Alexia Dellner
·5 min read
We recently asked a sex therapist about the words that she wishes people would use more often, and one of her answers was a term we'd never heard before: compersion. “Compersion is about feeling love for your partner as they enjoy something or someone else,” Rosara Torrisi, PhD from the Long Island Institute of Sex Therapy, told us. In other words, it’s the opposite of jealousy. And it can be seriously beneficial to your relationships, as psychologist Joli Hamilton, PhD explains below.
Meet the Experts
What Is Compersion?
Compersion is a form of sympathetic joy in which Person A experiences positive thoughts and emotions when they know about Person B's positive experience, even if Person A gets nothing out of it for themself. According to a UC Berkeley publication, the term's origins date back to the 1990s in the now-disbanded San Francisco polyamorous group the Kerista community. Thouin points out that although the neologism is relatively recent, similar concepts of selfless love have precedents in world religions, such as Buddhism's state of mudita and Christianity's agapé.
Now Let’s Talk About Jealousy
“Jealousy is normal,” says Hamilton, who's also a brilliant TED-talk leader. In fact, psychologists can see it from the age of six months (cue Junior wailing when mommy holds another baby) and it only gets more complicated as we get older. “People feel it more or less strongly, more or less frequently, but no matter where you are on the jealousy spectrum, it’s not a moral failing to feel jealous,” she explains. “It’s what we do with jealousy that matters.”
Fighting jealousy or trying to get rid of it is not the solution. In fact, this will just lead to even more feelings of jealousy. And here’s something else you should know about the green-eyed monster: There doesn’t actually need to be a real threat in order for jealousy to exist… jealousy can attack through the imagination. In other words, jealousy can invent a problem or rival (like that time you got upset that your S.O. was playing video games with his friends all night instead of spending time with you). This can trick us into thinking that our relationship is in danger. But remember, jealousy itself isn’t the problem—it’s what you do with it.
When jealousy tries to take over (“He doesn’t want to spend time with me anymore” or “She’s totally flirting with that waitress”), rather than let the fear of losing your partner overwhelm you, Hamilton advocates moving toward compersion.
Compersion in Polyamory Relationships
Hamilton says that "polyamorous people do their best to treat jealousy as a valuable teacher, an indicator that they care deeply about someone, then then they take steps to move away from the fear and move instead towards jealousy’s opposite." She explains that "compersion isn’t about destroying jealousy, it's about turning toward joy and turning toward each other, instead of turning away, which is the result of jealousy."
Compersion in Monogamous Relationships
"Evolutionary psychologists explain that jealousy is a natural and even necessary way of protecting our DNA lineage and hoarding the resources that a partner may provide," Hamilton says, in what is usually taken as biological justification for possessiveness and sexual fidelity. "I don’t think this is the whole picture, because as humans we also excel at overriding our instinctual drives—we donate organs to strangers, we raise children who aren’t biologically our own, we rescue people from burning buildings." The practice of aspiring toward compersion—while still honoring agreed-upon parameters of the relationship, from fidelity to a unique depth of emotional intimacy—can lead to greater satisfaction within the relationship.
How to Foster Compersion
By going through with the above steps, you will move closer to compersion and figuring out what would serve you in the moment—whether that’s more closeness, wanting to be seen or perhaps even some time alone.
An Example of How to Turn Jealousy into Compersion
Here’s an example of what that might look like: Let’s say that you go to a party and your partner spends the evening working the room and mingling with others. In fact, every time you look over, it seems like your S.O. is laughing and having a good time with an attractive and charming guest. Meanwhile, you’ve been stuck talking to Mr. Let-Me-Tell-You-About-My-Cats for the last 40 minutes. Do you A. start an argument on the way home about it? Or B. take a deep breath, tune into your body, notice that you’re feeling jealous and tell yourself that you can figure this one out?
If you go with option B, you’ll probably feel better about yourself tomorrow morning and you may even realize that seeing your partner having fun and being so engaged and desirable is actually pretty cool. Boom—compersion.
But Wait, Should I Not Tell My Partner When I’m Feeling Jealous?
“Compersion doesn’t ask us not to be jealous or accept whatever we’ve been presented without question” says Hamilton. In fact, she stresses how important it is to set boundaries and ask for what you want. (“Hey, when we go to a party, I’d really like it if we could check in with each other every so often.”)
Summary
It goes without saying that compersion works best when employed in relationships that are loving, communicative and consensual. (In other words, there’s no need to turn to compersion if you’re jealous because your partner is cheating on you and you’re not in an open relationship.) But as relationship counselors and researchers have found, in both polyamorous and monogamous relationships, jealousy need not be the bitter end point of a relationship, and moving toward compersion might be a beneficial goal for the individual and the relationships itself.
“But when jealousy plants a seed of despair, compersion says—hold on, let’s not water that,” explains Hamilton.
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