SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

De. Sooners posted in another thread:

"Side note, I do wonder if society did take this incredibly hard stance on cheating and no one ever reconciled or dated a known cheat if it would help to reduce the instances. Does the existence of R actually keep cheaters around. If they knew it would 100 percent without doubt ruin their romantic future, would cheaters still exist? Who knows."

Now, if this has been beat to death, point me to it; I don’t know how to search.

Leviticus and Deuteronomy (I refer to these not as religious texts, but as historical documents), both written perhaps 3,000 years ago, took a very dim view of adultery and punished it harshly.

Why?

Some possibilities:

1. If we punish it, it’s less likely to happen to us. Maybe. Why do we care so much? Should we care less?

2. Adultery can lead to violence. Maybe. But if adulterers are getting beaten up, who cares. They’re going to be stoned, anyway.

3. Adultery confuses paternity, inheritance, primogeniture, etc. perhaps more important then than now.

4. Adultery often produces abandoned women and children who must now be supported by the community, which would rather not. Still a problem.

Many US states will punish an adulterer in a divorce, although in only a few is adultery a crime. And if a crime, usually a misdemeanor. Ahh, but the public shaming.

What should society’s position be?

Can I please note that I was in no way condoning or advocating for a particular societal response to cheaters.

Just asking if it's possible the push to forgive and redeem cheaters could possibly aid in acceptability of it. If we were more hard line, always divorced them and never dated a known cheat... Would that reduce instances?

I'm not convinced it would for clarity. Just wanted thoughts on that.

I don't think punishment would matter. I mean, of the top five states with the highest murder rate, four have the death penalty. So, the possibility of punishment doesn't seem to be much of a deterrence.
But could we get popular media to stop romanticizing it? Stop making it look so enticing. Like we did with smoking. That could be a start.

Many US states will punish an adulterer in a divorce

Many? I thought it was maybe all of five states or some very small percentage. Yes, some other states have laws on the books but they’ve chosen to completely ignore them. Others have evidential demands basically requiring video of the act and ten eyewitnesses to come into play.

I would love to see adultery come back into relevance in divorces again. These days a number of women are the breadwinners, and as they too get screwed in divorces where their adulterous husbands walk away with cash & prizes for their sexcapades, just perhaps there’s a microscopic chance more states will stop ignoring infidelity when dividing assets.

One can only hope….

I said on that thread I do not think consequences will likely influence someone so busy dismissing them.

I do not mind if they use adultery as a factor for deciding settlement. I can see a lot of positives there. I thought it fair to give my husband a better settlement when he initially asked me for a divorce.( Of course that’s easier to do when there aren’t kids and both people make good salaries.We were also older and had a lot of equity in our home and other investments). I don’t think the ws should walk away with nothing, after all I did contribute to gaining all the things. I just felt that I blew up the marriage against his will and it was fair for him to be compensated differently in light of the circumstances. Of course, that offer would no longer be on the table given all that happened after that.

My problem is more with the idea that a no fault divorce would no longer be grounds at all. Mostly because then you have to prove the reason to be granted the divorce. Oh, the stepdad is molesting your daughter? Prove it. Your wife is emotionally abusive? Prove it. That’s really my only qualms on getting rid of the no fault divorce.

Though I don’t have a dog in the fight for myself, I won’t get married again if something happens to my husband. And if we divorce it won’t be because I cheated again.

Even if there were a Scarlet Letter of sorts for cheaters (and a small petty part of me is smiling as I type this) - I sadly don't think it would really change anyone's behavior.

I would, however, like it to be a factor in things like divorce and settlement.

And maybe (I know this is a slippery slope) if children are involved, consider having an AP not be involved with said children during the transition of separation/divorce.

Side note - I do wish the attitude towards those who expose would change. So many exposers are blamed as the homewreckers and relationship destroyers and not the cheaters themselves.

Given our recent dialogue, I'm sure she'll fall off her chair reading this but I largely agree with Hikingout on this one. Though of course can't be sure.

I think most cheaters aren't thinking of consequences at all and as such nothing could stop them preemptively. This begs the question is it inherit in their character or are we all capable of cheating?

I know so chaterogircally that I would never cheat, that I do not feel it is the latter. Probably a question for another thread and needs deeper thought.

I do however think it's possible it may stop the flavour of cheater that thinks 'they'll forgive me if I get caught, no one way they'd throw away our whole history for a fling' types. Simply because this hypothetical societal view necessarily eliminates the possibility of this thought. Specific example homealone123 (no longer an active user) simply seemed awestruck that her husband would possibly divorce her over a physical only affair. Another example being Puzzled-Physics-3226 wife (Reddit user) - who's wife had convinced herself that partaking in swinger parties without her husband's knowledge for 7 years wasn't a divorcable offense as no emotions were involved and it made her a better wife. Even said it didn't take her time away from him or have any affect on the marriage.

That being said, I think this level of delusional thought process is so rare it wouldn't really tip the needle. Likely accounts for less than one percent of affairs. Though I did just entirely make up that statistics based off accounts I've come across so it's ultimately just my opinion.

Then further to the above, would those people simply discover alternative rationalisations and thought processes to enable to affairs to start anyway?

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 8:59 PM, Wednesday, February 12th]

I believe the only true punishment that can be bestowed upon a "cheater" is something that happens within themselves. Those cheaters who are genuinely remorseful, take accountability and never stop investing in themselves, ultimately have to live with the heaviest of burdens. While their wounds are healed, the scars remain as a painful reminder for the rest of their lives. I honestly couldn’t think of any worse punishment … kinda like trading your soul to the devil.

I don't know about punishment but in my opinion pre-nuptial agreements should be mandatory, with context around emotional and physical infidelity.... Of course that brings with it the burden of undeniable proof, which then gets into privacy protections, etc, etc....so not as simple as it sounds

I think it would be better if we did punish adultery (civilly or criminally), but the main reason we don't is because the previous penalty systems for adultery were not equally applied to men and women. It's a little bit hard to say "yes we should" without recognizing that we used to, and when we did, women were dramatically more likely to be penalized despite men being mildly more likely to cheat.

We are sort of left with a system that punishes no one because the previous system unfairly over-punished women.

Maybe I should be careful about "no politics" here, but the upshot is something along the lines of "ideally society probably should punish adultery, but practically society hasn't shown the capability to apply those rules equally".

I think they should be punished in court. I was a legal contract and the ONLY reason it isn't is because law writers ... cheat also.

I think if you are married you should definitely have some sort of ‘punishment’ when it comes to the divorce. More alimony, less assets etc especially if the BS will be much worse off financially. This doesn’t happen in Australia unfortunately, infidelity has no bearing.

This is actually one of the original reasons for me not to leave. I would lose a lot of money, some of which was from my family for wedding and house presents (Im super lucky and have a generous family).

But as for society punishing them? Not sure on this one. I ready a FB list the other day on a women’s 40+ page I’m on. A lady asked ‘I’m dating a guy who admitted to cheating on his girlfriend 12 years ago, should I stop seeing him?’. The response was overwhelming obvious to run. And I was thinking holy shit this guy is condemned to a life of loneliness because of this one time event (assuming this was a once time event and there was no more context to it). I actually felt a bit bad for him.

My WH currently is being a great partner and even if we don’t end up together forever I still do hope he will continue to be an honest guy that is happy and emotionally open.

1. If we punish it, it’s less likely to happen to us. Maybe. Why do we care so much? Should we care less?

That second part is actually the point ethical non-monogamist are making: If we can treat our romantic relationship(s) more like they were friendships rather than central pillars of our emotional and mental health, then we would be a lot less hurt when they suddenly fail. ENM types are pretty big on internal validation, a lot of the "work" they recommend doing in preparation of ENM is precisely internal validation. They're basically doing what we recommend, but just doing it before any A happens.

Note: this does not mean ENM types think cheating is ok, but rather that it will hurt a lot less when it does happen.

Note 2: the above only applies for ENM types that recognize cheating, such as open relationships. There are other types of ENM which believe that it is inappropriate for anyone to draw sexual exclusion boundaries around anybody else, thus cheating is a meaningless concept.

3. Adultery confuses paternity, inheritance, primogeniture, etc. perhaps more important then than now.

If and when society decides to solve this, it'll likely be with mandatory paternity tests before signing the birth certificate as opposed to some kind of direct legal consequence for adultery

I don't think punishment would matter. I mean, of the top five states with the highest murder rate, four have the death penalty. So, the possibility of punishment doesn't seem to be much of a deterrence.

Punishment can definitely deter crime, just because there are some cases where it doesn't work, doesn't mean that there are no cases in which it works. I believe what you have shown with that death penalty example is that there is some threshold after which increased severity of sentence has no deterrent effect, but this does not mean that punishment as a whole has no effect. Think back to a few years ago around the covid times. Thieves were simply walking out of stores with flat screen tv's and other goods because punishments on theft were relaxed. Or revenge porn laws, do you think that they have had no effect whatsoever on revenge porn?

Just asking if it's possible the push to forgive and redeem cheaters could possibly aid in acceptability of it. If we were more hard line, always divorced them and never dated a known cheat... Would that reduce instances?

I believe it would, I think that social consequences for cheating are way too light, just like it was with the thieves walking out with tv's. An analogous situation would be something like the views on spousal violence back in the day when husband spanking their wives to discipline them was seen as acceptable. Compare that to nowadays when the reaction is universally: "get out of there girl!". There are plenty of men and women who would never date a violent spousal abuser and I do think that has some deterrent effect on would-be-abusers. Same dynamic would work for cheaters.

I think it would be better if we did punish adultery (civilly or criminally), but the main reason we don't is because the previous penalty systems for adultery were not equally applied to men and women. It's a little bit hard to say "yes we should" without recognizing that we used to, and when we did, women were dramatically more likely to be penalized despite men being mildly more likely to cheat.

We are sort of left with a system that punishes no one because the previous system unfairly over-punished women.

It is rather unfortunate that adultery deterrence wound up on the wrong end of the women's liberation movement. In hindsight it would have been much better to clean it up and make it unbiased instead of tossing it out altogether.

Maybe I should be careful about "no politics" here, but the upshot is something along the lines of "ideally society probably should punish adultery, but practically society hasn't shown the capability to apply those rules equally".

Not quite because as a society we've never actually made an honest effort to deter adultery in an unbiased manner, so it can't be said that we don't have the capability. Consider the analogy of men's prison sentences. Men are punished more harshly than women for just about every single crime outside of adultery(and related transgressions). The reaction shouldn't be "practically society hasn't shown the capability to apply those rules equally" so lets get rid of prison sentences! (which is what happened with adultery). The reaction should be to work to get rid of the biases but keep some form of punishment because it does have a legitimate purpose.

I like irwinr89’s idea about pre-nups. Maybe a standard form pre-nup that defines the burden of proof for adultery and the consequences.

We have sex offenders lists. Maybe cheaters lists.

I don’t think cheaters should be allowed to just move out and have children randomly exposed to a "new person" in a live-in situation. That’s a hard no for me.

I also don’t think a spouse should have to give up significant assets in a divorce to a cheating spouse. Had I divorced my H we had state mandated % I would get in alimony (no fault Divorce state).

When we married we had no $. There was nothing to per-nup lol. My post nup however is a different story. And yes I am well protected.

IMO half the world would be penalized for cheating lol.

One can argue that ALL divorce is caused by a breach of the marital contract and expectations.
We do have the experience of a long period where infidelity did carry legal repercussions.
Yes – for many countries and many years this tended to be one-sided, where the wife was seen as a lesser partner than the man, and the children the "possession" of the husband. We also have societies where paying for sex wasn’t seen as legal infidelity. But even the later decades where infidelity factored into divorce on a more gender-equal way (like the UK from about 1945-1975) it didn’t really give positive results.

Like... We had periods where getting your spouse certified as insane and locked away was the way to go. We also have so many instances where the cheapest solution was to simply kill your spouse and get to keep all the marital assets. Or to ship them to the countryside to prevent the social stigma of divorce. We had various level of proof required – generally it had to be more-or-less in-the-act. We had legal debates and definitions of what infidelity really was.

Other than a form confirming age, marital status as single and a certain level of sanity society didn’t make too many demands when I decided to marry. I would hate for it to make more stringent demands if I wanted to exit a bad decision.

What I do think however is lacking in our society is some form of required PRE-marital guidance.
Marriage is in it’s base a contract, and when it comes to divorce the laws follow that contract. Religion has nothing to do with that. A Catholic isn’t forbidden by law to divorce but by self-imposed ethics. No matter how restrictive the religious might be regarding matrimony, the laws are the same. I would want people to attend some form of 2–3-hour course outlining the LEGAL commitments they are entering by signing that marital contract. Like the realization that in many countries and states assets become marital unless you do a pre-nup, that it’s not really his income and her income but joint income. That the reason one can work 10-hour days and advance the career is the JOINT decision that the other maybe only work 4 hours, but tends to the children and home. That your bloated pension might be due to a decision for unequal earning opportunities. That if your spouse is lazy and doesn’t work then that impacts income and impacts JOINT assets...
I know this might seem to focus on the financial side of marriage, but reality is that financial disputes and issues is a greater cause for divorce than infidelity, and I think that a couple that budgets, plans, monitors etc their financial health has possibly closed what tends to be one of the hardest communication hurdles. Therefore possibly making it a more sustainable marriage.

Having said all that... I do think that if a betrayed spouse can show a joint and planned expected financial future then that should affect possible division of assets in divorce. I just don’t know of any/many couples that have this sort of plan in place.

The negative effects of obesity on every facet of life are well known, but we keep eating.

yes, cheaters should be punished.