We tried again. Does that change anything?

This is the question people ask most often and find answered least, usually months after the decision has already been made. You found out, you tried again, it did not work. Whether that costs you anything depends entirely on which state you are in — and in a handful of them it costs you the ground you were going to rely on.

Two distinctions matter here, and almost every other source collapses them. “Not in the statute” is not “does not exist.” Five states have no condonation provision in their code; whether the doctrine survives in their case law is a different question and not one this site answers. And “no fault ground left to condone” is an answer, not a gap — in a no-fault state, forgiving the affair cannot cost you the divorce, because the affair was never what you were asking for.

All fifty, side by side

Every cell names the section it comes from. Where a state publishes its code only through a commercial publisher, the cell says not confirmed rather than repeating what other sites say about it.

Showing all fifty states.

The ones worth reading before you decide

Five things that get people wrong

1. “Not in the statute” is not “does not exist”

   Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Utah have no condonation provision in their codes. We know that because we read the codes. What we do not know is whether the doctrine survives in those states at common law, because that is a case-law question and case law is outside what this site cites. Five states are marked not in the statute for exactly that reason, and anywhere you see a confident “Utah does not recognize condonation” you should ask what it is based on.

2. New Hampshire keeps it without writing it down

   RSA 458:52 says “nothing in this chapter shall abrogate the common law doctrines of recrimination or condonation.” The doctrine is preserved by name and then left entirely to the courts. That is the opposite of the five silent states: there, the absence of a statute tells you nothing; here, the statute exists specifically to tell you the absence of rules is deliberate.

3. Forgiveness can be proved by what you did, not what you said

   New York’s DRL § 171 is explicit: forgiveness “may be proven, either affirmatively, or by the voluntary cohabitation of the parties with the knowledge of the fact.” Virginia, West Virginia and Alaska use almost the same construction. You do not have to say you forgave it. In several states, resuming the marriage after you knew is the proof.

4. The clocks are not where you would look for them

   Virginia’s five-year limit lives in § 20-94 — the condonation section — not in the grounds statute. Alaska and Idaho both run two years from discovery. West Virginia runs three, in two directions at once. New York’s five years applies only where there was neither express forgiveness nor cohabitation, which makes it a fallback rather than a general limitation. And South Dakota lists “limitation and lapse of time” as a mandatory bar while the sections that would have defined it were repealed in 1973, so there is no number at all.

5. Maryland has nothing left to forgive

   Maryland repealed its fault grounds effective 1 October 2023. There is no adultery ground to condone, which makes the doctrine moot there — while the misconduct factor survives untouched in both the alimony and property statutes. Twenty states are in the same position for the same reason, and that is an answer rather than a gap: in a no-fault state, forgiving the affair cannot cost you the divorce because the affair was never what you were asking for.

What we could not confirm, and how we got in

Nothing is blank. All fifty cells are filled, and the last two days are the reason this section is worth reading at all.

New Mexico closed on a change of question. Its official compilation serves statute text through a viewer that refuses automated reading, so we had read only the grounds sections and left the cell empty. But the question this column asks is not what does section X say — it is is there a condonation provision anywhere in the dissolution article, and that is answered by a section list rather than by section text. NMSA chapter 40, article 4 has thirty sections, 40-4-1 through 40-4-20 with decimal insertions. We read the full list in the 2025 compilation and cross-checked it against the 2006 one. Not one of the thirty mentions condonation, collusion, recrimination, defenses or forgiveness. New Mexico is silent, which on this page means we looked and there is nothing there — not that the doctrine is dead, because that is case law and this column records statutes.

What the two misses had in common. Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee were blank because we could not read their codes; New Mexico was blank because we could not read one section of its. In every case the sentence we published — we could not read the source, so we are not asserting an answer — was true, and was the right thing to publish rather than a guess. It was also the thing that let us stop looking. A blank cell with a stated reason feels like rigor, and rigor is a comfortable place to stop.

Two doors we had not tried. A state’s appellate courts publish for free and quote the statutes they apply — that opened Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee, and it is recorded on the adultery page in detail. And a question about whether a provision exists is answered by a table of contents, not by the text of a section — that opened New Mexico. Neither is clever. Both took an afternoon after two days of knocking on a locked front door.

If you can read something we have marked unreadable on any page, send it. We would rather publish a finding with your name on it than keep a clean-looking table.

Three of the four blanks closed on 1 October, and not by finding a better code mirror. Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee each route the official code to a commercial publisher, which is outside what this site will cite — but each state’s own appellate courts publish for free, and they quote the provisions they apply. Tennessee’s § 36-4-112 is described and partly quoted by the Court of Appeals in Gilliam v. Gilliam, 776 S.W.2d 81 (1988), which also puts the burden of alleging and proving condonation on the defendant. Mississippi’s doctrine is set out in Ashburn v. Ashburn, 2006-CA-00554-COA (27 November 2007) and the must-be-pleaded rule restated in Denham v. Denham, 2020-CA-00675-COA (1 February 2022). Georgia’s § 19-5-4 we read on two independent free reproductions of the code, which is weaker provenance than the rest of this column, so we are saying so here rather than letting the cell look like its neighbors.

The Cusp is not a law firm and does not provide legal, financial or clinical advice. This page records what statutes say and the date we read them. Condonation is an area where the written rule is unusually thin — several states make it a mandatory bar without ever defining it — which means case law does work the statute does not show. If the answer matters to a filing, take the citation to someone licensed in your state. And if you are deciding whether to try again, decide that on its own terms. This page is about what the law does afterwards, not about what you should do.

The questions at two in the morning is the place to start if the decision itself is what you are sitting with. What getting back together does to a divorce case covers the rest of the mechanics — abatement, dismissal, and what a court treats as resuming the marriage. Adultery and alimony covers what the affair itself costs.