"Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth"
The wisdom tucked into this verse is so incredibly deep that most men completely miss its truth. The fountain in this proverb is one's wife – the source of children that will be born to this union.
Solomon is saying if one's wife is blessed, treasured, cherished, and rejoiced in, then the prospect of sexual fulfillment for you and her will be heightened. A woman is a totally different sexual being than her husband. She needs to sense that she is valuable and treasured as a person, not just a sexual object. She needs to sense and see that her husband values the relationship with her above the sexual fulfillment that he can get out of her.
rejoice in the wife of your youth
Notice the word rejoice. To rejoice means to re - joy and the word joyis always associated with depth, harmony, and connectedness of relationship. Solomon is imploring young men to invest new energies in the wife they have, and that reconnecting with her will bring a level of blessing and encouragement to her that will allow her to respond to him. Solomon is rightly saying to married men that if you want a lively and enjoyable sexual relationship, start treasuring and filling up your wife in her needs and she will respond to you.
Does your wife feel blessed to be married to you? Does she feel neglected or abandoned as you pursue work and hobbies, only approaching her for your own selfish ends? What could you have done over the last three months for your wife to really honestly say that being married to you is one of the greatest blessings of her life?
With incredible insight Solomon – moved by the Holy Spirit of God – gets it right that a husband who focuses his attention on his wife's needs will develop a dynamite relationship in which the physical relationship will be a delicious frosting to the substance of their relationship.
Gentlemen, the secret to a great sex life is: Let your fountain (wife) be blessed and rejoice (reconnect deeply) with the wife of your youth. It is the depth of the relationship that creates the wonder and pleasure of a sexual relationship.
It is interesting that this advice is coming from a man who just kept adding wives and concubines to meet his own sexual pleasures. I would submit that this verse is an admission that that method of satisfying his sexual need did not satisfy his soul. It is possible that Solomon actually went back and began to develop a relationship with these women who he just kept adding to his harem, and that he found that developing a relationship with these treaty wives was deeply rewarding.
What often happens in marriage is that a man becomes consumed with his own sexual fulfillment. This drives him to try and meet this consuming impulse in his life outside of the boundaries of marriage. He will eventually run into the consequences of this behavior either financially, maritally, physically, emotionally, etc. If he had been willing to invest in his wife and renew their relationship, he would have found a renewed woman ready to interact with him physically.
The New Testament is right when a man honors his wife, understands his wife, gives her security in the relationship, builds a dynamic unity, develops a system of agreement in which the two can live and make decisions as one, nurtures his wife as his number one relationship, and defends his wife from internal and external foes, he will create a dynamic marriage in which his soul, spirit, and body will be satisfied in and with this woman. Too few men have been willing to put in the time to really allow their wives to be blessed.
Until tomorrow,
Gil Stieglitz