Tracy Schorn has cultivated a personal philosophy of cheating, one that views infidelity as a form of abuse and absolves the betrayed of any role in their own betrayal.
Perhaps more notably, she has also created a very specific language to discuss it.
The cheated-upon are known as “the chumps.” The affair partner is called the “schmoopie.” The cheater feeds off “ego kibble” and often benefits from a partner’s “spackling” — the excuse-making that a chump undertakes in a desperate attempt to salvage a relationship.
Ms. Schorn, a cartoonist and former journalist who has run a blog called Chump Nation since 2012, says this snarky approach allows victims of infidelity to process their realities, all while adding levity to a difficult time.
“I tried to create the kind of support site that I wish existed when I went through it,” Ms. Schorn, who is 57 and lives in Waterford, Va., with her husband, said in an interview. She compares the site’s straight-shooter approach to the voice of a “best friend that’s just going to grab you by the lapels and go, ‘Stop it, you’re being manipulated.’”
Her blog’s supportive ethos; her oddball terms and phrases, like “the pick-me dance”(the competition one can be goaded into with an affair partner); her comic strip-style cartoons lampooning cheaters and their exploits: All are in service of her mantra, “Leave a cheater, gain a life.”
On her website, Ms. Schorn answers letters from readers looking for guidance. One wrote that she was contemplating giving her husband a fourth chance and another asked whether post-traumatic stress disorder could justify cheating. She also writes about news events as they relate to cheating and hosts a podcast about surviving infidelity called “Tell Me How You’re Mighty” alongside Sarah Gorrell, a BBC radio journalist.
Twelve years after starting her blog, Ms. Schorn has racked up a following of thousands who find solace in the community she created, consoling one another in her site’s comment section and on Facebook and Reddit. But as she finds herself in a spotlight that has recently grown much brighter after being thanked in a high-profile novel, critics have begun to question the wisdom of her approach to infidelity.
Ms. Schorn is quick to point out that she is not a marriage counselor or a psychotherapist, merely “a woman with critical thinking abilities and a sense of humor.” She’s also a chump herself, dating to 2006, four years before she married her current husband.
Ms. Schorn, then 39, was married to her second husband after being in a relationship with him for about a year and a half. After six months of what she thought was marital bliss, she received a call from a woman who said she had been having an affair with him.
“His mistress called me and revealed that he had a double life going back decades,” she said. After doing more research on him, she discovered that he was a serial cheater.
She soon filed for a divorce, and even though the marriage was short, they had bought real estate together and were already meaningfully intertwined.
“He isolated me,” she said. “He made me financially vulnerable to him, because I gave up my job in D.C., I followed his career, and I did a lot of things that women are expected to do that weren’t based on self-protection.”
She sought guidance online but was unhappy with what she found. “Everything — and I mean everything — was, ‘What did you do to make him cheat and how are you going to improve yourself to win him back?’” she recalled.
Frustrated by what she calls the “reconciliation industrial complex” — the constellation of counselors, authors and others who have a financial interest in selling the idea that cheating can lead to a stronger relationship — Ms. Schorn sought a different approach.
In 2012, her current husband suggested that she write a book about her experiences. She decided to write a blog instead, as a way of processing everything she had been through. (A book, “Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life: The Chump Lady’s Survival Guide,” came later.)
Ms. Schorn has recently been the subject of significant criticism and backlash. An article last month in The New Yorker accused Ms. Schorn of peddling “steely certainties, swaddled in baby talk and baby thinking,” that don’t leave room for questioning complicated marital dynamics. Weeks later, The Cut wrote that she was contributing to a general culture of affirmation in which women are often expected to validate one another without question.
Ms. Schorn said she believed her work was receiving so much pushback because it questions “basic assumptions” about infidelity, like how the quality of a marriage may lead a person to cheat.
“Bad therapy encourages this. Bad theology encourages this,” she said. “Chumps get blamed by cheaters, and they internalize it and stay on the hamster wheel of trying to fix themselves to keep their partner from hurting them. It’s a whole other level of harm.”
Many are hesitant to label cheating abuse for fear of diluting a term usually reserved for more direct forms of physical or emotional harm. But Ms. Schorn rejects those concerns. To her, the potentially traumatic effects of cheating are no different from those of gaslighting, lying and manipulation, simply because cheating involves all of those betrayals.
“We readily understand a punch in the face as transgressive,” she said. “We do not recognize infidelity as transgressive. That’s the narrative I’m trying to change.”
To those who point to cheating as a symptom of a bigger issue — like having an unsatisfactory sex life, struggling with new parenthood or discovering one’s true sexuality — Ms. Schorn said it was possible to work through those issues, or to break up ethically, because “nobody owes you a relationship.”
“Cheating is deliberately not breaking up with you,” she added. “Cheating is the theft of your reality. It’s extracting labor from you and value from you. Maybe you’re raising my children. Maybe you have a paycheck that I like. Maybe you front normalcy.”
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