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Who really said it

Bigamy Is Having One Spouse Too Many. Monogamy Is the Same

Not Erica Jong — an anonymous joke she quoted Anonymous Author unidentified · in print by 1922, still unsigned in 1942
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Erica Jong did print this joke — as the epigraph to chapter one of Fear of Flying (1973) — but she signed it “—Anonymous (a woman),” not with her own name. Quote Investigator traces the gag back through anonymous printings to an 1841 precursor and finds no single originator ↗. One further wrinkle: every dated printing in that record says “wife” or “husband” — the tidy gender-neutral “spouse” version is a later smoothing, and is in fact the headline Quote Investigator wrote for its own article.

Last verified 8 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Bigamy Is Having One Spouse Too Many. Monogamy Is the Same” Anonymous. Not Erica Jong: she used the "husband" wording as a chapter epigraph in Fear of Flying (1973) and credited it to "Anonymous (a woman)." Earliest printing to pair bigamy and monogamy: Robert Webster Jones, Light Interviews with Shades (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 1922), 18. Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Erica Jong. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the themes of love and happiness. Theme: "Bigamy Is Having One Spouse Too Many. Monogamy Is the Same". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Bigamy Is Having One Spouse Too Many. Monogamy Is the Same". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the joke actually shows up in print

Earliest documented pairing
Light Interviews with Shades
Author & year
Robert Webster Jones, 1922 — Dorrance & Company, Philadelphia
Location
Chapter I, “Bluebeard Tells Why He Killed Wives,” page 18
Popularly credited to
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (1973) — where the epigraph is credited to “Anonymous (a woman)”

I could go on all night telling you about my other wives and the causes of their sudden shufflings-off … The proverb says, ‘A word to the wives is sufficient,’ but I never found it so. Not by a long shot. I found action more effective than words. They say bigamy means one wife too many; but so does monogamy sometimes. 1922 · page 18

Spoken by the shade of Bluebeard in a comic mock-interview. This is the earliest printing Quote Investigator documents that pairs “bigamy” and “monogamy” — the wording is not yet the modern one, and it carries no author’s name beyond Jones, who is writing in Bluebeard’s voice.

Scanned 1922 edition
Light Interviews with Shades, page 18
Quote Investigator: the full 1841–1973 chronology

How we verified this

No status is asserted for the wording on this page: it is an anonymous joke with no identified author and no identifiable first publication, and the “spouse” form in particular matches no dated printing on record. The 1922 and 1929 printings quoted above were published before 1931 and are out of copyright in the United States. Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) is in copyright, but the epigraph she reproduced there was already circulating unsigned, and she credited it as anonymous rather than claiming it.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Three names, none of them the author

This joke has been pinned on three different people across a century of reprinting. The paper trail supports none of them — and one of the three said so herself, in print, at the time.

Erica Jong Populariser, not author

Jong used the “husband” wording as the epigraph to chapter one of Fear of Flying in 1973 and signed it “—Anonymous (a woman).” Quote Investigator notes that she did not credit herself, indicating the joke was already in circulation ↗. Aggregators then dropped that byline and substituted hers — one such page credits it to Erica Jong flatly, with no source at all ↗.

Oscar Wilde No evidence

The Wilde ascription surfaces in A Treasury of Humorous Quotations (1969), long after the joke was in print anonymously. Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence that Wilde wrote or said it ↗, and the line does not appear anywhere on Wikiquote’s Wilde page ↗.

H. L. Mencken Compiler, not creator

Mencken printed the saying in his 1942 New Dictionary of Quotations without naming an originator, and The Reader’s Digest reprinted it that September marked “Author unidentified.” By 1970 an Omaha newspaper was crediting the line to Mencken himself. Quote Investigator documents each of those steps ↗.

“One spouse too many” Modern smoothing

No dated printing on record uses “spouse.” The citations run “wife” (1922, 1929, 1942, 1969, 1970) and “husband” (1973). The gender-neutral form is in fact the title Quote Investigator gave its own article ↗ — a researcher’s summary heading, not a historical quotation.

The honest answer is older and duller than any of the three names: an anonymous joke that mutated in print for well over a century, and the one person who could plausibly have claimed it — Erica Jong — explicitly refused to. Quote Investigator’s chronology runs from 1841 to 1973 without ever finding an author ↗.

Context

Why this one sticks to Erica Jong

An epigraph is a strange piece of typography. It sits at the top of a chapter in the author’s book, set in the author’s typeface, and it is the one thing on the page the author did not write. Jong made that explicit — the line under her epigraph reads “—Anonymous (a woman).” But quotation databases scrape the quote and the nearest name, and the nearest name on that page is hers.

The same mechanism had already run twice on the same joke. H. L. Mencken put it in his 1942 dictionary with no originator named, and The Reader’s Digest reprinted it that September as “Author unidentified”; within a generation an Omaha newspaper was crediting the line to Mencken. A 1969 humour anthology handed it to Oscar Wilde, who is the default owner of any epigram nobody can place. Jong is simply the third and most durable name to be attached to a joke that has been signing itself ‘anonymous’ since before she was born.

She signed it “Anonymous (a woman).” The internet crossed that out and wrote her name.

How old is the joke, really?

Quote Investigator’s chronology starts in 1841, with a Greenwich pensioner in a London character sketch who holds “that every man takes one wife too many whenever he is such a fool as to marry the first.” The words ‘bigamy’ and ‘monogamy’ are not there yet, but the shape of the joke is.

The first printing to use both words is the 1922 mock-interview book Light Interviews with Shades, where the ghost of Bluebeard delivers it: “They say bigamy means one wife too many; but so does monogamy sometimes.” Seven years later The Literary Digest ran a version very close to the modern one, crediting the British humour magazine London Opinion rather than any writer — which is how this joke has travelled for its entire documented life.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Love Happiness

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full 1841–1973 chronologyquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Twelve dated citations, the Fear of Flying epigraph, and the verdict that Mencken and Jong popularised the joke without writing it — while the Oscar Wilde ascription is unsupported.
Light Interviews with Shades (1922) — scanned in fullarchive.org

Robert Webster Jones's mock-interview book. Page 18 carries the earliest documented pairing of "bigamy" and "monogamy" in this joke, spoken by the ghost of Bluebeard.
Erica Jong on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's sourced collection of her lines — notably, this one is not among them.
Oscar Wilde on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Checked for the rival credit: the bigamy/monogamy line appears nowhere on the page, sourced or misattributed.
Fear of Flying (novel)en.wikipedia.org

Publication facts for the book that carries the epigraph: Erica Jong, 1973, Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Erica Jongen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the author most often credited: born 26 March 1942, novelist, satirist, poet and teacher.

The popularizer, not the author

Erica Jong quoted it — and said so

Erica Jong

Born 26 March 1942 · American novelist, poet and satirist

Erica Mann Jong is an American novelist, satirist, poet and teacher, born in New York City on 26 March 1942. Her 1973 debut Fear of Flying was famously controversial for its frank treatment of female sexual desire, figured prominently in second-wave feminism, and has sold tens of millions of copies. She opened its first chapter with this joke as an epigraph — and credited it to “Anonymous (a woman),” which is precisely the line the internet later deleted in order to hand her the credit.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented pairing

Robert Webster Jones, “Bluebeard Tells Why He Killed Wives,” in Light Interviews with Shades (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 1922), 18. Earliest printing to pair “bigamy” and “monogamy” per Garson O’Toole, “Quote Origin: Bigamy Is Having One Spouse Too Many. Monogamy Is the Same,” Quote Investigator, 16 July 2014, which also documents an 1841 precursor and the 1973 Fear of Flying epigraph credited to “Anonymous (a woman).”

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Bigamy Is Having One Spouse Too Many. Monogamy Is the Same’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/bigamy-is-having-one-spouse-too-many-monogamy-is-the-same/

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