Compersion

What is compersion?

Compersion is the pleasure you feel because your partner is enjoying someone else. Not putting up with it, not swallowing it down, but feeling something good about it yourself. The word came out of the polyamory world, where it is often called the counterpart to jealousy. It was a coined word, because no everyday one covered the feeling.

What compersion looks like in practice

It sounds lofty, and it is usually something small.

Take the plainest example first. Your partner comes home from an evening with someone else, cheerful, telling you about it, and you notice it makes you happy. Not in spite of it but because of it. That is compersion in its simplest form.

A second example sits closer to BDSM. In cuckolding one partner watches while the other has sex with a bull, and what gets felt there is humiliation for some, jealousy for others, and for others again exactly this: arousal that comes out of the other person’s pleasure. The same act, with three completely different engines under it.

Flicker and Sancier-Barbosa found, across 255 people, that compersion is not one thing. They set apart three kinds: contentment about an existing bond between your partner and their other partner, excitement about a new connection, and sexual arousal. That last one was reported the least and had predictors of its own.

Where the word comes from

Compersion was invented, not grown. The encyclopedic description traces it back to the Kerista commune in San Francisco, and describes it as “an empathetic state of happiness and joy experienced when another individual experiences happiness and joy”.

The same source calls compersion “the opposite or flip side of jealousy”, with a comparison that explains it better than any definition does: the joy parents feel when their child marries. You lose something, and at the same time that loss is exactly what you are glad about.

Within polyamory the word works as a direction, not a demand. Jealousy and possessiveness do not count there as something to avoid, but as reactions you examine and work through, with compersion as the goal on the horizon.

What has been measured

There is serious research on it by now, and that makes the conversation more level-headed.

Flicker, Thouin-Savard and Vaughan asked 44 people in consensually non-monogamous relationships what helped compersion along and what stood in its way. They describe the feeling as “positive feelings, such as joy, excitement, and satisfaction, that one may experience in response to their partner’s other intimate relationships”. Four things helped in concrete terms: self-worth, security in the relationship, communication with your partner, and a positive view of that other person.

What stood out was that the participants disagreed among themselves on two questions: whether jealousy and compersion are really opposites, and whether compersion is something you have or something you learn.

The later study by Flicker and Sancier-Barbosa, among 255 people, points the same way. The strongest predictors were closeness to the other partner and knowing what was going on in that relationship. The strongest forces against it were jealousy, envy, and attachment anxiety.

That this is no fringe phenomenon shows in how often such relationships come up. Haupert and colleagues found, in two national samples of single Americans, that well over one in five had at some point been in some form of consensual non-monogamy.

Why people want to be able to feel it

Compersion is not a goal in itself. It is what remains when fear does not take over.

• For the person watching it changes the whole experience. The same image that hurts when you are scared turns good when you feel secure.
• For the person enjoying it it takes the guilt out. Nothing holds you back like the idea that your pleasure is causing the other person pain.
• For the two of you together the payoff is mostly information. Whatever stands in the way of compersion is usually something that needed talking about anyway.

Feeling compersion is not an achievement, and feeling jealousy is not a shortcoming. The participants in the research did not agree among themselves on whether one rules out the other. If you do not feel it, you are doing nothing wrong.

How people practice it

From what helped it along, you can draw a practical line.

1. Get to know the other person. Closeness to the other partner was the strongest predictor anyone measured.
2. Make sure you know what is happening. Knowing what is going on turned out to matter just as much. Vagueness feeds the imagination, and the imagination is rarely kind.
3. Work on the foundation. Self-worth and relationship security make the biggest difference, and they have nothing to do with the arrangements.
4. Name the jealousy instead of hiding it. Within polyamory, jealousy counts as something to examine, not something to be ashamed of.

Misconceptions about compersion

“Compersion means you are never jealous.” That is the most damaging one. The people studied did not agree on whether the two are really opposites. Feeling both at once is perfectly ordinary.

“If you do not feel it, you are not cut out for an open relationship.” Opinions split there too, right on the question of whether compersion is inborn or learned. There is no evidence for the idea that it is an entry requirement.

“It is always about sex.” Of the three kinds Flicker and Sancier-Barbosa set apart, sexual arousal was in fact the one reported the least.

What I make of it

Being the bull for a cuckold couple is on my yes-list, and then we make it fun for three. That little word “three” is exactly what this term is about.

Those evenings line up strikingly well with what has been measured. The couples it works for are the ones where the man has spoken to me beforehand and knows who I am. Where that contact is missing, what is left is a fantasy figure that someone spends the whole evening measuring himself against. So meeting beforehand is not a courtesy but half the work.

What you can do yourself

• Meet the third person beforehand, even briefly. That is the strongest measured factor you have in your own hands.
• Ask questions instead of looking away. Knowing what happened works better than not wanting to hear it.
• Agree on what you do afterward. An evening together once it is over catches more than any arrangement made in advance.
• Say it when you feel jealous. That is not a failure; it is the information you can actually do something with.
• Do not expect it right away. For most who know the feeling it grew over time, it did not appear all at once.

More reading on compersion

On this site, the article on the power of jealousy and humiliation covers the feelings that can sit next to compersion in the same evening, and the piece on cuckolding to strengthen your relationship describes how couples approach this in practice.

Off this site, the study by Flicker, Thouin-Savard and Vaughan is the best starting point, precisely because it also lets the participants say where they disagree among themselves.

Sources

• Factors that Facilitate and Hinder the Experience of Compersion Among Individuals in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships. Flicker, Thouin-Savard & Vaughan, Archives of Sexual Behavior 51(6), 3035–3048, 2022. Study of 44 participants; it provides the definition, the three groups of facilitating factors, the four concrete factors that helped, and the disagreement among participants over whether jealousy and compersion are opposites and whether compersion is inborn or learned.
• Your Happiness Is My Happiness: Predicting Positive Feelings for a Partner’s Consensual Extra-Dyadic Intimate Relations. Flicker & Sancier-Barbosa, Archives of Sexual Behavior 53(3), 941–958, 2024. Study of 255 participants; closeness to the other partner and knowledge of that relationship were the strongest predictors, jealousy, envy, and attachment anxiety the strongest counterforces, and three kinds of compersion were set apart, of which the sexual kind occurred the least.
• Prevalence of Experiences With Consensual Nonmonogamous Relationships. Haupert et al., Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 43(5), 424–440, 2017. Two samples of single Americans (n = 3,905 and n = 4,813); well over one in five had at some point been in some form of consensual non-monogamy.
• Compersion. Wikipedia. The description as an empathetic state of happiness, the origin in the Kerista commune in San Francisco, the reading as the flip side of jealousy, and the role of compersion as a goal within polyamory.

Related terms

• NRE. The high in your partner that compersion or jealousy is a response to, with the research by Clemons-Castaños and Flicker.
• Jealousy. The opposite: the same moment that gives one person compersion stirs up the fear of losing in another.
• Cuckolding. The play in which compersion is one of the three possible engines, alongside jealousy and humiliation.
• Bull. The third person the evening revolves around, and the reason meeting beforehand counts.
• Consent. The condition under which all of this only works, for all three people involved.
• Hotwifing. The arrangement in which compersion is the engine, with the research on jealousy under consent.
• Monogamy. The form in which compersion plays no part, and where most couples come from.
• Polyamory. The relationship form in which compersion counts as the ideal, with what the research finds about the second relationship.
• Stag. The man who hopes for compersion while his partner is out, and what the role asks of him beyond that.
• Vixen. His counterpart, and why she often prefers that name over hotwife.
• Metamour. Your partner’s partner, and so the person compersion is usually about.
• Trio. The situation where this feeling is most often tested for the first time.
• Ethical non-monogamy. The wider field in which compersion is named as an ideal.