About Funke Allen
Marriage counsellor, storyteller, and student of grace
Oluwafunke Allen has spent fifteen years as a marriage counsellor, sitting with men and women who carried into their weddings narratives about sex and intimacy that were never theirs to begin with — myths inherited from parents, culture, and silence, rather than from Scripture. Married for over two decades, she writes from inside her own ongoing journey of learning, unlearning, and relearning what God actually designed marital intimacy to be, rather than from a place of having arrived.
Her own story includes a childhood where sex was never discussed, a single inherited warning that shaped her early fears, a boarding house at Federal Government Girls’ College Akure that became an unlikely place of spiritual awakening, and a marriage that has taught her — slowly, and against the grain of everything she was first told — that God’s design for the marriage bed is good, holy, and worth pursuing fully. She shares pieces of that journey throughout this book as “Voices from the Counselling Room.”
Funke is a woman who gathers every experience, every season, and every encounter and weaves them into the architecture of her becoming. Her life is a solid bridge — one that connects humanity to meaning, depth, and divine purpose. This posture of intentional living stirred in her a love for journaling, a quiet hobby that blossomed into the wellspring of her creativity.
From the pages of her journals emerged a voice — thoughtful, nurturing, and deeply intuitive. This voice now flows effortlessly into her unique recipes, her healing combinations, and the nourishing expressions she offers her audience. What began as personal reflection has evolved into authorship, and what started as curiosity has matured into a dependable gift: the gift of nurturing through wisdom, words, and wholesome nourishment.
Today, she stands as an author, a creative nutritionist, and a trusted nurturer — a woman whose life, message, and craft consistently feed the mind, strengthen the soul, and uplift the human spirit.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
My journey to becoming an author must have started in my early years. I remember myself in the dark toilet at Subuola Memorial Nursery and Primary School, where my imagination would race ahead to the world we live in now, while my five senses told me it was all a lie. One memory in particular has stayed vivid: a toilet that flushed without anyone needing to touch the handle. I could not explain it then, but I never stopped being curious about the world I was somehow already imagining.
I attempted writing a novel once, but it didn’t go far. My journals truly came to life during my university days, starting with simply jotting down points in church or during sermons. That habit gradually grew into prayer journals and expectation journals. I wrote and wrote, but my five senses kept tricking me into believing there was still something more I needed before I could be the great author God had designed me to be — so I went looking everywhere else for inspiration. It got worse when I lost interest in reading anything outside my academic curriculum, and then the internet arrived and gave my curiosity a new, less disciplined outlet: surfing the net.
Here is an interesting twist: I married a man who loved reading novels, the son of a librarian by nature, from a family that read books like no man’s business. In the early days of our marriage, I struggled with how much time and attention he invested in novels, which seemed to shut me out of his quiet moments. I was unhappy with that loneliness, especially because he was a banker who left home at dawn and returned at dusk, and weekends were given over to reconciling his work tickets. I wanted us to invest our time together in things we were actually doing together. Long story short — he stopped reading novels, because of me. What a shame.
That shame was real enough that I determined to nurture a love of reading in my own children. It turned out to already be in their DNA — I did not have to do much beyond buying books and, as they got older, giving them the chance to choose their own. My first son struggled with writing in his early school days, and I genuinely could not understand how a six-year-old could be in school from eight in the morning until the close of day and come home having written nothing at all. I tried every African-mother tactic of punishment and discipline I knew, and none of it worked. Eventually I resorted to prayer. Fast forward to today, and he is writing books of his own.
Back to me: journaling became so much my own thing that I would write epistles to my husband whenever I was unhappy. My personality struggles with confrontation, so rather than say how I felt out loud, I would put it down on paper. Some of those letters were so emotionally raw that they were difficult for him to relate to, and my five senses tore me apart each time that happened — yet I kept going back to it, because it was my default way of communicating my feelings. Over time I also developed the habit of writing a gratitude journal every day, either first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
Early one June, I woke around one in the morning and heard a notch in my spirit: that my gratitude journal could serve as a manuscript for a book. I was going to write about my life journey. The prompt I received was to start with my journal on sex in marriage — the one I had been building for years out of the questions that surfaced again and again in our premarital counselling sessions over the past fifteen years. It occurred to me that publishing that content would reach far more people than the counsellees who ever made it into our classes. This book is what came of that one o’clock prompt — and, I have come to see, one way of living out my own declaration to be a contributor rather than a spectator in God’s family, using what I have been given to help build up the saints rather than keeping it to myself.
VISION
I intend to make sure every human being I meet is helped to give meaning to the situations and circumstances they encounter.
VALUES
Spirituality. Family (connection). Impact. Integrity. Simplicity. Development and growth. Success.
Remembered by the mnemonic: Sally Found Interesting Ideas Sitting Down Suddenly.
THE TITLE OF MY STORY
The title of my story is “The Beloved” — a story that showcases a journey of newness, walking a path that connected situations and experiences together to make a whole. This story has handed me an instrument of impact. Everyone who played a part in it was, in some way, an agent God used to hand me my weapons of impact for my world — weapons meant to heal and change the narrative for people who have walked through abuse or misalignment, the tearing apart that leaves a life feeling incongruent with itself.
MISSION STATEMENT
My experience, and everything that has contributed to me so far, forms a whole network that serves as a tool and a weapon designed for impact in my world. This weapon was carefully crafted, and with it I am putting my footprint on the sand of time on a global dimension. This neatly and deliberately crafted weapon gave birth to the story of my life, titled “The Beloved.”
I believe this is how societal change actually happens: one life at a time, one home at a time, each home passing something better to the generation behind it than it received from the one before. That is the scale I am working at with this book — global in hope, but built one marriage at a time.
THE KIND OF WOMAN I AM
I am evolving as a woman into the woman who inspires her world, blazes the trail, pioneers greater works, models and exemplifies what she teaches, and serves as a type of Christ in human flesh. She is evolving into an Amazon — in the sense of that legendary race of female warriors — and so the authenticity of her inborn gifts is being given a special place for expression.
“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”
— Song of Solomon 6:3
