The reason is that conjugial love places the highest value on a union of wills, and so freedom of choice. These two aims are banished from a marriage by competing for ascendancy or the dominant position. This competition divides or splits their wills into separate parts, and changes freedom of choice into slavery. So long as it lasts, the spirit of one plots violence against the other. If their minds were then opened up and inspected by spiritual sight, it would look as if they were fighting with daggers, and regarding each other alternately with hatred and with good will; with hatred when they are intensely competing, with good will when they hope to win and when under the influence of lust.

[2] Once one has gained the victory over the other, this hostility withdraws from the outward to the inner regions of the mind, and remains there uneasily. This results in coldness for the man who is subdued or enslaved, and also for the woman who wins or becomes dominant. She too feels coldness, because there is no longer any conjugial love, and its absence is coldness (see 235). The place of conjugial love is taken for her by the warmth derived from ascendancy, but this is utterly at variance with the warmth of marriage, though it may show outward signs of agreement through the workings of lust. When the couple have come to a tacit understanding, it looks as if conjugial love has turned into friendship. But the difference between conjugial friendship and servile friendship in marriage is like that between light and shade, between a real fire and illusory light, in fact, between a fully fleshed person and one composed of nothing but skin and bone.