Infidelity Reframes Marriage Norms

Contemporary cultural products (novels, press) increasingly avoid the term 'adultery' and instead use 'affair' or 'infidelity,' signaling a shift from treating extra‑marital sex as a public, contractual breach to treating it as a private relational problem. That lexical change often tracks legal shifts (e.g., New York decriminalized adultery in 2024) and changes in how millennials conceive marriage’s social meaning. — If widespread, this semantic and normative reframing will alter family law, divorce politics, debate over marital obligations, and how policy or institutions defend or adapt to changing household norms.