedding ring doesn’t switch off internal struggle — Jesus taught that lust is a matter of the heart, not circumstance, and growth in that area continues inside marriage exactly as it does outside it.
A word for the husbands, because this one gets missed constantly
Here’s a myth that rarely makes it into the sermon at all: that a husband navigating low desire, stress-related disinterest, or occasional difficulty is failing at being a man. Male desire fluctuates with stress, health, exhaustion, and emotional disconnection exactly as female desire does — it was never designed as an always-on default. Scripture ties a husband’s calling to sacrificial, patient love, not to constant performance. A husband struggling here isn’t failing his marriage. He’s a human being in a body affected by the same pressures his wife’s body carries, and he deserves the same grace this whole post has been extending to her.
The line I want you to keep
Every one of these myths shares the same fingerprint: they shrink something God called good down into something to manage, minimize, or quietly endure. Scripture never asked for that shrinking. It asked for the opposite — delight, honesty, and mutual giving, exactly as designed. The book’s second chapter, “Bursting the Myths,” goes through these and more in far greater depth.
