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Adultery
Adultery is usually defined as consensual sexual intercourse by a married person with someone other than their legal spouse. As there is typically an implicit or explicit agreement between spouses to not have sex outside the marriage, the common synonym for adultery is unfaithfulness as well as unfaithfulness or in colloquial speech, cheating.
The sexual colleague of a person committing adultery is often referred to in legal documents (especially divorce proceedings) as a co-respondent, while the person whose spouse has been disloyal is often labeled a cuckold; first, the latter term was applied only to males, but in more new times women have been characterized in this way too.
A marriage in which both spouses concur that it is acceptable to have sexual relationships with other people is termed open marriage and the resultant sexual relationships are generally not considered adulterous, at least from a non-legal point of view. The law in some areas may not be familiar with open-marriage agreements and thus such extramarital sex may be considered adultery nonetheless. Sometimes only one gathering in an open marriage will opt to contain other sexual relationships, in which case the one who does not do so is referred to as a wittol: sometimes called a "happy cuckold".
Penalties for adultery
Historically adultery has been topic
to severe sanctions including the death penalty and has been grounds for separation
under fault-based divorce laws. In some places the method for grueling adultery
was traditionally stoning to death.
In the original Napoleonic Code, a man might ask to be divorced from his wife if she committed adultery, but the adultery of the husband was not an enough motive unless he had reserved his concubine in the family home.
In many jurisdictions (e.g., Austria, Greece, Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan), adultery is still unlawful, but enforcement of the laws is often rough. In places where adultery laws are actually enforced, women are often punished more cruelly than men, in some cases being careful guilty of adultery even when they have been raped. This has been alleged to happen in Nigeria and Pakistan.
In the United States, laws differ from state to state. For example, in the State of Pennsylvania adultery is strictly punishable by 2 years of imprisonment or 18 months of treatment for madness. That being said, such statutes are typically measured blue laws, and are rarely, if ever, essential. In the U.S. Military, adultery is a court-martial able offense only if it was "to the chauvinism of good order and discipline" or "of a nature to bring discredit ahead the armed forces". This has been practical to cases where both partners were members of the martial (and particularly where one is in authority of the other), or one colleague and the other's spouse.
In Canadian law, adultery is distinct under the Divorce Act. Though the written definition sets it as extramarital relations with someone of the conflicting sex, the recent change in the definition of marriage gave basis for a British Columbia judge to strike that definition down. In a 2005 case of a woman filing for separation, her husband had cheated on her with another man, which the judge felt was equal way of thinking to dissolve the union.