Pursuing Love that Blazes Like Fire

We don’t often think of men as lovers—not in the earnest, deep, meaningful sense. We respect men as workers and warriors, and we celebrate men who achieve great things: fighters, athletes, and entrepreneurs.

Yet sadly, we’ve also grown familiar with the much less chivalrous versions of these qualities. We know men who are too driven, too lost in work or a war. They become angry or withdrawn, distant or dangerous.

And when we think of a man as a lover, we may laugh. We’ve got almost no imagination for it, and that’s a tragedy, because the lover in a man is the part of him that connects to his world and all its goodness. The kind of love the Bible says “burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame” (Song of Songs 8:6) lets a man laugh, play or dance, hug or weep, reminding him that love isn’t just something we do; it’s something we feel.

What’s more, we’ve been conditioned to think men just want sex, but that’s simply not true. When men in counseling tell me they want love, they often preface it by saying, “I guess I’m more like the woman in the relationship. I actually want the emotional stuff.” What a broken, warped world it is when a man who wants affection, emotional connection, or romance thinks he’s acting like a woman.

In our culture the word “lover” and the idea of a fully alive heart have been exiled. Take “libido,” which we mostly define as a sex drive. The word from which it derives means “to love.” Even the word “virility” extends beyond our simple definition of sexual potency. In antiquity, virility was often associated with courage and self-control. Being a lover is about way more than your sex drive.

The connection between sex and the heart is inextricable. I want you to recover this image of a truly virile man, a man with virtue and vigor and courage and strength, because it gets us closer to identifying what’s missing in many men today. Being a lover involves a lot more than having sex. To be a man is to have heart. And sex that doesn’t require your heart, that doesn’t put your heart on the line, lacks virility.

Heavenly Father, I rejoice today that you have designed me to experience deep, authentic love, which goes far beyond the world’s mistaken assumptions. Amen.