I wonder how many married couples have reached the place where they share a bedroom every night but have slowly lost the habit of being husband and wife in that room.
I think it happens more easily than most of us would care to admit, especially after enough years of marriage that life has become crowded with responsibilities.
We work, raise children, serve at church, keep up with a household, and by the time we finally make our way to bed, there is often very little left of us to give to the person lying beside us.
Somewhere along the way, the bedroom can become little more than the place where two exhausted people charge their phones and get enough sleep to do it all again tomorrow.
I have been married long enough to understand how that happens, and I certainly have no intention of writing this as though I have perfectly managed every season of my own marriage.
Last time, we began this series, “The Three Rooms of a Christian Home,” in the kitchen, where fellowship is built through the ordinary work of feeding our families and gathering them together.
Today I want to move into a room that deserves far more attention than we sometimes give it, because the health of the marriage affects nearly everything else happening beneath the roof.
Psalm 127:1 says, “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it.”
We can put an enormous amount of effort into building a good life for our family while allowing the very relationship that began the family to slowly become neglected.
I think this is especially easy for mothers because the needs of children can be so immediate, and there are seasons when keeping everyone fed, clothed, educated, and cared for seems to consume every available minute.
Then the children grow, the demands change, and we discover that the marriage has been patiently waiting for attention we kept intending to give it later.
That realization ought to concern us.
There is a reason God gave marriage a particular kind of intimacy, something reserved for a husband and wife that belongs to no other relationship in the home.
Genesis 2:24 says, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
That cleaving requires intention long after the wedding day has passed.
And the bedroom has a very practical part to play in protecting it.
I think Christian women sometimes become uncomfortable discussing the physical side of marriage, perhaps because we were raised to treat the subject with such privacy that we eventually stopped talking about it altogether.
Privacy is certainly appropriate, and there are things between a husband and wife that ought to remain theirs alone.
Still, Scripture speaks plainly enough about marital intimacy that we should be able to acknowledge its importance without embarrassment.
First Corinthians 7:3 says, “Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.”
Paul goes on to speak of the mutual responsibility husbands and wives have toward one another, and I think the word mutual deserves our attention.
Both spouses have needs, both are called to care for the other, and the physical relationship within marriage should be approached with affection, consideration, and a genuine desire for closeness.
There are seasons when intimacy requires more thought and effort than it did when we were newlyweds.
Pregnancy, postpartum recovery, illness, exhaustion, hormonal changes, and the ordinary effects of aging can all change what comes easily to us.
A loving marriage makes room for those realities with patience and understanding, while remaining mindful that this part of the relationship deserves care.
I think we can become so accustomed to postponing intimacy that eventually postponement becomes the habit.
We tell ourselves we will have more energy when the baby sleeps through the night, when the children are older, when work settles down, or when life becomes a little less demanding.
Some of those seasons really do require adjustment, but marriage cannot spend twenty years waiting for circumstances to become ideal before husband and wife begin making room for one another again.
There is also an emotional intimacy that needs protecting in this room.
I want my bedroom to be a place where my husband and I can lay down the responsibilities of the day and enjoy being together.
After years of raising children and carrying the ordinary concerns of a family, there is something precious about having a place where conversation can wander without an agenda, where we can laugh about something nobody else would find particularly funny, or simply enjoy the familiarity that comes from sharing so much life with another person.
Those moments are easy to lose when we allow the world to follow us into bed.
I am as guilty as anyone of picking up my phone to check one thing and discovering far more time has passed than I intended.
We have become so accustomed to being constantly available that even the final minutes of the day can be surrendered to messages, news, social media, or whatever happens to be demanding attention from a screen.
Meanwhile, the person we promised our life to is lying a few inches away.
I wonder whether many of us need to become more deliberate about closing the rest of the world out of our bedrooms.
There are conversations a husband and wife need to have without interruption, and there is affection that deserves room to develop without competing with a device.
Sometimes protecting the marriage may begin with something as ordinary as putting the phone down early enough to remember that the person beside us is worth our undivided attention.
But there is another kind of protection this room needs, and I think it may be just as important as the physical side of marriage.
We need to be careful about what we carry into it.
Every marriage has disagreements, disappointments, and seasons when one or both people are struggling.
I have never met a married couple who managed to live together for decades without occasionally hurting one another’s feelings or failing to understand what the other needed.
The question is what we do with those things once they happen.
Ephesians 4:26 says, “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath.”
I understand that verse is sometimes used carelessly, as though every marital disagreement must be completely resolved before anyone is allowed to sleep.
Some matters require time, and an exhausted couple may be far wiser to agree to continue a difficult conversation the next morning than to argue until two o’clock simply because they believe the Bible requires an immediate resolution.
Still, there is wisdom in refusing to become comfortable with unresolved resentment.
A bedroom should never become the place where affection is continually withheld to punish a spouse, where silence is used to make the other person miserable, or where a husband and wife have grown so accustomed to emotional distance that neither remembers how to begin closing it.
That kind of coldness can settle into a marriage gradually, especially when the same hurts have been allowed to accumulate without honest conversation.
There may be genuine wrongs that need addressing, and forgiveness does not remove the need for repentance or rebuilding trust.
Yet we should be very careful about allowing ordinary marital frustrations to become a reason for keeping our spouse at arm’s length indefinitely.
I think about how much effort we put into making our bedrooms beautiful.
We buy comfortable bedding, arrange furniture, choose lamps, and try to create a room that feels restful at the end of the day.
I enjoy those things, and I believe there is value in making this space pleasant for the two people who share it.
But I also want to consider whether the relationship inside the room is receiving the same attention as the room itself.
There is something sad about a beautifully decorated bedroom occupied by two people who have become strangers to one another.
Song of Solomon gives us such a lovely picture of the affection that belongs within marriage.
In Song of Solomon 2:16, the bride says, “My beloved is mine, and I am his.”
I love the sense of belonging in those words.
After years of marriage, there is something deeply comforting about knowing you belong to someone who has seen you through every season of life and still desires your companionship.
The bodies change, the responsibilities shift, and life has a way of introducing circumstances neither person could have imagined on their wedding day, yet the affection between husband and wife can continue growing through all of it.
That is worth protecting.
And I think wives need to be honest about the part we play in that protection, just as husbands must be responsible for theirs.
We cannot spend all our energy nurturing every other relationship in the family and assume the marriage will remain healthy simply because we are still living together.
Our husbands need to know they are wanted, appreciated, respected, and loved beyond what they provide or accomplish for the household.
There is a particular tenderness that belongs to marriage, and it should be cultivated with enough consistency that affection remains familiar even during the seasons when life becomes demanding.
I also believe our children benefit tremendously from knowing that Mom and Dad have a relationship that belongs to them.
Children are precious, and their needs deserve our attention, but they should grow up understanding that the marriage has a place of its own within the family.
There is security in watching parents enjoy one another, protect time together, and continue choosing each other as the years pass.
Eventually those children will grow up and build lives of their own, and the two people who began the family will find themselves sharing a home with fewer interruptions and considerably more time together.
I want that season to be something we look forward to.
I want the years spent raising children to have strengthened our friendship enough that when the house becomes less busy, we still genuinely enjoy the person sitting across from us.
That kind of marriage is built through the years we are living right now.
I know there are some couples reading this right now whose marriages are in difficult seasons, and I would never want to make something deeply personal sound as though it can be fixed by a date night, fresh bedding, or simply trying harder.
Some marriages carry serious wounds, and healthy repair may require considerable time, outside counsel, and genuine change.
For those of us navigating the ordinary demands of married life, however, I think there is value in occasionally examining what we have allowed to become normal.
Have we become so busy caring for the family that we have forgotten to care for the marriage?
Has our bedroom become another place where the world competes for our attention?
Are we making room for affection, conversation, and the physical closeness God intended for marriage, or have we allowed exhaustion and habit to determine how much of ourselves our spouse receives?
There have been seasons when the marriage has received whatever energy remained after everything else was finished, and I know how easily that happens when you are trying to keep a household running.
Yet I also know that the relationship I share with my husband deserves deliberate care, even when life is busy enough that making room for it requires us to change a few habits.
As we continue thinking about the rooms of a Christian home, I hope we remember that the bedroom has a purpose worth protecting.
It should be a place where a husband and wife can retreat from the demands of the world, where affection is welcomed, where private conversation strengthens friendship, and where the marriage is given the attention it deserves.
The kitchen may be where much of our family fellowship is built, but the bedroom is where we have an opportunity to nurture the relationship that made us a family in the first place.
And if we are asking the Lord to build our house, surely we ought to care deeply about the marriage at its foundation.
Biblical Womanhood
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