u/Foolishkillahh

If you strip it down, cheating isn’t just “messy feelings”. It’s lying in a situation where the other person is making real decisions based on trust. People share money, build homes, plan families, and even rely on each other for their health.
If someone deliberately breaks that trust, they can cause real damage, financial stress, serious emotional harm (sometimes permanant) or in some cases, exposing their partner to diseases without their knowledge. In that sense, it’s not that different from other situations where deception leads to harm, and those are exactly the kinds of things laws usually step in to deal with.