Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Marie Thouin, a leading scholar on compersion and the author of the groundbreaking book, What is Compersion? Understanding Positive Empathy in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships. Our Instagram Live conversation focused on demystifying compersion and exploring how individuals practicing consensual non-monogamy (CNM) can cultivate this often misunderstood emotion.
This is the foreword to Marie Thouin’s forthcoming book, What Is Compersion? Understanding Positive Empathy in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships. Jessica Fern is a Psychotherapist, Coach, and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional. Jessica is the author of Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and NonMonogamy, The Polysecure Workbook, and Polywise: A Deeper Dive Into Navigating Open Relationships.
Many of us who have been around the block with consensual non-monogamy can recognize that jealousy and compersion often coexist, sometimes maddeningly so. Your partner is excited to be heading into a second date, when it’s been crickets for you on the dating apps. You turn green with envy, but you’re also giving them a genuine high five and helping them fix their hair on the way out the door. It’s dizzying and confusing, but ultimately it leaves an open pathway to compassion, connection, and support.
Harboring vyapada, on the other hand, closes the gate. There is no way to squeeze sympathetic joy out of a heart that is wrapped around the handle of a dagger, desperately guarding the painful spots. And so I’ve learned that to follow the ill will, to follow the extreme lack of compersion, to follow the hatred is to find what needs to be healed. Is there pain that is going unacknowledged? Do I need my hurt to be heard and validated? Or am I prodding at old emotional wounds like compulsively picking at a scab, refusing to let it heal?
For some marginalized folks, rejecting normative concepts such as monogamy is a form of resistance. Monogamy has roots in capitalism and colonialism. So for many non-monogamous folks, their participation in non-monogamy is a form of resisting ideas about love and relationships that were imposed upon us by these systems. And not only do they reject the notions of how we “should” be in relationships as dictated by standard societal ideals, but they reject the notions of how we should FEEL about relationships as dictated by standard societal ideals, to include the experience of compersion. It is a form of resistance for them to assert that even though everything around them says that they are supposed to feel jealous, threatened, or negative about their partners seeking fulfillment in romantic and sexual relationships with others, that they are instead going to choose to feel joy, peace, and encouragement about their partners other relationships because to feel the reverse is to be in agreement with the dominant culture’s ideas about relationships. More than just reject the more problematic notions of monogamy in behavior and practice, they reject them in thought and feeling and their compersion is part of that rejection.
A comperstruggle is when you’re caught between jealousy and compersion. This is what we call the experience of sincerely wanting our loved ones to have a great time with others–aka having a compersive ATTITUDE–but at the same exact time, struggling with painful jealous feelings.
Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Marie Thouin, a leading scholar on compersion and the author of the groundbreaking book, What is Compersion? Understanding Positive Empathy in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships. Our Instagram Live conversation focused on demystifying compersion and exploring how individuals practicing consensual non-monogamy (CNM) can cultivate this often misunderstood emotion.
This is the foreword to Marie Thouin’s forthcoming book, What Is Compersion? Understanding Positive Empathy in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships. Jessica Fern is a Psychotherapist, Coach, and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional. Jessica is the author of Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and NonMonogamy, The Polysecure Workbook, and Polywise: A Deeper Dive Into Navigating Open Relationships.
Many of us who have been around the block with consensual non-monogamy can recognize that jealousy and compersion often coexist, sometimes maddeningly so. Your partner is excited to be heading into a second date, when it’s been crickets for you on the dating apps. You turn green with envy, but you’re also giving them a genuine high five and helping them fix their hair on the way out the door. It’s dizzying and confusing, but ultimately it leaves an open pathway to compassion, connection, and support.
Harboring vyapada, on the other hand, closes the gate. There is no way to squeeze sympathetic joy out of a heart that is wrapped around the handle of a dagger, desperately guarding the painful spots. And so I’ve learned that to follow the ill will, to follow the extreme lack of compersion, to follow the hatred is to find what needs to be healed. Is there pain that is going unacknowledged? Do I need my hurt to be heard and validated? Or am I prodding at old emotional wounds like compulsively picking at a scab, refusing to let it heal?
For some marginalized folks, rejecting normative concepts such as monogamy is a form of resistance. Monogamy has roots in capitalism and colonialism. So for many non-monogamous folks, their participation in non-monogamy is a form of resisting ideas about love and relationships that were imposed upon us by these systems. And not only do they reject the notions of how we “should” be in relationships as dictated by standard societal ideals, but they reject the notions of how we should FEEL about relationships as dictated by standard societal ideals, to include the experience of compersion. It is a form of resistance for them to assert that even though everything around them says that they are supposed to feel jealous, threatened, or negative about their partners seeking fulfillment in romantic and sexual relationships with others, that they are instead going to choose to feel joy, peace, and encouragement about their partners other relationships because to feel the reverse is to be in agreement with the dominant culture’s ideas about relationships. More than just reject the more problematic notions of monogamy in behavior and practice, they reject them in thought and feeling and their compersion is part of that rejection.
A comperstruggle is when you’re caught between jealousy and compersion. This is what we call the experience of sincerely wanting our loved ones to have a great time with others–aka having a compersive ATTITUDE–but at the same exact time, struggling with painful jealous feelings.
Maybe polyamory is not your jam.
Maybe ambiamory—the ability to enjoy both monogamy and polyamory with little to no preference between the two—is still a bit much.
Maybe monogamish sounds vague to you—or 10% more poly than how you really feel.
But maaaybe, just maybe, the idea of strict lifelong monogamy also doesn’t fully apply to you.
There’s a new word for that: monoflexibility. It’s the heteroflexibility of relationships.
Jealousy is not the enemy. Choosing our responses to it thoughtfully makes it possible for jealousy to enhance our intimacy with self and others, rather than harm our relationships. This blog provides a life-affirming understanding of jealousy’s nature and purpose, as well as 5 steps for navigating this emotion more constructively in consensually non-monogamous relationships and beyond.
Several evenings ago, I attended a class and conversation on open relationships at a feminist sex shop in an increasingly trendy area of my mid-Continent city. The class was for the open relationship curious, or beginners. Although I’ve been at this for about nineteen months, I’m still a beginner. My fabulous fellow WOC (woman of color) sex educator friend, Divina, led the course. She also does community activism on a range of other social issues that entangle and go beyond topics of sexuality. In this largely white, middle-class poly community, where I shy away from poly group events because I feel like a cultural outsider, I willingly submit to Divina’s skilled, effusive, and politically sophisticated leadership. Like me, she thinks about the role of compulsory monogamy in propping up a heteronormative, patriarchal, and colonial society. I can jump right in with her—into the politically deepest part of a conversation on this stuff and she’s right there with me. Plus she’s got years more on-the-ground experience in open relationships than I do. This particular class was aimed at a more general audience, however, tackling issues that many Poly 101 classes do—namely handling jealousy and the kind of never-ending communication that is a hallmark of healthy polyamory.
Can the worldview that the Universe is conspiring in our favor (rather than against us) enhance compersion?
Pronoia, as described in Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia Is The Antidote For Paranoia: How The Whole World Is Conspiring To Shower You With Blessings, is the idea that the Universe is conspiring on our behalf; that everything happens for us, not to us. Because it is such a powerful antidote to the pervasive negativity that permeates our conditioned minds, pronoia can be an essential tool for anyone looking to invite more compersion into their lives–whether in consensually non-monogamous relationships or in other contexts.
Looking at love as a way to elevate one another, and taking joy in their autonomous, unique, and incommensurable expression—rather than under the lens of conditionality and control—begins with an intention. When we develop a “compersive attitude,” experiences of envy or jealousy can be framed not as a personal affront, but as an indicator that there is an opportunity to fill our individual and relational plates more abundantly.
Incommensurability can help us to liberate ourselves from the idea that there is an abstract, seemingly universal meaning and function to physical intimacy that poses a constant invitation to compare who does it ‘better’. Incommensurability offers us a view on intimacy that lets us cherish the specificity and uniqueness of each intimate connection for its own sake.
As someone who doesn’t like to be pigeonholed into tightly defined labels or identities, novogamy is the term I had been waiting for all my life! Finding out about it gave me a sigh of relief—and a breath of fresh air.
Novogamy is the freedom to adopt any relationship structure that suits you and your partner(s) in a consensual manner, at any given point, without binding yourself to a rigid identity or set of beliefs. The term was coined by Dr. Jorge Ferrer in his recent book, Love & Freedom: Transcending Monogamy and Polyamory, which explains in great detail why monogamists and polyamorists should finally stop their ideological war (and live happily forever after on whatever relational path suits them best).
Refreshingly, novogamy says that we don’t have to choose between monogamy OR polyamory—OR any other relationship style for that matter, in a permanent way. Novogamy expands relational choices beyond the mono/poly binary, and eschews the age-old debate around the supposed superiority or naturalness of monogamy versus polyamory—and instead argues that there is no such thing as one “universal truth” when it comes to intimate relationships.
Creating a relational life that embodies the necessary conditions for compersion represents a remarkable feat in and of itself—because these are conditions of healthy relating. We may compersion as a flashlight to illuminate the areas in our relationships that can be improved.
The essence of this journey into empathy and gratitude can apply to monogamists and consensually non-monogamous folks alike—providing a foundation for relationship satisfaction and individual happiness in any relationship style.
A personal introduction to the book “Love and Freedom: Transcending Monogamy and Polyamory”, by Jorge Ferrer, PhD. This book proposes a paradigm shift in how romantic relationships are conceptualized, a step forward in the evolution of modern relationships. In the same way that the transgender movement surmounted the gender binary, Ferrer defines how a parallel step can—and should—be taken with the relational style binary. This book offers the first systematic discussion of relationship modes beyond monogamy and polyamory, as well as introduces the notion of “relational freedom” as the capability to choose one’s relational style free from biological, psychological, and sociocultural conditionings.
Ferrer articulates three relational pathways to living in-between, through, and beyond the mono/poly binary: fluidity, hybridity, and transcendence. Moving beyond that binary opens a fuzzy, liminal, and multivocal relational space that Ferrer calls novogamy.
MY GIFT TO YOU: FREE COMPERSION HANDBOOK
- Discover the 6 elements that promote empathic joy in consensually non-monogamous relationships
- Discern myths from realities about compersion
- Understand where YOU are on your compersion journey
