A Word for the Opposite

Most languages have plenty of words for the pain of seeing someone you love take pleasure in somebody else. Very few have a word for the opposite: the experience of being glad about it.

English acquired one in a commune in San Francisco. The Kerista community, which lived in the city from 1971 to 1991, organised itself around closed group relationships, several adults sharing relationships among themselves and faithful within the group, an arrangement it called polyfidelity. Polyfidelity was their word, and so, by the usual account, was compersion, coined for the feeling the arrangement needed its members to have: pleasure in a partner's happiness with somebody else.

The word outlived the commune. It spread through the polyamorous communities of the following decades and now turns up in research papers, in self-help books and in ordinary conversation.

It is worth being clear about what compersion does not mean, because the misunderstanding runs in both directions. It does not mean the absence of jealousy. People in consensually non-monogamous relationships who describe compersion very often describe jealousy too, sometimes about the same event on the same evening. The communities that use the word are, if anything, unusually preoccupied with jealousy: they write rules about it, schedule conversations about it and have produced a large practical literature on handling it. Compersion is better understood as an aim, or as a feeling that can sit beside jealousy, than as a state in which jealousy has gone.

What does the research say about these relationships?

The field is young, but some findings are reasonably consistent. In 2017, analyses of two large surveys of single American adults found that roughly one in five had at some point been in a consensually non-monogamous relationship, which makes the subject less marginal than its origins suggest. Studies comparing people in such relationships with monogamous people have generally found broadly comparable levels of relationship satisfaction, trust and commitment.

That last finding needs its caveat stated as clearly as the finding itself. The people in these studies chose their arrangement, and they chose to take part in research about it. People who found consensual non-monogamy miserable are likely to have left it and are unlikely to be in the sample. So the research can show that some people manage these relationships well. It cannot show that most people could, or that you could.

Now notice what compersion does to two opposite positions that are often argued with great confidence.

The first says jealousy is natural, the product of evolution, and therefore that monogamy is natural too and that anything else is a denial of human nature. Compersion is awkward for this view. There are people who feel something other than jealousy, or alongside it, about a partner's other relationships, and who run stable households on that basis. Whatever jealousy is, it is not so automatic that no one can do otherwise.

The second says jealousy is merely a cultural script, a learned possessiveness that dissolves under reflection, so that anybody who thinks clearly enough should be able to set it aside. Compersion is awkward for this view too, because the people who have thought hardest about it, and built their lives around it, report jealousy constantly and work hard to manage it. If reflection dissolved jealousy, these communities would not need their rules.

Neither position survives contact with the people actually living this way.

There is also a quieter observation, which is that compersion is not exotic outside romance. Parents are glad when their adult children fall in love. Friends are glad, not always immediately, when a friend makes a new close friend. Most people already know what it is to be pleased by the happiness of someone they love even when it does not include them. What is unusual is not the feeling but the decision to extend it to sexual relationships, where the alarm described at the start of this book is at its most sensitive.

The fair conclusion is a modest one. Jealousy is strong, common and manageable to different degrees by different people, under different arrangements and with different amounts of effort. A word for its opposite does not prove that the opposite is available to everyone. It proves that it is available to someone, which is more than the confident accounts on either side allow.