What is Compersion?
And why focusing on compersion, the absence of jealousy, misses a much more important part of mental health: How we effectively communicate the emotions that we do have.
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Last week was the first week of one of the most insane months of my life.
In exciting news, we’re moving!
In terrifying news, we have no idea where!
Obviously, a firstborn who likely would have been a travel agent if born fifty years ago (me) and a person started a successful psychotherapy business in Boston at the age of 30 (Julia) wouldn’t be entirely laissez-faire in constructing a move like this.
We’ve narrowed our move to two cities, scheduling twenty apartment viewings in these two locales. (If you happen to know anyone on the production team of The Amazing Race, feel free to connect them with us.)
Last Sunday, we towed our suitcases to city one. We walked through a bunch of parks, had a few coffee dates with friends, and saw an incredible comedy show.
(I highly recommend seeing Kristin Key and her show Lesbian Army. For my former evangelical readers, she grew up in the Church of Christ. I simultaneously gasped with excitement when she mentioned the absurdity of Bible Bowl and shuddered in fear about the bullshit that she’s had to go through as a queer woman in a much more rural and conservative version of the CoC that I endured.)
In the middle of the week, between touring apartments, managing our smaller than expected Airbnb (note to self: spend extra money on a 2-bedroom place the next time we have a working trip), and seeing clients, we both had breakdowns.
Julia and I carry mental load in different ways (and some similar ways), and while we make sure to do a lot together, such as finances and planning fun things to do, we also divide and conquer our lives by relying on each of our strengths. Nerdily, we’ve created business titles that align with our strategies.
I’m the Chief Operations Officer.
In our business, that involves writing first draft of decision making processes and standard operating procedures, strategic planning with collaborators to determine possible joint ventures, and initiating the logistics for live and virtual event planning.
In our family, that typically entails things like doing the laundry and dishes, structuring our travel in town and out of town, and communicating with landlords and other important people that we contract with.
Julia is the Chief Executive Officer.
In our business, that involves evaluating barriers to success and offering strategies for troubleshooting clinical growth, editing and finalizing decision making processes and standard operating procedures for business, and leading the team/rapport building with colleagues and new collaborators.
In our family, that typically entails things like checking in on the emotional health of each of us and the relationship, imagining (and often overseeing) how we can use and organize our larger space, and planning and prepping food.
Our mid-week breakdowns were driven by different things synchronously happening.
For me, it was simply an administrative overload. Too many things crammed into too short of a time. I sped up, snapped a few times, and started to make individual decisions for our relationship and tell Julia what those decisions were rather than collaborating with her.
For Julia, the breakdown was rooted in a deeper, more existential fear: The reality that she has to manage her family in ways that I don’t, especially in presenting major decisions that she and I make, and was slated to spend a few extra days in close proximity in week two of our crazy month.
Julia’s anxiety manifested through a combination of self-negativity, panic, and lower motivation. Which of course spiked my own anxiety and manic tendencies. We fed off of each other’s stressed out, negative energy for a few days.
There were three game changers that lifted us from an extremely difficult 72 hours.
The Kristin Key comedy show. Thank you Kristin and the Lesbian Army for injecting humor into our relationship.
Season 2 of Nine Perfect Strangers. The writers and producers are doing a fantastic job constructing the intersection of nine people in a drug-induced psychotherapy retreat, with Nicole Kidman as the maniacally brilliant therapist.
Julia communicating to me that she was jealous of me. She let me know that she would much rather be in my shoes this week, viewing 14 apartments and working virtually in city two, than risking activating religious trauma.
Quick pause, because jealousy gets a really bad rap in moral and psychological spaces.
For the last few weeks, we’ve been promoting our most recent episode of Sexvangelicals with our friends Jimmy Bridges and Becs Waite, co-owners of the private practice This Space Between. We answer the question “What if I want to have sex with other people?”, which is typically an entry point into a conversation about ethical non-monogamy, or at least permission to discuss a relationship structure other than monogamy.
An important component of the ethical non-monogamy world is an idea called compersion. ENM researcher Sharon Flicker defines compersion:
“The positive emotions that one may experience in response to their partner’s intimate involvements outside of their relationship.”
Flicker describes three elements of compersion:
Joy or contentment toward a partner’s relationship with another person.
Encouragement of the sexual exploration of their partner(s).
Emotional excitement toward one partner’s experiences for and opportunities for connecting with other people.
Compersion often gets framed as the absence of jealousy in ENM-land. Evolved poly people celebrate the experiences of their partners regardless of what it might bring up for them.
Flicker recently interviewed 45 people who practice ENM about their experiences of compersion, and noted ten strategies that people use to limit their jealousy toward the experiences and actions of other people:
Effective communication. A communication strategy that covers both the logistics of how a person is allocating temporal, emotional, and financial resources with others, and the sharing of what a person learns about themselves and the world.
Clarity of rules for the practice of ethical non-monogamy. For instance, is there clarity and agreement around the hierarchy of relationships? Or is there clarity around where and when these relationships can happen?
Time-management skills. And the personal accountability that a person won’t get swept away in disorganization, new relationship energy, and a myriad of other administrative threats to the relationships.
Honesty and trust. A combination of a clarity around transparency, specifically around what information does/doesn’t get shared, and follow through.
Challenging limiting messages of monogamy. Most notably, the recognition that, with effective communication, what a partner does outside of their primary relationship doesn’t lessen or cheapen what happens inside.
The recognition that every relationship is an open relationship. And the ensuing reliance on multiple people to meet a myriad of personal needs.
A non-attachment to the outcome or destination. And an emphasis on the process that one takes to get from point A to point B.
Self-confidence. Specifically, strategies to reduce the insecurities about not being enough.
Empathy. Not just an anarchical recognition that each person has the autonomy to make their own decisions, but an understanding of why a decision might be uniquely meaningful to that person.
Growth. To what extent does ethical non-monogamy help a person engage with the world in pro-social ways that aligns with their values?
Flicker’s article, “Factors that Facilitate and Hinder the Experience of Compersion Among Individuals in Consensual Non-Monogamous Relationships”, published in August 2022’s Archives of Sexual Behaviors, is a really important exploration about how people might manage the emotional challenges that arise with ENM, such as jealousy.
However, many conversations about compersion miss a really important feature of psychology.
Emotions, such as jealousy, are not the issue. Emotions are amoral, subconscious states of subjective experience.
And while it’s important to have language about the emotions that we experience, guided by tools like the Wheel of Emotions, emotions, like jealousy, create relational trouble based on how they are communicated.
My overwhelm got me in trouble when I started to throw way too much information at Julia in a staccato, intense tonality. My overwhelm got me in trouble when I made unilateral decisions and assumed that Julia would go along with it.
Julia’s jealousy got her in trouble when it merged with other emotions, like dread, to present a temporary unwillingness to consider any outcome other than doom. It got her in trouble when it projected what I was “going to do”, even as the stories that jealousy told her about me are completely out of my character.
The jealousy itself makes a lot of sense. And when she communicated the jealousy in a clear, calm way that isolated jealousy from the other emotions that she experienced, I was able to absorb it, calm my own nervous system, move closer to Julia, and resume operating collaboratively with her.
I think some of the confusion about compersion speaks to an ongoing disturbing trend in some portions of psychology.
This segment of our profession has managed to divorce emotions from communication. It validates emotions at the expense of understanding how our emotions encourage us to communicate. At its worst, this segment endorses all types of communication, concluding that because the emotion is valid, any kind of communication, including the self- and other-harming behaviors and communication, are also valid, assuming the psychotherapist even finds the process of communication relevant.
In my work with ethical non-monogamy, I’ve noticed jealousy arising in three common ways:
A partner grieving not getting to experience a part (i.e. playfulness, sexuality, emotional depth) of an important person in their life, combined with the knowledge that someone else they may not know gets to experience that.
A partner who takes on an imbalanced proportion of the administrative load (i.e. parenting, finances, family of origin) while another partner explores other relationships.
This one is especially common in former Evangelical systems. A partner who deconstructs from the repressive messages of monogamy and rigid gender norms “slower” than another partner, with ENM used as a platform for that deconstruction.
The emotions in all three of these contexts make a ton of sense.
The jealousy itself is not the issue.
Relational problems happen when that jealousy gets used to criticize, manipulate, and control.
Likewise, relational problems happen when the person who has less jealousy blames, minimizes, or ignores the person with more jealousy.
The identification, ownership, and effective communication and description of jealousy can create clarity about what a partnership is actually dealing with.
In a best case scenario, like the one with me and Julia, it can bring a partnership closer, creating a deeper understanding of the emotional world and administrative capacities of each person, and invite the space for each person to do their own thing.
In a more stress-inducing scenario, the behaviors and communication patterns that accompany jealousy expose a two choice dilemma. You can either give up the criticism that stems from the emotion jealousy, trust (or practice trusting) your partner, and figure out strategies to care for yourself while your partner does their own thing. Or you can give up the criticism that stems from the emotion jealousy, actively not trust your partner, and agree to move toward ending the relationship.
Julia and I also offer free 30 minute consultations with couples who are interested in pursuing relationship and sex therapy/coaching, and ethical non-monogamy is often something that we help couples navigate as well. (60 minute consultations for paying members of Relationship 101!)
We specialize in working with who participated in an Evangelical, Mormon, or Pentecostal community, and are looking to discover or rediscover the role that sexuality might play in your life and relationship.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia
Hi, I'm loving your articles on positive sexuality and open relationships.
However I wanted to point out something that a lot of people miss about the term "compersion". When it was initially coined, the etymology of compersion was a combination of "compassion" and "aversion". The online history of this word fails to denote this important connection. But I clearly recall reading about this when the word first became used in polyamory circles.
Rather than indicating an absence of jealousy, it actually highlights the slightly squeamish but also happy sense you get when you see your partner being loved by someone else. It's a complex form of appreciation.
As ENM becomes more popular in the mainstream, the early meaning of compersion has been stifled and it's become linked to only compassion and joy at seeing your partner loved by another.
But I think the word itself, its combo of compassion and aversion, is more accurate in describing the layers of feeling you might get about appreciating someone else's love for your lover. It is rarely so simple as just feeling joy.
The deep letting-go that occurs in ENM involves a bit of an ouch. And that is why the original version of compersion is more helpful, in my humble opinion! Thanks for taking the time to hear me out!