That feeling of satisfaction or pleasure one gains from knowing or imagining that their romantic partner is emotionally or sexually enjoying another person — a phenomenon known as compersion. It’s a fairly new word to our vocabulary and not yet recognized by dictionaries, but thanks to the growing interest in sexual exploration and openness it’s most likely a word we will start hearing more often. Simply put, compersion is the opposite of jealousy. Another important word to know in this realm is metamour. The term metamour is polyamory language for your partner’s partner. This could refer to a serious relationship or something more casual.
The term compersion was traced back to the early 1990s by the Kerista community, a San Francisco-based polyamorous group that has since disbanded, as a feeling akin to taking joy in the joy that others you love may experience. In the context of consensually non-monogamous romantic and sexual relationships, compersion refers to the feeling of joy or happiness one experiences when their partner takes pleasure from their metamour, or metamours.
Although polyamorists were the first to coin this term in the English language, the concept had existed long before the 1990s. However, the feeling itself could be linked to the Buddhists understanding and seeking sympathetic joy (also known as mudita in Sanskrit) to be one of the four qualities of the enlightened person—the other three being loving kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), and equanimity (upeksha). In all religions and most philosophies a we can find some element in celebrating another’s pleasure or joy, why haven’t we applied this more openly to our intimate and sexual relationships?
In a study conducted and written by Sharon M. Flicker, Michelle D. Vaughan, and Lawrence S. Meyers, “Feeling Good About Your Partners’ Relationships: Compersion in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships“ Flicker plans to explore the depths of this fairly new concept and how people are experiencing it. In the study, 44 adults who had been involved in at least one consensually non-monogamous relationship within the past 12 months were asked open-ended questions about their experience with compersion. The researchers then conducted careful analysis of the responses and used their findings to develop a scientific survey, which they named the Classifying Our Metamour/Partner Emotional Response Scale, or COMPERSe. Flicker told Psypost,
“There is now a validated scale that measures three aspects of compersion: positive feelings toward one’s partner’s relationship with an established metamour (a metamour is one’s partner’s partner), excitement about one’s partner potentially forming a new intimate connection, and sexual excitement that one may experience thinking about one’s partner and metamour together. Individuals may experience compersion in ways that are distinct from others and may even vary toward different partners or at different points in time,”
The research is currently limited to being only English speaking adults and predominantly white polyamourous women, but even despite those limitations, forming an initial base of a standardized measure of compersion will allow researchers and psychologists to better understand the causes and consequences of this psychological phenomenon. Flicker went no top explain to Psypost,
“My current project examines individual, relationship-level, partner-specific, and metamour-specific factors that are associated with greater experiences of compersion. I am essentially seeking to examine how feelings of compersion vary across time or across partners and metamours and what factors may drive such changes/differences. It would also be of interest to determine if differences exist in the extent to which individuals involved in various forms of consensual non-monogamous relationships experience compersion.”
As the polyamory world becomes a more widely accepted fixture in our culture, it’s interesting to ask ourselves where the lines could be blurred and what we can learn by exploring these other avenues of emotions if we aren’t already fully experiencing them. At the very least, it’s useful to know all of these “new” words and terms, whether to expand your vocabulary but more importantly if you are dabbling in the modern dating world. Until more studies are done, asking and exploring these questions with friends or partners could lead to some very interesting insight. In the meantime there are plenty of great articles to read about compersion if you haven’t yet discovered or explored it.
More polyamory and relationship terms to know: