Under Maine adultery divorce laws, a cheating spouse is grounds for a fault-based divorce, but the affair itself rarely changes how property, support, or custody get decided. Adultery is one of nine fault grounds listed in Title 19-A, Section 902, sitting alongside the no-fault option of irreconcilable differences.1Maine State Legislature. Maine Code 19-A 902 – Grounds; Defenses The practical rule to keep in mind: Maine courts react to what an affair cost the family, not to the affair itself.
Filing on Adultery Instead of Irreconcilable Differences
You can allege adultery in the initial complaint filed with the District Court, or you can file on irreconcilable differences and skip the question of blame entirely. Most Maine divorces go the no-fault route because fault filings are slower, more expensive, and carry a real risk.
If adultery is your only alleged ground and you cannot prove it at hearing, the court can deny the divorce outright. For that reason, attorneys who do file on fault grounds often list irreconcilable differences as an alternative, so the marriage still ends if the adultery claim falls short.
What Proving Adultery Looks Like
The spouse making the allegation carries the full burden of proof. Courts have historically looked for evidence of both opportunity and inclination: the chance to be unfaithful and behavior consistent with an affair. An admission or explicit messages are the cleanest proof, but circumstantial evidence can be enough. Text messages, credit card receipts for hotels or gifts, photographs, and witness testimony all come up in these cases.
Suspicion is not enough. Vague feelings or a spouse who comes home late will not meet the threshold. Concrete documentation needs to be in hand before the complaint goes in, because gathering it afterward, with the other side on notice, is much harder.
Defenses the Accused Spouse Can Raise
Maine’s divorce statute specifically addresses condonation. If the accusing spouse knew about the affair, forgave it, and resumed the marital relationship, the accused spouse can argue the claim should be barred. The statute makes clear this is not an absolute defense: the judge has discretion to weigh it and can still grant the divorce on adultery grounds despite the forgiveness.1Maine State Legislature. Maine Code 19-A 902 – Grounds; Defenses
Three common-law defenses also remain available, though they are uncommon in modern practice. Recrimination argues that the accusing spouse also committed adultery. Connivance argues that the accusing spouse set up or encouraged the affair. Collusion argues that both spouses fabricated the allegation for some strategic purpose.
How Adultery Affects Property Division
Maine divides marital property under an equitable distribution standard, meaning the court splits assets in whatever proportions it considers fair rather than defaulting to a fifty-fifty split. The statute directs the court to weigh each spouse’s contributions to acquiring property (including homemaking), the value of each spouse’s separate property, and each spouse’s economic circumstances at the time of division.2Maine State Legislature. Maine Code 19-A 953 – Disposition of Property
Adultery is not on that list. The fact that a spouse had an affair does not, by itself, change how the house, retirement accounts, or bank balances get divided. Courts do not use property division to punish infidelity, and a faithful spouse does not automatically get a bigger share of the marital estate because of emotional betrayal.
When Affair Spending Changes the Split
The real exception is money that went out the door to fund the affair. If a spouse used joint savings for hotel rooms, expensive gifts, trips, or rent for a third party, the other spouse can argue those expenditures were a waste of marital assets. Courts can credit the wasted amount back to the marital estate when dividing what remains. If one spouse drained $15,000 from a joint account on affair-related expenses, the judge may shift $15,000 in remaining assets to the other spouse to make the division whole.
One caveat worth knowing. The property statute also lists “economic abuse” as a factor, but that term has a specific legal meaning in Maine: it refers to one spouse controlling the other’s financial resources as a form of domestic abuse, such as withholding access to bank accounts, forbidding employment, or stealing money.2Maine State Legislature. Maine Code 19-A 953 – Disposition of Property That is a different issue from affair spending, though the two can overlap in some cases.
The marital-versus-nonmarital line matters here too. If a spouse spent their own separate funds — money they brought into the marriage, or an inheritance kept separate — the waste argument gets much weaker because those were never joint assets to begin with.
Adultery and Spousal Support
The court sets spousal support primarily on financial factors: the length of the marriage, each spouse’s earning capacity and income, their ages and health, and their economic circumstances. Being the wronged spouse does not entitle you to higher payments simply because the other person was unfaithful. Emotional betrayal, standing alone, does not move the needle on monthly support.
What does move the needle is money. The spousal support statute lists “economic misconduct by either party resulting in the diminution of marital property or income” as a factor the court must consider.3Maine State Legislature. Maine Code 19-A 951-A – Spousal Support If one spouse blew through savings to fund an affair, the court can factor that into the support award. Reimbursement support, one of the five types Maine recognizes, specifically exists for exceptional circumstances that include economic misconduct, giving the court a tool to compensate the other spouse for financial losses tied to the affair.
This distinction trips people up. The court does not care that a spouse cheated. It cares if the cheating cost the family money. Those are two different questions, and only the second one changes the financial outcome of the divorce. If the affair was emotionally devastating but financially invisible, the support calculation will proceed as though the affair never happened.
Both spouses must file Form FM-043, Maine’s mandatory Financial Statement, and intentionally entering inaccurate information can draw court-imposed penalties including attorney fees.4Maine Judicial Branch. Financial Statement Form FM-043 If you suspect your spouse funneled marital money into an affair, those financial statements are where discrepancies often first show up.
Does Adultery Affect Child Custody?
Maine courts decide custody using the best-interest-of-the-child standard. The statute lists specific factors: the child’s age, each parent’s relationship with the child, the child’s preference if old enough to express one, the stability of proposed living arrangements, each parent’s capacity to encourage contact with the other parent, and several others.5Maine State Legislature. Maine Code 19-A 1653 – Parental Rights and Responsibilities Adultery does not appear on that list.
Courts recognize that a person can be a poor spouse and a perfectly good parent. An affair, by itself, does not justify reducing parenting time or shifting primary custody. Judges focus on who has been the day-to-day caregiver, how each parent supports the child’s relationship with the other parent, and whether the child’s routine will be preserved.
Adultery enters the custody picture only when it directly harmed the child. If a parent left young children unsupervised to meet a romantic partner, or exposed the child to someone who poses a safety risk, that behavior becomes relevant — not because it was an affair, but because it affected the child’s welfare. The bar is not “this parent made bad personal choices” but “this parent’s choices put the child at risk.”
Should You File on Adultery or No-Fault?
For most people researching this question, the practical answer is to file on irreconcilable differences and raise the financial consequences of the affair during the property and support phases of the case. Here is what actually changes when you file on fault instead:
- Property division does not shift based on adultery itself. Affair-related spending can be credited back as waste, and you can raise that in a no-fault divorce too.
- Spousal support considers economic misconduct regardless of which ground you filed under.
- Child custody uses the same best-interest factors in both fault and no-fault cases. Adultery has no effect unless the child was directly harmed.
- A fault-based divorce is almost always more expensive and slower, requiring evidence, potentially witnesses, and a contested hearing just to establish the ground.
- If adultery is your only alleged ground and you cannot prove it, the court may deny the divorce. A no-fault filing carries no such risk.
Alleging adultery as the ground does not unlock any financial remedy that a no-fault filing would block. Wasted savings, hidden debts, and dissipated assets can all be raised either way. For most people, the no-fault path reaches the same financial result without the added expense and uncertainty of proving fault at trial.