Factors that Facilitate and Hinder the Experience of Compersion Among Individuals in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships is a 2022 qualitative study by Sharon M. Flicker, Marie I. Thouin-Savard, and Michelle D. Vaughan, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, that maps what makes 📝compersion easier or harder to feel.
A qualitative companion to the 📝COMPERSe scale, the study asked 44 people in 📝Consensual Non-Monogamy (CNM) relationships who had experienced compersion to describe, in an open-ended survey, what facilitated and what hindered it. A thematic analysis sorted their answers into three domains: intrapersonal factors within the individual, the qualities of the relationship with one's partner, and one's feelings and judgments about the 📝metamour — the partner's partner.
The factors most often named as facilitating compersion were a stable sense of self-worth, feeling secure and having one's own needs met in the relationship with the partner, open communication, and genuine positive regard for the metamour. The same dimensions in the negative — insecurity, unmet needs, poor communication, or a strained relationship with the metamour — tended to hinder it. The finding reinforces a theme running through this literature: compersion is less an innate disposition than a state that secure, well-tended relationships make room for.