For more than a century, cheating on your spouse has been a crime in New York.
But adultery may soon be legal thanks to a bill moving through the New York Legislature that would finally repeal the little-used law that includes penalties of up to three months behind bars.
The ban on adultery remains in effect in several US states, although accusations are rare and convictions even rarer.
They were traditionally enacted to reduce the number of divorces at a time when an unfaithful spouse was the only way to achieve a legal separation.
Adultery, a misdemeanor in New York since 1907, is defined in state code as when a person "engages in sexual relations with another person at a time when he or she has a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse."
Just weeks after it went into effect, a married man and a 25-year-old woman were the first people detained under the new law, after the man's wife filed for divorce, according to an article in The New York Times of the time.
Since 1972, only a dozen people have been charged under New York law, and of those, only five have been convicted, according to Assemblyman Charles Lavine, sponsor of the ban appeal bill.
The last adultery charge in New York was reportedly filed in 2010 against a woman who was caught engaging in a sex act in a public park, but was later dropped as part of a plea deal.
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Lavine says it's time to scrap the law, since it's never enforced and because prosecutors shouldn't be looking into what consenting adults do in their privacy.
"It doesn't make any sense and we've come a long way since consensual intimate relationships between adults are considered immoral," he said.
"It's a joke. This law was the expression of someone's moral outrage."
Katharine B. Silbaugh, a Boston University law professor and co-author of
A Guide to America's Sex Laws
, said the adultery bans were punitive measures aimed at women, intended to discourage extramarital affairs that might call into question the parentage of a child.
"Let's put it this way: patriarchy," Silbaugh said.
New York's bill to repeal the ban has already been approved by the Legislature and is expected to soon be approved by the Senate to be sent to the governor's office for his signature.
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The law was nearly eliminated in the 1960s, after a state commission tasked with updating the entire penal code found the ban was virtually unenforceable.
The commission's leader was quoted as saying: "This is a matter of private morality, not law."
The commission's changes were initially accepted in the Assembly, but the chamber reinstated the adultery law after a politician argued that its elimination could appear to be the state's endorsement of infidelity, according to a 1965 New York Times article.
Another Times article from the same time also detailed opposition from at least one religious group that argued that adultery undermined marriages and the common good.
Changes to the penal code eventually became law, with the ban on adultery intact.
Most states that still have adultery laws classify them as misdemeanors, but Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Michigan treat adultery as a felony.
Several states, including Colorado and New Hampshire, have moved to repeal their adultery laws, using arguments similar to Lavine's.
Questions also remain about whether adultery prohibitions are constitutional.
In 2003, a Supreme Court ruling struck down sodomy laws and cast doubt on whether adultery laws could be passed.
At the time, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his ruling that the ruling called those prohibitions into question.