Song of Solomon 4:9 says your wife can steal your heart with one glance. If it’s been years since she did that to you — if romance feels like something you did during the engagement, not something you still do — you’re not broken. You just stopped reading the parts of your Bible that talk about this.
To love your wife like Christ loved the church means pursuing her the way Song of Solomon pictures it and Ephesians 5:25 commands it — not with sentiment, but with sacrifice, delight, and daily pursuit that outlasts the wedding day. Song of Solomon shows what desire and romance look like inside God’s design for marriage. Ephesians 5 shows what that love costs: your comfort, your preferences, your life, laid down the way Christ laid His down for the church. Together, they call a man to be an active, passionate, faithful lover of one woman for life — not a husband who mistook the vows for the finish line.
This Is Bigger Than the Bedroom
Physical intimacy is part of this conversation, but it’s not the whole conversation, and it’s not what this post is about. If you’re looking for a straight answer on the physical side of marriage, that’s a separate topic for a separate post.
This is about the courtship you stopped running the day you got married — the pursuit, the desire, the delight in one specific woman that Song of Solomon and Ephesians 5 both assume is still happening decades in. A man can be faithful in the bedroom and still have stopped chasing his wife everywhere else. This post is for that gap.
The Command Ephesians 5:25 Actually Gives
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25, NIV). That word for love is agape — not a feeling, a direction. It moves toward her, not toward how she makes you feel.
Paul doesn’t stop at the command. He defines it: Christ “gave himself up” — not advice, not affection when it’s convenient, but a body laid down.
Verses 28-29 push it further: “husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies… he who loves his wife loves himself” (Ephesians 5:28-29, NIV). You already know how to care for your own body — you feed it, protect it, pay attention when something’s wrong with it. Paul says love your wife with that same instinct, aimed at her instead of you.
This isn’t about who leads. It’s about what love costs the one doing the leading. A husband who reads Ephesians 5 and skips straight to authority has missed the verse. Christ’s authority over the church looked like a cross. Your love for your wife should look like sacrifice before it looks like anything else.
Paul also writes, two verses earlier, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21, NIV). Whatever you believe about how a home should run, that verse sits right before the command to husbands. Love that costs you something is the frame the whole passage hangs on — not a footnote to it.
Love Is a Verb Before It’s a Feeling
Paul’s other famous description of love reads like a checklist, not a mood: love “is patient, love is kind… it always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7, NIV). Every one of those is something you do, not something that happens to you.
That matters because most men wait for the feeling before they act. They tell themselves the spark will come back on its own, and pursuit will follow naturally once it does. Scripture reverses the order. Do the patient thing, the kind thing, the persevering thing, and the feeling tends to follow the action — not the other way around.
Providing Is Not the Same Thing as Pursuing
Here’s where most Christian men actually get stuck. You work, show up, and pay the bills and coach the kid’s team on Saturday and show up to church on Sunday. You’ve quietly decided that providing is your love language, and that should be enough.
It isn’t wrong to provide. Ephesians 5:29 tells you to feed and care for your wife the way you’d care for your own body — provision is part of the command. But provision without pursuit turns a marriage into a well-run business. Your wife isn’t a coworker you’re managing well. She’s the woman Song of Solomon 4 describes a husband staying up late to praise, feature by feature, because he still can’t stop looking at her.
If the last time you pursued her on purpose was the engagement, provision has quietly become a substitute for romance instead of an expression of it. Scripture never lets those two separate — Song of Solomon’s husband is a king with a kingdom to run, and he still stops everything to praise his wife by name.
Song of Solomon: The Book Churches Skip
Most men can’t name a single verse from Song of Solomon. It’s eight chapters of romantic and sensual poetry between a husband and wife, and a lot of churches quietly skip past it.
For most of church history, that wasn’t the problem — the opposite was. Origen and later Bernard of Clairvaux read the Song almost entirely as allegory: Christ and the church, not a real husband and wife. Bernard preached 86 sermons on the Song of Songs and still hadn’t finished it when he died (Cantica Canticorum: Eighty-Six Sermons on the Song of Solomon). That reading dominated for over a thousand years. Modern scholarship swung the other way, reading the Song as ancient Near Eastern love poetry — real desire between two real people, nothing more (Logos, “Is the Song Allegorical?”).
Both readings get something right and miss something too. A growing number of scholars now argue for both at once — the Song describes real romantic and physical love between a husband and wife, and that love is itself a picture of God’s covenant love (Logos). You don’t have to choose. The Song is a real love story that happens to double as a window into how God loves His people. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the point.
What Pursuit Actually Looks Like in Scripture
Song of Solomon isn’t vague about romance. It’s specific.
The husband initiates: “Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, come with me” (Song of Solomon 2:10, NIV). He doesn’t wait for her to come to him.
He praises her out loud, specifically, not generically: “You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride; you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes… How delightful is your love” (Song of Solomon 4:9-10, NIV). Four full verses follow, praising specific things about her — not “you’re pretty,” but a detailed, unhurried description of what he actually sees and loves.
She responds in kind, wanting to be wanted: “I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me” (Song of Solomon 7:10, NIV). Desire runs both directions in this book.
And it closes with the strongest claim about love in the whole Bible: “love is as strong as death… many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away” (Song of Solomon 8:6-7, NIV). That’s not soft. That’s a man being told his love for his wife should be one of the most durable forces in his life.
Solomon’s not the only voice in scripture saying this. Proverbs tells a husband to “rejoice in the wife of your youth” and to stay “ever intoxicated with her love” (Proverbs 5:18-19, NIV) — decades after the wedding, not just during it. And Paul, writing to a church in a culture that treated marital affection as optional, told husbands and wives not to withhold physical intimacy from each other except by mutual agreement, “so that Satan will not tempt you” through neglect (1 Corinthians 7:3-5, NIV). Desire between a husband and wife isn’t tolerated in scripture. It’s protected.
The Puritans Understood This Better Than We Do
If you picture the Puritans as sexless prudes, you have the history backward. Richard Baxter taught that pleasure between husband and wife was good, so long as it pointed back to God’s glory. William Gouge told couples to “mutually delight each in other, and maintaine a pure and fervent love.” John Cotton rejected the idea that women were a necessary evil, calling a wife “a necessary good” (Desiring God, “Christian Hedonists or Religious Prudes?”).
They didn’t just teach it. They enforced it. In 1640s Boston, the First Church excommunicated a man named James Mattock — not for adultery, but for denying his wife intimacy for two years (Desiring God). Withholding love from your wife was treated as a sin worth church discipline, not a private preference.
Jonathan Edwards, one of the most serious theologians America ever produced, wrote of his own marriage as a union that was “spiritual and therefore will continue forever” (Desiring God). These were not soft men, and this wasn’t a fringe position among them — it was mainstream Puritan doctrine, taught from the pulpit and enforced by the church. They thought neglecting your wife was the sin. Not desiring her.
Eros Isn’t Lust — C.S. Lewis Draws the Line
C.S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, makes a distinction worth sitting with: “Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved” (1517, “C.S. Lewis and the Four Loves”).
Lust wants a body. Eros wants her — her whole person, her history, her voice, her presence in the room. That’s the difference between a man who still chases his wife and a man who’s only ever chased the feeling she gives him. One fades when the feeling does. The other doesn’t, because it was never really about the feeling in the first place.
Lewis ties Eros back to the same cross Paul describes in Ephesians. Romantic love, done right, becomes self-giving instead of self-serving — it starts to look like the love Christ has for the church rather than a love that only takes (1517). Desire isn’t the enemy of sacrifice. Rightly aimed, desire becomes a form of it.
What the Research Says About Marriages That Stay Alive
Dr. John Gottman has studied married couples since 1976, and one of his earliest findings still holds: the quality of a couple’s friendship predicts whether the marriage survives better than almost anything else (Gottman Institute, “Marriage and Couples Research”). His later work found 69% of the problems couples fight about never fully resolve — they’re rooted in personality differences, not solvable disagreements. Marriages don’t fail because they have problems. They fail because the friendship underneath the problems erodes.
One concept from his Sound Relationship House model is called a “Love Map” — the detailed, current knowledge you carry of your wife’s inner world: her stress, her friendships, her unmet dreams, what’s actually on her mind this week (Gottman Institute, “Build Love Maps”). Couples who keep updating that map, instead of running on what they knew about each other five years ago, handle stress better and stay closer.
None of this is secular in the way it sounds. Solomon was building his wife’s Love Map three thousand years before Gottman had a name for it — that’s what four chapters of specific praise in Song of Solomon 4 actually is.
Gottman’s research also found that in heterosexual marriages, husbands who let their wives influence real decisions — not just the small ones — were far more likely to stay in happy, stable marriages than husbands who didn’t (Gottman Institute). That’s not a contradiction of Ephesians 5. It’s the same posture from a different angle: a husband who lays his preferences down for his wife’s sake, whether the topic is dinner or a five-year plan.
Counterfeit Romance vs. Biblical Pursuit
| Counterfeit Romance | Biblical Pursuit |
|---|---|
| Romance was for dating; marriage is for logistics | Pursuit is a lifelong pattern, not a courtship phase (Song of Solomon 8:6-7) |
| Generic compliments (“you look nice”) | Specific, detailed praise of who she actually is (Song of Solomon 4:9-10) |
| Waiting for her to initiate connection | The husband initiates: “Arise, my darling… come with me” (Song of Solomon 2:10) |
| Love as a feeling you either have or don’t | Love as a direction you choose and act on — agape (Ephesians 5:25) |
| Desire that only wants the physical | Desire for the whole person — Eros over lust (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves) |
| Not knowing what’s actually going on in her life this week | An updated “Love Map” of her inner world (Gottman Institute) |
How to Actually Pursue Your Wife This Week
Start with her Love Map. Ask what’s stressing her out right now, who she’s been talking to, what she’s been dreaming about lately — and actually remember the answers. Most men know less about their wife’s current inner world than they think.
Praise her the way Song of Solomon 4 does: specific, out loud, unhurried. Not “you’re a good mom.” Name the actual thing you watched her do and tell her you saw it.
Initiate. Don’t wait for her to plan the date, start the conversation, or make the first move toward closeness. Song of Solomon’s husband says “come with me” — he doesn’t wait to be invited.
Remember what Ephesians 5:25 costs. Pursuit sometimes looks like flowers. More often it looks like taking the kids so she can breathe, killing your own plans for her sake, or apologizing first. That’s the sacrifice Paul is actually describing.
Protect the time. A Love Map you don’t update goes stale — Gottman’s research points to regular, undistracted conversation as the mechanism, not a once-a-year anniversary trip (Gottman Institute). Fifteen minutes a night with your phone somewhere else does more than one elaborate date a quarter.
Let her influence something real. Gottman’s finding on husbands who accept their wife’s influence isn’t about picking a restaurant — it’s about a budget decision, a schedule change, a parenting call, going her way sometimes because her judgment matters as much as yours (Gottman Institute). That’s a form of pursuit most men never think to count as one.
A Word for the Women Reading This
Some of you found this post searching on behalf of a husband who isn’t chasing you the way he used to. You’re not wrong to want this — Song of Solomon 7:10 says desire runs both directions in a healthy marriage, not just from husband to wife.
Ephesians 5:25 is written to him, not you, and it’s not your job to extract that love from him through pressure or performance. But you can hand him this post, pray Proverbs 5:18-19 over your own marriage, and know that what you’re longing for isn’t vanity or an unrealistic standard from a movie. It’s the standard God actually wrote down.
Is Romance Just Vanity? Answering the Objections
“Isn’t chasing romance a distraction from real spiritual leadership?” No — Ephesians 5:25 is the leadership instruction. Christ didn’t lead the church by managing it from a distance. He led it by loving it enough to die for it. Pursuing your wife isn’t a break from leading her well. It’s what leading her well looks like.
“What if I pursue her and she doesn’t respond?” Ephesians 5:25 doesn’t have a performance clause. Christ loved the church “while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8, NIV), not after it responded well. Your call is to love like that regardless of the response you get back — not because her response doesn’t matter, but because your obedience doesn’t depend on it.
“Isn’t this just for newlyweds?” Song of Solomon 8:6-7 says love should be as strong as death and unquenchable by anything life throws at it. That’s not a description of month one. That’s a description of the whole marriage, including the hard, boring, ordinary middle of it.
“What if my marriage has been more roommate than romance for years?” Then start with one verse, not the whole book. Read Song of Solomon 4:9-10 out loud to her tonight and mean it. Pursuit doesn’t require a perfect starting point. It just requires a start.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
You already know the verse about your body being a temple (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Fewer men have thought about what it means to treat their marriage as sacred ground too — a place God is honored not just by discipline, but by delight.
This is part of the same new identity in Christ every Kingdom Gladiator is walking into: a man who’s bold, disciplined, and strong isn’t just fit for the gym and faithful at church. He’s the most passionate, attentive man in his own house. That’s not a soft add-on to discipleship. Song of Solomon and Ephesians 5 put it in scripture for a reason.
Nobody pursues perfectly. Christ’s love for the church is the standard precisely because it’s not yours by default — it’s something you grow into, one deliberate choice at a time, the same way discipline in your body isn’t natural either until you build it. Song of Solomon and Ephesians 5 aren’t handing you a performance review. They’re handing you a direction to walk.
If you want a community of men pursuing this — body, mind, and marriage — the free Kingdom Reset 5-Day Fast inside the Kingdom Gladiators Skool community is where to start. It’s the same framework this post pulls from: obedience over willpower, in every part of your life your wife shares with you.
