Physical vs. Emotional Sex in Men and Women: What Does the Bible Say?

As people who read and write on a website about sex between married Christians, it is important that we are all aware of what the Bible says about sex.

In our culture, it has been emphasized a lot in the last few decades that men are supposedly only physical, while women are only emotional. However, when I looked for evidence of this in the Bible, I could not find much.

In the one book that is specifically about sex, the Song of Songs, both the man and woman openly delight in each other’s physicality. Nothing is written that suggests only the man is physical or that only the woman is emotional.

In our culture, even in Christian culture, there is much written about women needing to be sexually available to their husbands, as if we are all a bunch of disembodied Victorian Gnostics who cannot stand the thought of physical sex and merely comply with it out of duty, or as long as we receive some emotions from it. Yet in 1 Corinthians 7:5, Paul admonishes both husbands and wives not to deprive each other. He does not single out only women, and he says nothing about emotions.

In the Bible, it says two are to become one flesh in marriage. Sex is inherently a physical act, and this is what the passage means. If it meant only emotions, then Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 6:16 to not become one flesh with a prostitute would make no sense. Our flesh is physical.

Sex is also a procreative act. Children do not result from an emotional union between men and women; they result from a physical one.

Perhaps some might point to the passages where Paul directs how husbands and wives are to behave toward one another as evidence of women needing emotions. In our society, love is often described as an emotion, and husbands are told to love their wives. However, emotions are also often described as temporary states, and the love that husbands are to have toward their wives is not something that is supposed to be temporary or dependent on mood or whim.

What is nonetheless abundantly clear in the Bible is that married sex is undefiled; it is supposed to happen regularly. And it is undeniably a physical act in its very essence.

Regrettably, our culture has a tendency to downplay the physicality of it. Men are often shamed for “objectifying” women by focusing on physicality, and if women express interest in the physical aspects of sex, they are often told they are “unladylike” or worse, even within the marriage bed.

The Bible may warn of the lusts of the flesh, but it never says that flesh in and of itself is sinful. Jesus had a physical human form. We are not just souls and spirits floating in the world; we have bodies.

As Christians, we need to get away from the ideas of the world and look to the Word and God’s creation. Both men and women are physical beings. Married sex, especially in the Song of Songs, is revealed to be something God intends for both men and women to delight in, and it is a physical act. In all that Paul wrote about sex in the New Testament, we see the repeated emphasis on the physicality of sex as being binding, something men and women are to save for marriage, and engage in regularly within marriage.

If there are any other passages I might be missing, I am open to hearing from them. But from all I have read, I think the Bible is quite clear: men and women are physical beings, sex is a physical act they are to enjoy in marriage, and nothing our society may teach can take away from that.