Why are we treating an extramarital affair like a romantic comedy? This is not good.

This is why we can't have nice rings

“T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach had an affair” is the kind of thing that, in years past, you might have uttered very quietly to a friend or neighbor, the sort of thing that you might whisper to your spouse as you look over your shoulder to make sure the kids don’t hear. Affairs have historically been viewed as a catastrophic moral failure and a terrible thing; if it’s true what the moral philosopher Peter Kreeft says, that divorce is “the suicide of the family,” then surely an affair constitutes something akin to premeditated murder, the destruction of something precious in the service of something merely venereal.

Those days seem to be over. T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach are the hosts of one of the ten or twelve different variations of Good Morning America, and—not to be mean about it—most of us probably couldn’t pick them up from a lineup. But we all know who they are now because they had an affair with each other and it’s wall-to-wall news for some reason. Even by the low standards of tawdry celebrity gossip, the coverage of this sad scandal is remarkable in its depth and breadth.

And yet the frenzy of the news is matched only by its relative bloodlessness; everyone seems interested in what these people did, but nobody wants to acknowledge how bad it was. Indeed in some cases the coverage is outright positive: “The Internet Can't Help But Stan Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes,” Jezebel declared, while the Daily Mail gushed at the sight of the two “cozying up at NYC bar, spending a romantic weekend away upstate, and holding hands in an Uber.” Gross.

Affairs are not good. It’s okay to acknowledge that. It’s okay to acknowledge that marriage is good, that it’s better to be faithful to your spouse than unfaithful, and that affairs hurt lots of people, most pointedly the children that are often caught up in the confusing, bitter chaos that accompanies them. As I’ve written before, the practical effect of this kind of familial/matrimonial chaos on children is to render them both deeply hurt and deeply confused: They don’t understand everything about it, but they know that mommy or daddy decided that there was something or someone more important than them. If they’re not capable of comprehending what that all means, they can certainly grasp what it feels like. It’s bad enough when that happens in private, of course; imagine what it’s like to watch it happen on the front page of every tabloid in the country.

This feels a bit like a major societal shift—the weird and glitzy glorification of adultery, the cheerful “stanning” of two ruined marriages, the utter lack of comprehension as to just how awful it all is. We’ve come a long way from anything resembling a sane marriage culture, though I suppose the worst part is that we probably have not hit bottom yet. At this rate, sometime soon, we will.