No, not in the way most people mean. Florida ended fault based divorce decades ago. Under section 61.052 of the Florida Statutes, a court grants a dissolution of marriage on one of two grounds: that the marriage is irretrievably broken, or that a spouse has been mentally incapacitated for at least the preceding three years. Adultery is not on that list, and it is not a defense either: a spouse cannot block the divorce by denying fault or by pointing to fault on the other side.
That answer lands badly when an affair is the reason you are reading this, so it is worth being precise about what the law does. A Florida divorce court has two jobs: unwinding a shared financial life, and, where there are children, setting a parenting arrangement that works. Conduct enters the case where it changed one of those two things. Where it did, it matters concretely. The rest of this explains where those openings are.
Proof of the affair, on its own, buys very little
People often arrive with photographs, screenshots, a hotel receipt, sometimes an investigator's report. The difficulty is that a judge is not being asked to decide whether it happened. The questions in front of the court are what marital money went into it, and whether anything about it reached the children. Evidence that answers those questions has real work to do. Evidence that establishes only the relationship generally has none.
One caution before you gather anything. Florida requires the consent of every party to a private conversation before it is recorded. Section 934.03 of the Florida Statutes makes intercepting a wire, oral, or electronic communication without that consent a criminal offense, and section 934.06 bars unlawfully intercepted communications, and evidence derived from them, from being used in a Florida proceeding. A recording made to prove an affair can be a felony and inadmissible at the same time. Ask your attorney before you record anything, install anything, or log in to an account that is not yours.
Money spent on the affair is a real claim
Florida divides marital property under section 61.075, starting from the premise that the division should be equal and moving off equal only for a reason the statute names. One of those reasons is the intentional dissipation, waste, depletion, or destruction of marital assets after the petition is filed, or within the two years before it is filed.
Spending on an affair can sit squarely inside that factor. Gifts, travel, a second lease, a card opened quietly, cash moving out in a pattern the household does not explain. The claim rises or falls on arithmetic: what left the marital estate, when it left, and where it went. It is built from account statements, card activity, transfers, and a timeline, and the usual remedy is an adjustment in your favor in the division of what remains, sized to the money spent. This is the part of property division where the affair becomes a number rather than a grievance.
Two limits are worth learning early. The two year window before filing is the outer edge of that factor, so older spending is not reached by it. And ordinary spending during a marriage, including spending you disliked at the time, is usually not dissipation. Bring the records to your attorney and let the claim be tested before it is filed, because a dissipation claim that collapses under scrutiny costs credibility you will want later.
Alimony, and the one narrow opening the statute allows
Section 61.08 provides that the court may consider the adultery of either spouse and any resulting economic impact in determining the amount of alimony, if any, to be awarded. Every part of that sentence is doing work. It is permissive rather than mandatory, it reaches the amount rather than the entitlement, and it is tied to economic impact.
Entitlement is decided before any of that, on a demonstrated need on one side and an ability to pay on the other, and then on the statutory factors: the length of the marriage, the standard of living established during it, each spouse's age, health and earning capacity, contributions to the marriage including homemaking and child care, and responsibilities for the children. If those factors do not support an award, an affair will not manufacture one. If they do support an award, an affair will not erase it.
It also helps to know what alimony in Florida is now, because the law was rewritten. Effective July 1, 2023, permanent alimony was eliminated. The forms a court may award are temporary, bridge-the-gap, rehabilitative, and durational, each with its own purpose and limits. Anything you read describing a Florida spouse ordered to pay for life is describing a system that no longer exists.
Children, and the narrower question the court asks
Time-sharing is decided on the best interests of the child under section 61.13. Since July 1, 2023, Florida law begins with a rebuttable presumption that equal time-sharing is in a child's best interests, and a parent who believes otherwise carries the burden of showing it by a preponderance of the evidence.
The moral fitness of the parents is one of the statutory best interest factors, which is where people expect an affair to land. It does not open the door to arguing about the marriage in general. Florida courts have looked for a link between the conduct and the child, and something more than a theoretical possibility of harm, before that factor carries weight. What tends to carry weight is the day to day: care that stopped being arranged, a schedule that stopped being kept, a child asked to hold an adult's secret. Those are facts about a child's week. Bring them to your attorney and let the connection be assessed before it is argued.
What steering the case toward punishment usually costs
A case aimed at establishing betrayal and a case aimed at the numbers are run differently, and they cost differently. Investigator time, extra depositions, motions, and hearing dates are all paid out of the same marital money that is about to be divided. Discovery pointed at conduct rather than assets tends to harden the other side, which lengthens the case and raises the cost again.
Section 61.183 of the Florida Statutes allows the court to refer contested family matters to mediation, and in practice contested Tampa cases are usually referred before a final hearing. Mediation is where a great many resolve. It helps to know the room in advance: the mediator is neutral and represents neither spouse, and your attorney is the person there for you. A spouse who arrives needing an apology rather than an agreement usually leaves with neither, and the case goes on to a judge applying the same statutes.
What to do with what you know
Write the timeline down while it is fresh, with dates and amounts, and keep it factual. Pull statements for every account for the last two to three years, including ones you never look at. Change nothing and delete nothing, including your own messages. Then take it to a lawyer and ask the two questions the court will ask: does this show marital money leaving the estate, and does it show something that reached the children.
If the answer is yes, you have a claim worth making, and it will be made with records rather than with accusations. If the answer is no, that is not the law excusing what happened to you. It is the law pointing at where your leverage genuinely sits, which is almost always in the financial detail of your own case: what is marital, what it is worth, what support the numbers carry, and what schedule your children need. Those are the parts of a Florida divorce that shape the years after it.