A husband speaks to his wife, coolly dismantling the whole idea of a lasting bond. He argues that their passion simply burned itself out—they loved until the feeling was empty, and once that pleasure disappeared, the marriage died with it. The vow, in his view, was never a sacred promise; it was just a contract sealed by excitement, and now that the excitement is gone, the obligation vanishes too.
He then shifts to a kind of blunt pragmatism. If he has new pleasures to share with someone else, what real harm does it do a spouse whose own desires have already faded? Jealousy, he says, is madness—they would only be torturing themselves by trying to restrict each other’s freedom. The mood is sly, conversational, and deliberately unromantic. There’s no anguish here, only a light, almost dancing cynicism. The speaker sounds like a worldly libertine shrugging off convention, turning fidelity into a worn-out game not worth playing.