What Song of Solomon Says Real Love Looks Like in Marriage

Key takeaways

• Love takes pursuit. When a spouse is far away, the Song of Solomon pictures someone getting up and going to find them.
• Love asks you to come out of hiding. The text invites a person to show their face, with no demand that the other person climb walls first.
• Love cannot be earned or bought. Adam Mesa taught that real love is a covenant decision, and that a wedding day is only the start of it.
• Feelings are poor judges of a marriage. Emotions rise and fall, so a promise has to carry the relationship on the days feelings do not.
• Honest feedback needs years of trust. Adam and Ashley Mesa described a recent hard conversation that worked because they had built the safety for it.

A nightmare that opened the conversation

This episode of the Beyond I Do podcast began with a story. Ashley Mesa told her husband, Pastor Adam Mesa, and the others at the table about a dream she woke from twice in one night. In it, a couple of months after their ten-year vow renewal, Adam told her he was done, that he was leaving her and the boys, and that he was stepping away from ministry too.

She woke up praying over the room, and even wondered if she needed oil. Adam's answer was that leaving his family sounded like a significant downgrade to his life. The room laughed, and the story gave the conversation its subject: what keeps a marriage together.

Why Song of Solomon, and why now

Adam explained that the episode grew out of a message he had just shared at his church. That Valentine's weekend the church married couples who had been living together or raising children without a commitment of marriage, something it does every other year. Before that, he preached on love from the Song of Solomon, which he described as a back-and-forth love letter between a man and a woman that also points to God's love for us.

Each of his three points set what culture says about love beside what the book shows. In this episode he went deeper on each point and invited Ashley to respond from her own life.

Love costs pursuit

The first passage is Song of Solomon 3:1-4, where a woman wakes at night and cannot find the man she loves.

By night on my bed, I sought him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I didn’t find him. I will get up now, and go about the city; in the streets and in the squares I will seek him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I didn’t find him.

(Song of Solomon 3:1-2, WEB)

In the text she goes through the city asking if anyone has seen him, finds him, and brings him home. Adam stressed that he is not lost. She simply wants him close. Against the idea that real love should be effortless, he said scripture shows that "love is revealed by effort, not by ease." He added that love that never pursues eventually forgets why it started.

Ashley agreed and gave examples. She said love is work, and that this is true in marriage and also in motherhood, where she keeps seeking out her children so they learn what love is. She turned to Adam and said that he sought her out for seven years even while they were married, and that she had to see how much harder he was working than she was. A spouse who vowed and then stopped changing, she said, leaves the marriage unhealthy.

Someone in the conversation also raised a point about Jesus. If he is the fullest picture of love and we still find it hard to pursue him, a human marriage will take even more effort. The same speaker pointed to 1 Corinthians 13, where patience and kindness are choices that have to be made.

Adam's application was direct. When you notice you are a degree of separation from your spouse, he asked, what are you going to do about it? In the passage the woman gets out of the house and goes into the city.

Love costs vulnerability

The second passage comes earlier in the book, where the man calls to the woman as to a dove hiding in the cleft of a rock.

My dove in the clefts of the rock, in the hiding places of the mountainside, let me see your face. Let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet and your face is lovely.

(Song of Solomon 2:14, WEB)

Adam described the picture as an animal burrowed in for protection, with the invitation to come out and be seen. He set it against a familiar line from culture: if you love me, you will scale my walls of trauma. The text asks something different of the person hiding. "Biblical love says, since I love you, I will come out of hiding." He was careful to add that coming out does not guarantee you will not get hurt.

Ashley pointed out the contradiction. Culture says love should be easy, then says it takes enormous work to reach someone behind a wall. She said transparency is what built trust and friendship in their marriage, and she described being honest with Adam during their struggle with intimacy. She told him it was hard, that part of it was on her, and asked what accountability looked like.

Adam added a warning from his counseling of couples. If you enter a marriage hoping your spouse will heal something only God can heal, he said, you have set your partner up to fail. When someone says an ex cheated, so the new partner has to prove himself, Adam asks whether this partner has given any reason to distrust. "Love that is earned, is not love in and of itself."

He also described what he tells men who stay quiet because they fear weeks of silence from their wives. A wife is responsible for how she handles a conversation, he says, and the husband is responsible to tell the truth in love so that both can come out of hiding.

Love costs sacrifice

The third passage is from the last chapter of the book.

Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm; for love is strong as death. Jealousy is as cruel as Sheol. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a very flame of the LORD.

(Song of Solomon 8:6, WEB)

Adam read on through the verses that say many waters cannot quench love and that a man who offered all his wealth for it would be despised. His illustration was a funeral. You could not offer people two hundred dollars each to show you how they would grieve when you die, because it can only happen when it happens. Love is the same: it cannot be bought with money, flowers or cards, and it cannot be earned.

From there he gave the third contrast. As he put it, "culture says love is proven by how strongly you feel." The Bible, he said, measures love by what you are willing to give. A seal, he explained, can only be opened by the person it is addressed to, so the verse describes a permanent promise that does not change with the circumstances.

He applied that to weddings. People ask about the colors and how many groomsmen there were, and almost nobody asks what you vowed. Adam said marriage comes from the vow. He called it a covenant, and said it is not an event, a moment or even a statement.

Ashley added that emotions fade quickly. She has cried out of the blue and been fine ten minutes later, and she has had hormone imbalances she gets checked for, so she does not want her family treated according to whatever she feels in a given moment. She said her love is contingent on how she loves Christ, and that when her time with God lacks, her family feels it. She also noted that Jesus attached a cost to the healing he gave people.

A hard conversation that worked

Adam gave a recent example. About three or four weeks earlier, Ashley had asked him why the two of them felt distant and cold since the holidays. She had taken on more people to manage at work, and her phone was always going off. Adam said the strain was coming home. The boys were being yelled at, and he told her they had begun staying away from her. He said a date night would not fix it and that she needed to learn to separate work from home.

He told her plainly that she was sucking the joy out of the house, and he described that as his way of saying, come out of the cleft and step back into the light. Ashley took it well and turned quickly, and he said things have gone increasingly better since.

She explained why she could hear it. "The one place I'm safe is with you," she said, and she already knew he would say whatever he said in love. Adam observed that this kind of honesty is built over many years, so that a correction does not feel like an attack. He also said the listener has to be willing to hear it and then say, now let me speak into yours. Ashley added that she stays accountable for her own actions even though Adam is her accountability.

What this means for you

Each of the three points asks for a first move. If you are distant from someone you love, ask what pursuing them would look like this week. If you are hiding, ask what you are afraid of and who you would let see it. If you are waiting for the feeling to return, think about the vow you made and what keeping it would require today.

Adam's hope was that couples would use the episode to start conversations with each other. Those talks are easier for people who have worked toward them, and the work can start with one honest sentence.