Cheating occupies a weird place in modern morality. People will argue for nuance in almost every other area of human failure, then see an affair and go full public-stoning mode. Hurt matters. Betrayal matters. But the reaction to cheating, especially online, can get so inflated that it starts to look less like concern for the person who got hurt and more like a mass audition for moral superiority.

Part of that reaction comes from how strongly people condemn infidelity in the first place. Pew reported that nine in ten Americans say a married person having an affair is morally wrong, putting the U.S. among the countries most likely to take that view.

A 2025 study in Social Sciences found that infidelity tends to trigger anger, disgust, contempt, and compassion for the betrayed partner, which explains why people respond to it with such heat. 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 punitive streak gets much uglier once the internet gets involved. After Astronomer CEO Andy Byron was caught on a concert kiss cam with the company’s chief people officer, 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 the whole thing like a communal sentencing hearing, because online culture loves nothing quite as much as a chance to turn someone else’s private disaster into content.

The collateral damage is where the whole spectacle starts to look especially deranged. After Barry Keoghan’s split from Sabrina Carpenter, he said harassment spilled onto his family, including people “sitting outside my baby boy’s house intimidating them.” That’s not accountability. That’s a bunch of strangers deciding their own sense of injury deserves a target. The same moral certainty that makes people say cheating is unforgivable also makes them feel righteous while they terrorize people who had nothing to do with the relationship in question.

Author Esther Perel has argued that the “multifaceted experience of infidelity” gets flattened when people reduce every affair to a simple villain story, a point summarized by The New Yorker. That doesn’t excuse betrayal at all. It does, however, ask for a little adult perspective. 

Affairs can end marriages, wreck trust, and humiliate people. They can also sit inside relationships that the public knows absolutely nothing about. The internet has turned cheating into a morality play because morality plays are easy, and uncertainty is not. Real life, unfortunately, is not black and white. In fact, it’s very gray.