"So she seizes him and kisses him and with a brazen face she says to him: (verse 18) Come, let us drink our fill of love until morning. Let us delight ourselves with caresses."
The key to the actions of a harlot that entices a man is that the woman is sexually aggressive. Very few men can resist a sexually advancing, aggressive, seductive woman. This type of woman will usually get the man to give into the impulses she raises.
There are several lessons in this whole text:
The man cannot wait until he is in the presence of a sexually aggressive woman to start resisting and staying true to his wife (in the case of a single man – staying true to God's future choice for his wife).
It is sexual aggressiveness that moves a woman down the course of harlotry. When women come to understand and make use of the power that sexual aggressiveness has over men, it often becomes a destructive force in their lives. The television and movies of our day are like a training course in female sexual aggressiveness or how to be unfaithful. The tragedy is that there is no intimacy or true love waiting at the end of multiple sexual conquests for the woman any more than for the man. Intimacy and real love are not developed that way.
A man should mark sexually aggressive women to avoid contact with them for they represent a real threat to his happiness and prosperity.
What is interesting is that it is married women who are seeking to meet their husband's needs who really need to understand sexual aggressiveness within the confines of marriage. Most men find a sexually aggressive woman irresistible; it should be a man's wife who is trying to communicate through her sexual pursuit of her husband that she loves him and that she values him and wants depth with him. It is sexual aggressiveness of this sort within the marriage that has the power to transform the marriage. A woman can often communicate more of her needs and the marriage’s needed changes through sexual pursuit with clear communication in the midst of it than through any other means. A man who has a wife like this is highly likely to bend in her direction and take her advice and in this case suddenly follow her into strengthening their marriage, which is a good thing.
While a sexually aggressive woman outside of marriage is a bad thing and a destructive thing, a sexually aggressive wife toward her husband is a good thing in that it meets a deep need in a husband for respect and intimacy. Many men develop a sense of their own self-worth by whether someone wants them. Many men conclude (erroneously): if she wants sex from me and she is initiating it, then she wants me and loves me. This has to do with erotic love's place in a man's life. It is one of his top five needs, and he measures how much he loves his wife by how much he wants her sexually. Therefore he assumes it is the same for his wife. If she initiates, then she wants sexual relations with me and therefore she wants me and therefore she loves me. On the flip side: If she never initiates, then he is forced to conclude that she does not want him or that he is undesirable or that her love for him is slipping. Little does the man understand that a woman's needs are different and that she does not think the same or have the same top five needs.
Until tomorrow,
Gil Stieglitz