Americans have long considered cheating one of the worst things you can do to another person that doesn’t end in jail time.

We witnessed the ire that messing around incites second and third hand in July, when a kiss cam caught the now-infamous Coldplay CEO (not his legal name) and his fellow Coldplay-loving coworker canoodling during a concert at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts. After being spotted, the pair quickly separated and ducked, leaving frontman Chris Martin to speculate that they were having an affair. The video quickly became national news, with sleuths revealing the people’s real names (Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot), job titles (CEO and head of HR, respectively), and the company they work for (Astronomer, a data platform company). Online vigilantes found and descended on their spouses. Somehow, Martin’s own ex-wife Gwyneth Paltrow got involved (as part of a joke, not the affair).

Byron and Cabot’s affair contained a mash of scandalous elements, but there’s another reason why it has brought about the swiftest stripe of internet justice seen in recent memory: Americans love an uncomplicated story about a perceived moral failing. Nothing, therefore, brings us together quite like cheating.

We like when cheaters get caught. We like when cheaters have to pay. We like when cheaters get what we think they deserve. We like the Coldplay cheaters because we really don’t like dealing with the concept that infidelity is much more complicated than we want it to be.

Despite the raft of changes that have come for American relationships — the advent of feminism, the rise and fall of divorce, the burgeoning world of open marriages — and the bare fact that sneaking around isn’t uncommon, adultery is still the big bad thing we can all agree on. Why, exactly?

Americans are profoundly anti-cheating and always have been

There’s no question about it — getting cheated on can be horrible: heartbreaking, destabilizing, earth-shattering, wildly unfun. Unsurprisingly, cheating’s approval numbers are incredibly low.

Since 2001, Gallup has surveyed Americans about behaviors they find immoral, and cheating has consistently been in the gutter, neck and........

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