This verse sits inside the father's lecture on adultery and the wife of your youth, Proverbs 5:1–23, and is one of the most genuinely disputed verses in the chapter.
Quick answer
The road resists examination. Whether the verse means she never considers where she is going or that the son never gets the chance to, the effect is the same: this is a path nobody stops to weigh.
Read the whole unit
This lecture is the book's most sustained treatment of sexual faithfulness, and it moves in three sweeps. First the warning (vv. 1–14): a woman who is not his speaks in honey and oil, and the father tracks where that road actually goes, past bitterness and a two-edged sword, past squandered vigor and years handed to strangers, ending in an old man's speech of regret spoken over a wasted body. Then the alternative (vv. 15–20), and this is what makes the chapter unusual: it does not finish with prohibition. It turns to water, cisterns, wells, and running streams, and tells the son to drink deeply at home, to rejoice in the wife of his youth, to be satisfied and delighted. The chapter's answer to a wrong love is a right one, offered warmly and without embarrassment. Finally the reason (vv. 21–23): the LORD is watching, weighing every path, and a man who refuses instruction is bound not by God's ropes but by his own.
Three words hold the lecture together, and each one repays attention.
The first is intoxication. The verb behind "enraptured" in verse 19 appears again in verse 20 and once more in verse 23, where it is rendered "go astray." The NKJV footnotes its literal sense at verse 19: intoxicated. So the lecture's spine is a single question about one capacity. The son is built to be swept away by love; the father never suggests otherwise and never asks him to want less. He asks him where the intoxication will be spent, because the same word that means delight in verse 19 means staggering in verse 23.
The second is weighing. Verse 21 says the LORD "ponders" every path, and the footnote gives the literal sense: weighs. It is the same verb the father used at 4:26, "Ponder the path of your feet," and the same one that appears in verse 6, where the woman's road is precisely what cannot be weighed. A man is asked to weigh his way; one road makes weighing impossible; God weighs it all regardless.
The third is the word behind "immoral." In verse 3 the NKJV footnotes it: literally a strange woman. The Hebrew term means other, outside, not-yours, and it runs through the chapter attached to strangers who consume a man's wealth (v. 10) and strangers who must not share what is his (v. 17). This matters for how the chapter is read. It is not a verdict on women, and the catalog must not let it become one. The word describes a relationship, not a character type: she is the woman who is not his. The father is not teaching his son that women are dangerous. He is teaching him what his own appetite will do with an opportunity, and every consequence listed in verses 9 through 14 lands on the son, not on her.
One more thing should be said plainly, because this chapter has been used badly. It is preventive literature, spoken at a fork the son has not yet reached, and its power is in arriving early. For a reader who is already past that fork, the chapter's warnings describe a road already walked, and the word that reader needs is not this lecture but the one Jesus spoke to a woman dragged in from exactly this sin: neither do I condemn you. Both are true. The warning stands at full strength for the one still choosing, and the door stands open for the one who did not heed it.
What this verse contributes
This verse explains why the warning has to come early. The Hebrew word behind "ponder" means to weigh or make level, and it is the same verb the father used one chapter earlier when he told his son to "ponder the path of your feet" (4:26). Weighing is the skill the whole book has been teaching, and this verse says it is precisely what this road does not permit. Her ways "are unstable," literally wandering, and there is no fixed line to measure. The lecture's counsel in the next two verses follows directly: if a road cannot be assessed from the inside, the assessment has to happen before you are on it.
Why translations differ
The Hebrew is compressed and the subject is not certain. The NKJV reads it as a warning to the son, "lest you ponder her path of life," meaning the road keeps him from ever weighing it. The NIV makes the woman the subject: "She gives no thought to the way of life; her paths wander aimlessly, but she does not know it." Both are defensible readings of the same consonants, and the difference is real, one describing her obliviousness and the other his. The teaching survives either way, which is why the entry above states it from the road rather than from a person: on this path, nobody is weighing anything.
Related: Proverbs 4:26 · Proverbs 5:21
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.