 Compersion is the
capacity to take pleasure in the joy that one's lover gets in the
company of another lover. I'm using 'love' and 'lover' here in the
broadest sense -- intellectual, emotional, sensual, aesthetic, and/or
erotic love. Compersion is by definition generous, un-jealous, un-possessive.
Imagine
that you love someone completely, and that they passionately crave and
enjoy the company of another for one of the following reasons:
- his/her
intelligence, ideas, knowledge, imagination, creativity, curiosity,
wit, sense of fun, sense of humour, sense of play, beliefs,
expressiveness, hobbies or passions
- his/her emotional warmth,
empathy, ability to communicate on a common emotional plane, heart,
generosity, perceptiveness, fire, energy, strength, sensitivity,
appreciation, tolerance, capacity for love, trustworthiness, or
responsibility
- his/her beauty, art, talent, spirit, connectedness, synaesthesia, or aesthetic sensibility
- his/her sex appeal, skill/capacity at love-making, erotic mystery, or promise of sexual variety
How would you feel? Insecure? Inadequate? Threatened? Jealous? Angry? Hurt? Envious? Vulnerable? Turned off? Fearful?
Now
imagine that this lover told you you were silly to feel this way, that
his/her love for you was undiminished or even strengthened by his/her
other loves, and that it would be good for you to also find other
lovers whose company you enjoy.
Now how would you feel? Rejected? Humiliated? Ridiculous?
The
key to compersion is to learn not to feel any of these negative
emotions, and instead to feel delight in the pleasure your lover finds
in others that enlarges his/her happiness and frees you from the
expectation that you must be all things to him/her. This allows you to
be, for him/her, exactly what you are that he/she loves, and at the
same time frees you to find other lovers who spark something in you,
not necessarily better than what you get from him/her, but different.
Now imagine that each of you has five other
lovers, making a dozen people in all who you both love, either directly
or because of what they do for the ones you love directly. And imagine
that these twelve people in your polyamorous circle have made a pledge
of polyfidelity (to love only these same 12 people, and to leave the
circle if they choose to love others outside the circle, the community.
Do
you feel better now? Does the 'safety in numbers' of the circle, the
absolute abundance of love available to you, make compersion possible
when it wasn't when the circle was small or uneven?
In many
recent conversations with people who are in, or were in, or think they
might one day be in such a relationship, I've heard these three
comments over and over:
- Males seem to have more of a problem
with compersion than females, especially when the circle is small and
open. This is the finding that troubles me most.
- While many see
the polyamorous/compersion lifestyle as a worthy ideal, they also view
it as idealistic and even unachievable or unnatural. This may be due to
the fact that we are unpracticed, in our modern, love-starved,
love-as-scarce-resource, competitive, untrusting society. It may take a
generation of experimenting with polyamorous circles and communities
before they become (or, some think, re-become) just the way many of us live and love.
- The
circles seem to work better when women are mostly responsible for
managing them. This is pretty easy to understand -- most women are more
grounded and better at listening and seeking consensus than most men.
I'd
like to believe the first of these finding is just the result of lack
of practice setting aside the negative feelings we associate with our
lovers loving others, but I'm not so sure. I've felt pangs of these
negative feelings myself, despite the deep and growing circle of loving
and generous friends that are in my life.
Is there something
wrong with me, or is this just the way men are -- are our bodies just
telling us to choose one person to love and battle other men jealously
for her (or his, if you're gay) exclusive love?
To try to get at
the answer to this question, I considered what would be an evolutionary
advantage -- would polyamory or monogamy bode better for the health and
well-being of the whole circle, community or culture? To me the answer
to this is a no-brainer: polyamory groups should be better equipped and
inclined to defend and advance the interests of the whole. So
polyamorism should be the natural way to live and love.
So if this is true, what's wrong with us (men in particular) that we now find it so hard to behave naturally?
I suspect it comes down to "it's the only life we know" -- we won't
viscerally believe in polyamorous circles and communities, where
compersion holds sway, until we've seen models, first hand, that show
such communities work.
For
those of us who want to make the world a better place, then, our job
would appear to be clear: Try, experiment, learn from polyamorous
circles and intentional communities until we have evolved some working
models, with the bugs worked out of them and the natural rules of
engagement for them re-discovered. We owe it to ourselves, our sad
love-deprived world, and the generations that follow.
For the
rest of my life, this will be, I suspect, one of my key goals,
purposes, and intentions. In a world gone mad, where every conceivable
political and economic approach to saving it has been tried and found
wanting, this may be our last chance. I said yesterday that life's meaning emerges from conversation in community with people you love.
The rediscovery of compersion as natural human behaviour may therefore
be the way home, to the place we have always belonged, and the
essential way of living we have tragically forgotten..
Photo by Rhonda Miller from this remarkable Metroactive article about polyamory.
|
10:27:28 PM 
|
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
