§ 189
Monogamy is not perfect if there is anesthesia on either side. Anesthesia prevents complete union. Only the mates who are completely directed each to other are fully married, and marriage means not partial but complete union. All degrees of fragmentary attachment are defective monogamy and so not monogamy at all, but unconscious polygamy.
Furthermore, that portion of the ego which is not attached to one’s mate exhibits a tendency to attach itself to some other one’s actual or potential mate, simply because attachment is a case of tension fixed to relax on a definite object, and if the legally sanctioned object has been detached, if the tensions natural to either sex are, by some complex, detached from that object, they tend of themselves to seek relaxation from some other person. If a man is completely satisfied with his wife he will not only seek no other woman, but will be dangerously attracted by no other, and vice versa.
So we can suppose a possible scale on which a husband’s union with his wife, not hologamous, is measured in units from 1 to 100 such that we might say a man was sixty-five per cent married to his wife, while yet she might be a hundred per cent married to him. This gives 10,000 degrees of non-hologamous marital union, M 1 — W 100 representing a man with only slight interest in his wife who is herself quite devoted to him. This man’s other ninety-nine per cent of libido might be directed to any number of other women. If it were directed toward one other woman he would undoubtedly be happier if he divorced and remarried. But it is the thesis of this book that M 1 — W 100 is an impossibility.
A division of libido as disproportionate as this would not imply much split in the man’s libido. He would thus be ninety-nine per cent devoted to his paramour and only one per cent to his wife. His paramour would be his de facto wife. But if his ninety-nine per cent of libido were directed toward ninety-nine other women he would be called a personality of maximum diffusion.