Why Everyone Hates Cheaters So Much (It’s Not a Crime After All)
Cheating occupies a strange place in modern morality. People will argue nuances in almost every other area of human failure, then see an affair and go full public stoning. The hurt matters. Betrayal matters. But the response to cheating, especially online, can become so bloated that it begins to look less like concern for the person who was hurt and more like a mass audition for moral superiority.
Part of that reaction comes from how strongly people condemn adultery in the first place. Pew reported that nine out of ten Americans say that a married person having an affair is morally wrong, placing the United States among the countries most likely to hold that view.
A study from 2025 in Social science found that infidelity tends to trigger anger, disgust, contempt, and compassion for the betrayed partner, which explains why people respond to it with such warmth. The emotional charge is real. The problem starts when strangers decide that emotional charge gives them a license to punish.
No one hates a cheater more than the internet
That streak gets a lot uglier once the internet gets involved. After Astronomer CEO Andy Byron was caught on camera kissing at a concert with the company’s chief executive, Kristin Cabot, the clip went viral and Byron resigned days later. In other words, there were already very real consequences attached to what happened. The public treated it all as a collective verdict, because online culture loves nothing more than a chance to turn someone else’s private disaster into content.
The collateral damage is where the whole play starts to look particularly deranged. After Barry Keoghan’s split from Sabrina Carpenter, he said the harassment rubbed off on his family, including people “sitting outside my little boy’s house and scaring them.” That is not accountability. It’s a bunch of strangers who decide their own sense of hurt deserves a target. The same moral certainty that makes people say cheating is unforgivable also makes them feel righteous while terrorizing people who had nothing to do with the relationship in question.
Author Esther Perel has argued that the “multifaceted experience of infidelity” is flattened when people reduce any affair to a simple villain story, a point summed up by The New Yorker. That does not excuse betrayal at all. However, it requires a little adult perspective.
Affairs can end marriages, destroy trust and humble people. They can also be involved in relationships that the public knows absolutely nothing about. The internet has turned cheating into a morality play because morality play is easy and uncertainty is not. Unfortunately, real life is not black and white. In fact, it is very gray.
