Compersion is a feeling of joy when a loved one invests in and takes pleasure from another romantic or sexual relationship, often described as the emotional opposite of jealousy.
The term originated in the 📝Kerista Commune, a San Francisco 📝polyfidelitous community active from the 1970s through 1991, and has since become one of the most widely used concepts in 📝Consensual Non-Monogamy (CNM) and 📝polyamory. Where jealousy contracts around a perceived threat to connection, compersion expands — it's the capacity to witness a partner's happiness with someone else and feel genuinely glad rather than threatened. The experience is not the absence of jealousy but a distinct emotional state that can coexist alongside it.
Compersion is often aspirational rather than automatic. It tends to emerge more readily in relationships with secure attachment, transparent communication, and mutual trust — conditions that frameworks like 📝Relational Sovereignty and tools like 📝RADAR are designed to cultivate. For many practitioners, developing compersion is a practice rather than a personality trait, strengthened over time through self-work and honest engagement with one's own insecurities.
Compersion has drawn only a small body of empirical research — roughly five studies since 2003 — but the findings are consistent. Studies report that people in consensually non-monogamous relationships feel more compersion and less jealousy toward a partner's outside relationships than monogamous people do. A 2021 study in Archives of Sexual Behavior by Flicker, Vaughan, and Meyers was among the first to measure the experience systematically, and later work has linked compersion to cognitive empathy and found that it indirectly improves relationship satisfaction by reducing jealousy. This research also complicates the "opposite of jealousy" framing: the two emotions can coexist, supporting the view of compersion as a distinct, cultivable capacity rather than merely the absence of jealousy.
I was introduced to the term by 📝Gavin Doughtie, reflecting on my experience of seeing and sharing happiness for 📝The Birthday Girl who had been present at 📝Original Muscle Beach with her new boyfriend, her 📝Perfect Partner.