Say what you will about freedom and bodily autonomy, but adultery is perhaps the most harmful thing in society for which the perpetrators go unpunished. The reason I believe adultery should be a crime is not because of it being a sin or marriage being sacred or what not.

The first reason I believe so is that it is essentially defrauding your partner. Committed relationships, especially marriage, are an agreement between partners to share their lives and most things in them. When one partner is not faithful within the relationship, that partner is not upholding their part of the arrangement.

The second and more important reason is that being cheated on feels so violating that it’s hard to describe. When you devote yourself so much to another person thinking they’re equally devoted to you, it’s the greatest connection two humans can have. Now imagine the entire time that this idea is a lie because the partner is not devoted to you. Being cheated on is only half the pain. The other half is that your devotion to each other was an illusion from the beginning. Every memory you made, every feeling you thought you felt, was all based on a lie.

The third reason is that there are long term impacts from cheating. The cheater not only screws up their own life, but that of their partner. Their partner suffers more. Sometimes they can never feel trust or devotion again. And this is so much worse when there are kids in the picture. Kids suffer incredibly when they realize one of their parents was raising them in a lie, and that their role as a parent was a second thought. Victims of cheating end up truly broken, and all of them suffer some degree of long term issues with trust and relationships.

And all of this for what? For the cheaters own self gratification? It’s so pathetic that the law allows anyone to create so much pain and turmoil for such selfish reasons. I don’t care what your beliefs are, violating a committed relationship is wrong and creates lasting harm. I don’t care what you do in your bedroom if you’re not deceiving anyone while doing it. But the moment you start deceiving those closest to you, making sometimes years of their lives a lie, I think it should be criminal.