³ The lips of another man's wife may be as sweet as honey and her kisses as smooth as olive oil, ⁴ but when it is all over, she leaves you nothing but bitterness and pain. ⁵ She will take you down to the world of the dead; the road she walks is the road to death. ⁶ She does not stay on the road to life; but wanders off, and does not realize what is happening.

Proverbs 5:3-6 (Good News Translation)

Proverbs 5, like much of the book, features a father’s warnings to his son about adultery in general, and the adulterous woman in particular.

And there is considerable irony in a man with 700 wives and 300 concubines talking about fidelity, though given the systems and culture of the time, a man ruling an empire fortified by politically motivated marriages may have been understandably concerned that every one of his wives were faithful. Solomon may also have been acutely aware of how much damage he could do by messing with someone else’s wife, especially considering that his dad, David, had done precisely that with his mom, Bathsheba, though blaming HER for that situation obscures a series of criminal acts.

I prefer to look at this passage through a modern lens and recognize that it offers wisdom to men and women both.

Selfish, predatory people will harm you without thinking twice.

They offer fun with the illusion of no consequences, and by the time the consequences arrive, they are often not there to experience them.

They will invite you into deals with little risk for them and great risk for you.

They will play with fire, because they have the money and the power to extinguish it and get great treatment for whatever burns they incur.

But you probably don’t.

And the result for you is bitterness and pain, a brutal lesson in the way the world works.

As I have written here before, in the crime drama parody The Naked Gun, Ricardo Montalban’s character Vincent Ludwig explains that the most effective assassin is someone who doesn’t know they are an assassin.

The ultimate relationship assassins are not people hiding up in their lair planning your demise. They are happy vampires. They are oblivious narcissists. They are, at least in their own minds, “high-value” men and women.

And they have no idea how much damage they do.

People commit adultery for any number of reasons. That is the topic of another post.

The spirit described here, however, is casually destructive. It sees rules as antiquated, and commitments as limiting,

She has no idea she is walking a path toward death.

He will not understand the damage he’s done once he’s done it.

And there’s very little prospect for accountability, or closure, because this spirit is usually far more committed to weaponizing the language of love than applying it in their lives.

This spirit is far more concerned with its pleasure than your pain.

Most of us can look back over our lives and see at least one relationship we never should have started.

Some of us can see a bunch.

We can see whole seasons we could have avoided by just saying “no thank you.”

Sometimes the best thing we can do is keep it moving.

(Photo Credit: Rodolfo Clix)