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Infidelity can have significant impacts on your divorce. Some legal and some, I would say, practical. From a practical standpoint, obviously emotions are going to be running high. And if it was an infidelity that precipitated a divorce, odds are there’s significant emotions that are playing a part in the process. The more emotional, the more angry, the more distrustful that the parties are, the more likely that’s going to be a contested case, the more likely that’s going to be possibly even a long, drawn out case. So you shouldn’t underestimate the emotional side, the emotional and psychological impact that it has on the case. And that’s wholly separate from the legal X’s and O’s. From a legal standpoint, I mean, infidelity is a relevant factor that the courts will consider in deciding how to divide your assets, in deciding whether to award alimony.
If I am representing the party whose spouse was unfaithful, then the argument would be that there should be some cost associated with that, some penalty associated with that. It wouldn’t be fair for them to receive equal treatment when they were not an equal partner emotionally in the marriage. If I’m on the other side of that issue, perhaps I have the client who was unfaithful. I’m going to make what is very common argument that you can’t put all the responsibility and all the failures of the marriage onto this one event, that it was issues in our marriage that precipitated this issue. And if you can’t agree on what the financial impact of that should be, there are judges and juries who will decide that for.
