Ask most people what the Puritans thought about sex and you'll hear some version of the same caricature: gloomy, buttoned-up people who saw the body as a problem and the marriage bed as a necessary evil. The historical record tells a very different story. The Puritans were some of the warmest defenders of married love the church has ever produced.
They rejected the old suspicion
For centuries before the Reformation, much of the church treated celibacy as the higher calling and marriage as a concession for those who couldn't manage it. Married intimacy was often viewed with suspicion, tolerated for the sake of children but hardly celebrated.
The Reformers and the Puritans after them pushed hard against that view. They went back to Genesis, where God looked at the man and woman He had made and called it all very good. They read Paul's instruction that a husband and wife should not deprive one another (1 Corinthians 7:5) and took it at face value. They concluded that married love was not a lower path for weaker Christians. It was a good gift from a good God, meant to be received with thanksgiving.
They wrote about it plainly
William Gouge's Of Domestical Duties, published in 1622, was one of the most widely read marriage manuals of the era. Gouge counted the mutual giving of husband and wife to one another among the essential duties of marriage, and he treated it with the same seriousness he gave to prayer, provision, and the raising of children. Richard Baxter's Christian Directory likewise urged couples to keep their love for one another warm and to guard against anything that would cool it.
These pastors also understood that intimacy was about more than duty. They spoke of delight, of affection, and of the joy a husband and wife should take in one another. Proverbs gave them the language:
Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.Proverbs 5:18–19
A Puritan preacher reading that passage didn't blush and move on. He saw a command to enjoy the wife God had given.
They held couples accountable
One of the most striking examples comes from colonial New England. In 1640, the First Church of Boston disciplined a man named James Mattock, and among the charges against him was that he had denied his wife marital intimacy for two years. The congregation treated the withholding of love from one's spouse as a real sin with real consequences, the very opposite of what the caricature would predict.
They kept love inside the covenant
None of this made the Puritans loose. Their high view of married love came precisely from their high view of marriage itself. The historic Reformed confessions teach that God gave marriage for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of the human family, and for the prevention of uncleanness. Delight in one another was never separated from faithfulness to one another. The same God who commanded the husband to rejoice in his wife also commanded him to have eyes for no one else.
What we can learn from them
The Puritans offer modern Christian couples a healthy middle path. They refused the world's view that pleasure is the highest good, and they equally refused the false piety that treats the body as shameful. They placed married love exactly where Scripture places it: inside a lifelong covenant, received as a gift, and enjoyed to the glory of God.
If you grew up hearing that a godly marriage has to be a joyless one, the Puritans would be the first to correct you. Delight in your spouse is not a distraction from holiness. Received rightly, it is part of it.
For further reading, Leland Ryken's Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were gives an accessible overview of Puritan teaching on marriage and everyday life.
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