1If only you were to me like a brother, who was nursed at my mother’s breasts! Then, if I found you outside, I would kiss you, and no one would despise me.
PDA, Public Displays of Affection, vary from culture to culture and change over time. We know from watching the news that in most Muslim countries women must stay covered from head to toe when outside the home. Only close family may see them, and only females can touch females, except close family, and not in public. A friend noticed something here in Tennessee a few months ago. A group of Muslim men were eating in a restaurant and some kids kept running up to their table and then disappearing. It turned out that the women were eating in a completely different part of the restaurant with the children. They were not even allowed anywhere near their husbands! Now doesn’t that make you want to become a Muslim! I digress! The wife in our text wants to be able to step out of her culture and express her desire for her husband publically. She “wants” him! But she is not allowed to express it in public. We have few of these kinds of restrictions. Sometimes I wish we did; seeing couples making out with the words “get a room” running through my head, makes me want some tighter social rules. This wife wants to be able to publically say she desires her husband, not because she wants to flaunt cultural norms, but because she wants her husband to know he is desired by her. This is part of that dance of desire that makes for long-lasting intimacy in marriage, the kind that keeps burning for years.
The Arnold Journey 