For what other reason should we keep our way far off from that of a wayward person? Solomon answers: “That you may not give to others your dignity, nor your years to what is cruel; that strangers may not satisfy themselves with your power, nor the things you got by pain be in the house of a foreigner, nor you have to groan in your future when your flesh and your organism come to an end.”​—Proverbs 5:9-11.

What, though, is included in the ‘giving of our years, our power, and the fruit of our labor to strangers, or foreigners’? One reference work states: “The point of these verses is clear: The price of infidelity may be high; for everything one works for​—position, power, prosperity—​could be lost either through the avaricious demands of the woman or the outcry for restitution by the community.” Immoral relations can cost plenty!