Queering Compersion with @lifewflo and @polyamoryinpractice
Compersion, the feeling of joy/happiness at seeing your partner with other people, is often touted as the Holy Grail of polyamory: a milestone you reach once you have achieved complete security within yourself, fully embracing the abundance mindset, and having a complete lack of jealousy. In reality, it's a lot more complicated than that. In this episode, Flo (@lifewflo), Alexa (@polyamoryinpractice) and I discuss:
- deconstructing the binary of compersion/jealousy
- queering the timeline from high jealousy to high compersion on one's polyamorous journey
- our different experiences of compersion and how it is a mixed bag of feelings rather than a sensation of pure joy
- how to navigate different experiences of compersion and jealousy with partners and metamours
and much more.
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transcribed by Alexa @polyamoryinpractice
Leanne: Welcome to Happy Polydays, a series of intimate conversations about polyamory, sexuality, identity, and relationships, hosted by me – Leanne Yau of the Poly Philia blog.
Leanne: Hello everyone and welcome to day seven of the Happy Polydays series. Today I am joined by Flo and Alexa who are both polyamory content creators and today we are going to be talking about compersion, specifically, the concept of queering compersion. So, Flo is a sex educator, coach, and trainee therapist and they go by ‘life with flo’, so, @lifewflo on Instagram. And Alexa goes by @polyamoryinpractice, she is a therapist and a non-monogamy educator. So, welcome to Happy Polydays, Flo and Alexa!
I think my first question for the two of you is what was your journey into polyamory? What is your polyamory origin story? And after that, we can go into the concept of compersion and your personal experiences with that. So, yeah, go ahead!
Flo: Okay, so my polyamory origin story I would say came to be, end of high school. I was expressing a lot of feelings for my friends as well as being in relationships with people. I think it was really, really confusing because I didn’t have that language and I don’t think anyone really did in high school. So, it ended up being kind of a snowball of different things. And then, when I went to college my freshman year, I got into a very long-term relationship and I was exposed to that language. I brought it up in conversation and finally was able to explore polyamory in a much healthier, communicative way. So I would say, kind of just like gradually happened and freshman year of college was my start, like introduction, into polyamory for sure.
Leanne: Yeah, I started my polyamory journey at university as well. So it’s really good to hear someone else starting it earlier on. Because you don’t actually hear - I think most people they start in long term relationships or in marriages, you know, much later on. So, it’s good to hear from people who have started fairly early. What about you Alexa?
Alexa: Yeah, so, I kind of have a different experience. I think in 2019, my anchor partner now, we had just started dating. I think we were dating for 6 months I believe. And they brought it up to me as a potential identity of theirs. And I was very much like, “You are wild if you think I’m going to do that.” I told them - like I’ll be honest, you know I’m not proud of it now, but I told them, “Don’t say that word around me, like, don’t even say the word polyamory around me”. Which is really wild because I think a lot of that was just internalization of the fact that I've been engaging in polyamorous situations without the name for so long. In high school, I was in a long-term relationship with a man who kind of allowed me to be emotionally in a relationship, and intimately in a relationship, with a woman. And so I was kind of doing it without really noticing it. And when my anchor partner brought it to my attention, they were very patient with me. And I kind of just took a year to educate myself. So, we didn't do anything for a year, my anchor partner was very patient. And, after that, I realized I really resonate with these relationship structures and I’ve actually been doing it for so long. And my really intense reaction was just rooted in the internalized -isms and internalized stuff that was happening inside of me. And yeah, I think after a year of education, we took those steps and I have been actively polyamorous ever since.
Leanne: Yeah, that’s so great. I think, generally, I find that people either start out single but intentionally seeking a polyamorous dynamic, and then there are others who open up from an existing monogamous relationship. And I think those experiences are so different, because in one you’re like unattached and you can figure out boundaries for yourself, but it’s also like there is emotional insecurity with not being able to find partners and navigating the dating world, and that’s a whole other thing. And then, opening up from an existing monogamous relationship has its own challenges, because you're upending the foundation of your relationship. Like there are a lot of things that you need to renegotiate. But then at the same time you also have, you know, you’re on the same team. And you’re kind of working together to navigate the space together. And there is security to be found there. But also, a lot of insecurity in other places.
So, you know the reason why I invited the two of you to participate in this whole thing with me was because there was a post that you two collaborated on together that was making the rounds that was about the concept of queering compersion. And compersion is very much a hot topic in the polyamory community. I think a lot of people see it as a milestone and as the Holy Grail of polyamory. Like, you’ve worked through all your jealousy, and now when you see your partner with other people you feel just this immense joy and happiness, and whatever. And, I felt that your post was very important because it brought to light how compersion can be a wild variety of experiences and emotions. And it doesn’t just have to mean overwhelming joy but it can be, and the narrative can be, expanding to include other emotions. Neutral experiences as well as positive ones as well. And also, particularly, deconstructing the dichotomy between [compersion] and jealousy. I’ve talked about kind of similar stuff before but I think that the two of you articulated certain concepts in a very, very clever and accessible way. Like, it isn’t a spectrum from jealousy to compersion, but rather, that they can coexist, or you can have one without the other, and it’s all kind of a jumble, it’s not necessarily a linear process of you feel a lot of jealousy to start and then you move along and then you feel nothing but compersion. Like it doesn’t quite work like that.
But, you know, I don’t want to speak on behalf of the two of you. I would like to hear from you specifically. What compelled you to make this post? What were you seeing in the polyamorous community that led you to make this post about compersion and how it gets mixed up as “the opposite to jealousy”, right? And yeah, just kind of your general thoughts on why you feel compersion needs to be queered? And how you’re expanding the definition of compersion?
Flo: So we wanted to collab on a post a while ago, and it kind of just came up in conversation when we were hanging out that in both of our relationships, and our friendships and stuff, we had a lot of expectation to reach this final goal of feeling completely comfortable and 100% positive for everything that went on within our other partnerships and our metamours and stuff like that, too. And just within discussion at a coffee shop, we were just sitting there like, “Why do we sit here and think about compersion as this end goal? Is this only one way of achieving happiness and pure joy?” And we kind of just sat there with that question for a while, and when we started really dissecting it and trying to write it down on paper, like, why we had these thoughts, we decided that it would be a really good thing to share and discuss in public and raise that question to everyone else as well.
Leanne: Okay. So what do you think that the polyamorous community and mainstream polyamory narratives tend to get wrong about compersion, and what was your post aiming to correct specifically?
Alexa: Yeah. I think, especially in polyamorous spaces, there is this pressure to reach compersion in order to be polyamorous. Like, once you reach compersion instead of jealousy, suddenly you get your polyamory card in the mail and you can go swipe it and you get to experience polyamory. And that's where I was for a really long time. I wanted to feel compersion so bad because I thought that was going to be the indicator that I'm ready for polyamory. The way that I navigated polyamory in the beginning was moving from a monogamous relationship to a polyamorous one with my anchor partner. And I was not pursuing connections at that time. They were pursuing connections, and I was focusing on school, and I was really having a hard time knowing when I'd be ready for that next step because I didn't have this definition of compersion that I was reading about, that I saw online, that I saw on social media, on any media and art that I was consuming that was polyamory-oriented. And so my anchor partner waited a really long time to take these steps, because I just never felt ready, because I was waiting for compersion. I was waiting for that definition of compersion. It just wasn't coming. And I think thats what Flo and I were talking about at that coffee shop, which was just that that's the rhetoric that's in the polyamorous community right now in a really non-malicious way.
Compersion is beautiful. We all want compersion because it's awesome. It's beautiful. It's a word that has been developed and cradled by this community. And there's value in that. And it has created exclusionary situations and feelings for the rest of, a lot of, the community that might not be experiencing it in that way.
Leanne: Okay. And so then you created this post specifically to combat the narrative that you have to wait to feel this overwhelming joy before you're ready for polyamory. And it's also possible to be experiencing conflicting emotions. I think a comparison that I like to use very often is like, imagine if your friend got a job promotion or like a new job, right? But then it's also in another state or another country, even. So, you obviously feel a lot of joy and happiness for them because this is like a really great professional opportunity, and they're obviously really happy about it, right? But then at the same time, you feel some kind of bittersweet, you feel sad because they're going to be moving away. And then you might even feel some level of resentment that this kind of advancement in their lives is coming at the cost of your friendship. Or at least there's going to be some changes that are made to your friendship, right? So positive and negative emotions can exist at the same time, and they can create a mix of things. Oftentimes when we're feeling some type of way, it's usually a mixture of emotions and thoughts kind of jumbled up together.
And I think there was a slide in your queering compersion post that kind of encompassed different bubbles of emotions that I think really encapsulated that compersion isn't just the one experience of happiness and joy, but it can be excitement, it can be comfort, it can be quite a lot of different things. And so you don't have to be waiting for “I am absolutely jumping for joy, and now I'm ready!” I think it's also unrealistic, right? I think there's going to be stages, like at the beginning of opening up a relationship where you're going to feel jealous, you're going to feel scared. And that doesn't mean that you should stop doing it necessarily, or that you're not cut out for this or whatever I think there's always going to be this adjustment. Your nervous system is kind of going, “This is not how you do things normally, what is happening?” And there's a sense of danger, right? And it takes time to get used to those patterns and for your body to calm down and go, “Oh, okay, my partner isn't going to abandon me just because they're spending time with someone else, and it's fine, they keep coming home. And now I feel good and settled.”
And so I think it's very unrealistic of mainstream narratives for people to just jump into polyamory and immediately be completely chill with it from the get-go. And while that is the case for some people, right - for me, I've always had very secure attachment. I always, in practising non-monogamy and polyamory, I didn't struggle a huge amount in the early stages compared to the average person. And I think that is down to just the privilege I had of having a pretty secure childhood and family home and how that kind of contributed to my adult relationships. But not everyone has those privileges. And I think people ignore that. People just assume that everyone is starting from the same place of security and mental stability.
And in that way, I feel like mainstream polyamory education doesn't really take into account mental health or people with histories of trauma and how that can affect their ability to feel compersion, or whether, or how, they experience jealousy and that kind of thing. And I'm sure both of you, Alexa, you’re a therapist, Flo, a therapist in training, I'm sure you've come across this as well. How our trauma histories can impact how we experience jealousy and compersion.
Flo: Yeah, definitely. And I think it's really important that you said it's an unattainable or unrealistic part of compersion that the polyamory community holds as a standard. Just because even in our day to day, like even in our conversation, we were talking about how in my experiences I never felt an extreme jealousy or an extreme happiness. It was very neutral, which is why we brought in that neutrality of it, too. Because you don't have to sit there and think about it 24 hours a day and be like, “Oh, I'm so joyful that my partners are getting along or that they're having amazing dates.” You can just be comfortable and willing to listen and provide space for them, and then just go about your day. It doesn't have to be a thing that's constantly on your mind or that you achieve and always have with you. It's very much timeless, and you move through it in different ways.
Leanne: Yeah. Another thing that I feel that mainstream polyamory kind of gets wrong is that jealousy is something that you just work through at the start, and then it's just gone forever. I think that there's a couple of layers to this, right? Because as your circumstances change or your relationship change, then jealousy can crop up in some situations or in others. Some situations may feel more activating or triggering. And it's not like, “Oh, we've worked through this thing. And no matter how things change in our relationship, this emotion is never going to come up again.” That's unrealistic, right? We wouldn't say that about sadness or anger. It just comes up in situations that cause sadness or anger.
And I also think that the polyamorous community tends to frame jealousy as an internal issue. It's always something that you need to work on within yourself. And something that I have been bringing quite a lot of attention to in my recent posts is that there are definitely situations where your jealousy is 100% rooted in reality and is completely justified. Because jealousy, a lot of the time, is like a sense of loss. It's a fear of loss. It's a fear of abandonment. It's alerting you that there are needs that are not being met in your relationship. And these are external things. If your partner is continuing to neglect you and deprioritize you and abandon you, no matter how much you process your emotions, they're still going to be there because that external problem is still present and still happening. So at that point, it's actually counterintuitive to try and process and work through the jealousy, because what you're doing at that point is numbing yourself to what your body is telling you. Like, “Hey, there's things that should be addressed here externally, and it's not just like an internal trauma and insecurity,” but that can be difficult to distinguish. So this binary where it's like, “Oh, if you have jealousy, then you don't have compersion. If you have compersion, you have no jealousy.” It's an unhelpful model. And I think your post really did well to bring attention to that.
And I think it's kind of related to how jealousy can crop up in all kinds of situations no matter how many years you've been practising polyamory, and you can have issues with compersion depending on the person that your partner is dating. For example, a very easy example is if you don't get along with your metamour, or if your metamour is being quite disrespectful towards you or there has been conflict, you might struggle to feel compersion compared to a metamour who you really got along with. And you could see how they fit with your partner, and how good they are for each other, and how they contribute positively to your partner's life. And in that situation, you'd be like, “Oh, I'm super happy for you.” But if you had a metamour who wasn't like that, obviously, you would struggle a bit more. So it's not a linear process. It's not like a timeline. And so I really liked the squiggly jumble thing that you did in your diagram. You queered the timeline of compersion. There shouldn't be a linear expectation.
So I guess my question for you is, what have your personal experiences been with compersion? How would you describe your personal experience of compersion? I guess it depends on the situations you're in, but I'd love to hear more about what emotions crop up for you when you are experiencing compersion. I ask this because I think I want to show people the diversity of ways in which compersion can be experienced between the three of us. So, yeah! I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Flo: Yeah. So I was actually just talking about the feeling of compersion with one of my partners recently. I engage in a lot of kink spaces with one of my partners. And more recently, we've been having these discussions of having other play partners and just sharing interactions that we've come across. And I would say, a couple of days ago, my first more recent feeling of compersion was looking at a text that my partner sent me from some other person. And I was like, “How exciting, I kind of wish I was you in this spot right now.” And then it was also coupled with a little bit of like, “Ooh, what if it's more fun for them? What will I do?” But that's something that I had to process on my own as well. There's the excitement and the stress at the same time, and then having to sit back and really be like, “You know what? I'm super happy for you in this moment, and I'm going to take my time to really process this.” So that was the most recent thing for me. But I also think you can experience compersion with your friendships, like how you're mentioning with your friends, like moving, getting a job, and stuff like that. And I feel like that's the most common way that we see compersion in monogamous spaces. So, yeah, that was my most recent experience, and it was fun!
Alexa: Yeah. I love that we're talking about this. I love that we're going to talk about the diversity of compersion because it's just so vast and we don't talk about it enough. I found myself questioning, like, “Am I doing this right? Am I doing polyamory right?” I experienced a lot of compersion with my anchor partner because of, kind of what you were talking about, Leanne, that secure attachment. And then I experience more jealousy with newer connections and less compersion with newer connections because I'm like, “Okay, I thought we were getting to know each other!” But at the end of the day, I also do feel a lot of compersion over time, irregardless of who it is, which is why taking space is super valid. I'm just going to speak for myself - I thought I had to really reconnect with my partner and my partners after each endeavour they have had with other folks. But I realized like, yeah, I just need space, and then I can feel compersion. So taking space before, allowing yourself some space before, you put that pressure of, “Oh, I'm not feeling compersion right now”.
I think I experience compersion differently depending on the activity, which is really interesting. Like, my anchor partner is trans. And so when they spend their time with other trans folks, that brings me a lot of warm comfort. And just this feeling of, I guess I can only describe it as like drinking hot tea. It feels warm. Like, “Oh, I'm so happy. This is something that I don't give them as their cis partner, but they can get in other spaces.” And that's just really powerful. I think that warm feeling of compersion was the first time where I was really juiced about compersion. And then on the other side of the spectrum, I think - well, it's not a spectrum - but on the other side of the big squiggle that we were talking about is the compersion that is just more neutral. Like what Flo is saying. And I experience this a lot in my friendships. I have really great friends who have partners. And when they're telling me about their relationships, their experiences with their partners, sometimes I experience a really neutral form of compersion. Like, “Oh, that's really great.” I don't feel like I'm jumping up and down with joy for them. And that might be because there's some other stuff. Maybe I'm experiencing some jealousy, but it comes up a lot in my friends in heterosexual relationships. I get really juiced about my friends in queer relationships, but when I'm hearing about a heterosexual time, sometimes I feel more just neutral. My community is just so close to my heart.
Leanne: Yeah, absolutely. I want to touch on what you said, Alexa, about kind of how you feel a lot of compersion with your anchor partner, but with newer partners, you feel more jealousy. And I really don't think that this is talked about enough, because I absolutely feel this too.
So, a couple of months ago, I had a dalliance, shall we say, with someone? Unfortunately, that connection didn't end up lasting very long. But at the very start, I found myself getting very weirdly possessive of this person. And I was very surprised at myself. I was like, “I've been actively non-monogamous since I was, like, 17. It's been six years. How are these feelings coming up for me now? I thought I worked through this.” But then, what I realized was that the reason why I was feeling this way was - because he was telling me about a date that he had with someone else, and immediately I was like “mhhm!” - and I realized it was because him and I hadn't gotten to know each other extremely well. And so then in the early stages of our connection, I felt that it was easier for me to be replaced, because we were still kind of in the dating stage and nothing was set in stone. Of course, I don't feel that with my anchor partner because we've been together for three years. We've got an established rapport, established bond. We've got established commitments to each other. And I don't feel very threatened by that because I know that he feels very seriously about me and that we very much see the value that we each bring to each other in our relationship. So that was a weird time for me, because I had to kind of work through like, “Wait, I thought I was good at this!” and then suddenly realized, “No, there is a reason why I'm feeling this way.”
And I do also think - I have a theory, and perhaps the two of you can weigh on on this since you’re a therapist and therapist in training - I do think that how much agility someone feels with compersion with established versus new partners differs depending on whether you experience anxious or avoidant attachment.
Alexa: Oh, hell yeah!
Leanne: Here's my theory. I'm generally securely attached, but then in moments of activation in particular situations, I think I lean more towards anxious. So then I feel more anxious with new partners because we haven't found our footing in the relationship. And then so I struggle to feel compersion and I feel a bit more jealousy. But I've spoken to some other people who are avoidantly attached, and they say that they feel more jealousy and less compersion with established partners. But then they are able to feel a lot of compersion for people that they haven't gotten to know that well yet. And I wonder if it's because avoidants are typically kind of stereotyped with that fear of vulnerability, intimacy. And that when triggering situations happen, there is the shutdown and run away. Hence, the term avoidant. And so in that sense, with more established partners, while an anxiously attached person would feel more secure, they would feel insecure the more attached they are. Am I making any sense? That’s my theory. What do you think about that?
Flo: I’ll let you go first because I’m still in training.
Alexa: Yeah. Well, I will say that I was trained - my supervisor is a psychodynamic therapist, which is essentially the theory that's all about attachment. And so I've had a lot of training on attachment. And I don't know anything because theory is also complex and deep. But I do know that if there's one thing that shapes you, it is your attachment, and it is your attachment style. And that is just so salient for the rest of your life. And that's not an end all be all you're not only your attachment style, and there are ways to navigate it. There are ways to hold space for it, create space for it. We're not trying to change our attachment style. We're trying to show ourselves self-compassion.
But I think it's so, so valid to just really be shaped by your attachment style. I can definitely speak to the anxiously attached folks out there because that's me. I am like textbook definition anxiously attached, abandonment issues. And it's so hard with newer folks because it's so hard when there's just that constant fear of abandonment. It's kind of just like circling around. And typically - this is also just theory - but typically what we see is avoidantly attached people tend to appear more stable and so anxiously attached folks are drawn to that. So they'll draw avoidantly attached folks and then they will pull, pull, pull, and they will push, push, push. And then that kind of causes some kind of riff. I think it's also another big, like bubble squiggle, not spectrum. And there's nothing wrong with either attachments. And some other stuff that I've heard in the polyamorous community is that anxiously attached folks have a really hard time being polyamorous, and they can't do it. And that’s just not true. We can still do it.
Leanne: Absolutely, yeah.
Flo: I mean, I've definitely been trained in a completely different perspective. So as far as the training that I've had thus far, I would say that it's a very colonial approach to think about our upbringing within attachment styles. Specifically leading to how we interact as adults due to our childhood. And I would say that if anything, I would focus more on community versus individualistic perspectives of how we attach and relate to other humans. Honestly, I’m still in training.
Alexa: But I think there's so much validity to what you're saying. And we often look at attachment style as, “Who raised you?” When we talk about attachment style, we do think of a mom and a dad, which is that colonial mindset. Folks who are raised by their community, or raised in more collective styles, have more opportunity for secure attachment and have more opportunity for safe spaces, safe attachment styles.
Leanne: Yeah. Completely. I completely agree with you. And I think Jessica Fern actually kind of touched on this in her book Polysecure. Like when she was talking about her model of attachment encompassed not just within the personal family home, but also within your wider community. And then within the country that you live in, and then within the global stuff. I think climate change and stuff like that can contribute to personal insecurity and existential dread and all that stuff, and that can affect attachment.
I think that - I'm going to be covering this topic later on in two days time with @femmmeow and @antimononormative about polyamory and Gen Z, and how basically we feel that the younger generation of Gen Z, like, the kids who are currently teenagers are actually swinging back to more traditional, perhaps even kind of conservative, and right-wing models of relationships because they grew up with so much insecurity in the pandemic, and the climate, and protests, and political whatever. So they find stability in something like very traditional heterosexual monogamy. And that's kind of informed by our perspective on just our TikTok comment sections, because a lot of the really the most awful things that people have said to me on TikTok have been from, like, 13 -year-olds. And there were really traditional perspectives going, “Polyamory is wrong and should be man and woman, whatever”. And it's like, “Whoa, what is going on here? I thought the kids were woke.”
So anyway, that was a bit of a tangent, but I'm bringing that back to try and say, yeah, I do think that attachment is so much more than how we're shaped by our home, but also by community and financial situations and so many other things as well. So yeah, I think that's a really important point for you to have made.
I'm going to answer, because I asked you about how you experience compersion, so I'm going to answer my own question as well. I've also had very varied experiences of compersion and I think it also highly depends on what my relationship is with my partner's partner. I usually find it much easier to experience compersion if I know something about them, or have even gotten to know them on a more personal level. And in the past, some metamours have struggled to connect with me, or sometimes don't even want to connect with me at all. And there have been feelings around that. But then over time, I think obviously you have to learn to accept other people's boundaries and to work through your own stuff, right? Because we can't just be doing whatever we want, and expecting other people to just bend to our desires.
I think my compersion is also, to an extent, tied into feelings of arousal, actually. And that's interesting because I think that, as well as being polyamorous, my partner and I are swingers, and we're very much like exhibitionists. We're reasonably kinky and we like going to sex parties together and that kind of thing. And I really enjoy watching my partner engage sexually with other people. This is not everyone's cup of tea, right? I think some people are happy watching their partners engaging in PDA, kissing in public, and just being generally physically affectionate, but then a lot of people would draw the line at actually seeing their partner engaging sexually with someone else. So my perspective is very much my own individual comfort levels and boundaries and that kind of thing. But I really enjoy seeing my partner with other people because it turns me on! (laughs) So that has been a good time for me because I see what things that my partner is picking up through learning other people's bodies and what kind of new techniques and skills that he's doing that we can take back to our own life. All the while, obviously, I still feel a lot of joy and comfort seeing my partner have a good time with someone else.
At the moment, I'm quarantining in Hong Kong, and he is in the UK. And he's going on dates with other people telling me about how they went; how he visited this new bar, how they went to see this show. And I feel a lot of joy and happiness that he's able to have fun and socialize with other people while I'm over here, and he isn't feeling lonely. There is an aspect of it where I'm like, “Oh, I wish I was there with you”. But then again, two emotions can exist at the same time.
But back to what I said, I think compersion is in some scenarios tied to arousal to me, is tied to almost like a voyeurism kink. And I think that's also completely valid. And people don't talk about that very much, because I feel like the polyamory community has a weird aversion to talking about sex because we want to very much talk about how polyamory is not about the sex. And then in doing so, we kind of swing back in the other direction where I have found some polyamorous people to be very weirdly sex-negative where they're like, “If you engage in group sex, you are not truly polyamorous.” And I’m like, “Bro, sex is a very big part of how I love”. And I very much want to push back against this narrative that polyamory is not about the sex, because I think it can be. It's just not all of what it is. There is very hyper-sexual polyamorists like me. And then there's asexual polyamorists or people with low libido or whatever. There is a whole spectrum. I think the whole point is connection and intimacy.
So, yeah! My experience of compersion is kind of tied in with that aspect of things. And I think the fact that I enjoy seeing my partner engaged with other people definitely makes things easier for me. Otherwise, I think I might get in my head about comparisons of our bodies, or feeling inadequate if someone is able to satisfy a kink that I'm not into, or something like that. But for me, it’s like, “I'm glad that you're getting to know people that are enriching and fulfilling your life,” in that sense.
I do think a healthy amount of empathy comes into it as well. I think that when you start being able to see your partner's successes as your own, rather than engaging in this competitiveness with your partner. Like, not just competition with your partner's other partner, but also competition with your own partner regarding your own dating lives. Because I think some people can get into this thing where it's like, “Well, you get a date, I have to get a date as well. We have to go out and date at the same time.” Tit for tat. And that can get into a weird space. You end up objectifying other people as tallies on a scoreboard. And also engaging in competition with your partner over something as complex as dating.
So I think one thing that's really key to developing healthy compersion, or neutrality, or whatever kind of space you would like to get to, like comfort, is breaking down that sense of competitiveness with other people, with your partner. And then recognizing that you're a team, you're in this together, and that their wins are your wins. And their wins contribute to the happiness of your relationship, and their sense of fulfilment in themselves, and your relationship as a whole. And they all influence each other. They all benefit each other. And I think that's the really key thing. Because I think if you experience a lot of competitiveness and you're always keeping score and just being very calculating, I can imagine that feeling compersion would be a struggle in that kind of mindset. Do you have anything to add to that? What do you think?
Flo: I think what you said was beautiful, too. Just because, in the sum of it, what I hear is that to some extent, kink is also teaching us how to live vicariously through our partners. It can teach us so much about not only consent and focusing on our own boundaries and perspectives during these times and adjusting to our own bodily needs and soothing, but it can also give us an opportunity to live vicariously through our partners, experience that compersion in live space, and just figure out what you need in the moment.
A lot of people that I've encountered in polyamorous spaces have been very sex negative to the point where it's like, “If you go for just sex or you just hook up with someone or you have an immediate attraction, you're not doing polyamory,” because it's all about this one love and attainability of love, and to feel that compersion. And I think honestly, having one specific definition of even just compersion or polyamory - anything within our community is not the right way to go, which is why we wanted to queer compersion. Because there's so many ways to look at everything in our community, and standing by so firmly of one definition is definitely going to exclude a lot of people and leave a lot of things out that we, as human beings, feel and experience as multifaceted people. So, yeah, it was beautiful. Everything you said - just amazing!
Alexa: I love it. And Flo, you're bringing up such a good point of terminology and how terminology is used against the community sometimes. I had an experience where I was speaking to someone who practices what they call polyamory. And their definition of polyamory is they have an anchor partner, and then they engage sexually with other folks. One night stands, folks they meet at the bars, folks they meet at concerts, folks they meet at school. But they don't necessarily date them. And people have been really belittling them, saying, “That's not polyamory. That's an open relationship, or that's non-monogamy. But you can't call it polyamory.” And I think even just that rigidity in the term - your definition of polyamory is your definition of polyamory. Polyamory is a practice. It's also an identity. If you want to claim it as both, you can. Just as in the queer community, we have terms. The terms aren't used to label us. They're not used to force us into these boxes but instead should just give us freedom if we want to label different facets of our identity and also just ways to communicate about this. Ways to talk about this in everyday language, because we deserve to have that kind of treatment of just being in the conversation about relationships.
Leanne: Absolutely. I think that there is a grey area between what is classified as polyamory, what is classified as just non-monogamy. And while I do think the distinction is important - because I think the last thing that a polyamorous person wants is to engage with someone who is only sexually open but romantically monogamous, and then to find out very, very late in the line - which is why I think it's important for people to actually clarify what their boundaries are rather than throwing around labels that might mean different things to different people. Even things like, “What does commitment mean to you? What does the phrase “I love you” mean to you? What does cheating mean to you?” And to define that in your relationship rather than going like, “Yeah, don't cheat on me.” “Okay, what does that mean?” I think with polyamory, non-monogamy is kind of similar stuff as well.
I do like to make this distinction because I think polyamory as well has a bit of a political history regarding the free love movement and all that kind of stuff. And I do think that the practice is - I don't want to say sex, but - sections of swinging communities very much like uphold very heteronormative standards. Still, I do identify as a swinger, and I do love swinging. I do love going to sex parties. There are definitely some swinging communities that are very heteronormative where it's mostly straight couples engaging with each other with a little femme-on-femme for spice. And I think polyamorous people would reject that as kind of being included within polyamory. So I think the distinctions are important, still.
Alexa: Right.
Leanne: But I do understand what you mean. I think there are grey areas, right? I definitely know there are some swingers who have very long-term intimate relationships with other couples, and even if they don't necessarily define them as romantic, they are very intimate. They are long-term and they are committed and so, is that polyamory? Because these are four people and they've been with each other a long time and they're very close, right? They built a community. But is it just because they primarily meet up to have group sex, is that polyamory? So, there is overlap. And I think recognizing that nuance is important.
Alexa: Right, yeah. And something I want to add is just the example I talked about earlier - the person has a very relationship anarchist type of viewpoint where they express they love these people because in their experiences, sex is love. And so I think that, like you were saying, it's just really the definition of what love is to you. And I think that's the most important piece is, are you communicating? Is it consensual? And are there boundaries that are being followed? And when we have these labels, labels are just literal lingo. They’re just words. They have no meaning unless there’s consent, communication, and boundaries.
Flo: And I think that's the most important part, too. Like the difference between figuring out how you and your partners operate with these definitions and this terminology, versus how you operate when you're policing other people and engaging in a very exclusive construction of polyamory to the point of harming other folks. As long as no one's being harmed and you're deciding what works for you and what other people view polyamory as and how that fits into your relationship, then it's okay. But the policing aspect of it, I think, is what really draws people to feel, especially with compersion, excluded or feel like they can't achieve it. Like an unattainable thing because there is so many strict boundaries and outlines of what compersion should look like.
Leanne: Completely, I completely agree with you.
I asked the two of you to collate some questions from followers related to compersion and jealousy and all this good stuff. And so we do have a couple of things that followers wanted us to discuss. And I think one thing that would be really interesting to touch on is navigating differences in experiences in compersion with you and your partner or you and your metamour, and how conflict can arise within polycules if one partner is more jealous than the other, or one person is more compersive than the other, and how we go about navigating that. What do you think about that topic in general? Do you have any personal experiences around you experiencing more compersion than your metamour, or them experiencing more than you, and how that's played out in various scenarios?
Flo: Yeah, I definitely have a lot of experience with this. I tend to be the person who feels more compersion generally and is more, I hate labelling it like this, but more “chill” in a sense. I don't usually experience an extreme form of jealousy, and usually, I'm very internalized. When I do experience it, I process it on my own. So in my past relationships, I would have small conflicts where my partners would not feel as much compersion for each other. And I think what it came down to was navigating conversations between those partners, between metamours, because the polyamorous person who's dating, maybe even in like a V shape, is what I would have called it, can't always be the person communicating or striving to make the effort to include compersion or just help people feel compersion along the way. I think that metamours have to put in just as much work as the polyamorous people who are dating multiple people.
Leanne: Completely!
Flo: Yeah! So as a person who didn't feel as much jealousy and felt compersion really easily, I also had to be aware of my boundaries and the way I was reflecting my compersion back to my partners because it could be triggering in some ways for me to be joyous at all moments when we needed to process collectively. So it's very much just an ongoing conversation of how and when is the space to discuss this, and what capacity everyone is at to maybe address at their different positions in their polyamorous journey.
Alexa: I love that. Yeah, that's so true. Just what is best for everyone involved in terms of sitting down and having these discussions.
I think what came up for me is I definitely haven't had any kind of conflict with a metamour in my own personal experience. But there was a situation of my metamour not feeling, honestly, like they were allowed to talk about their compersion and their jealousy. Creating so much space for me and for my anchor partner and just not really feeling their own value in the relationship and their own power in the relationship. And I think that really encouraged me and my anchor partner to really open up safe spaces for discussion because you can feel your feelings, you can feel your compersion, you can feel your jealousy, and if you want to bring that up, it's important to really prioritize what a safe space looks like for you to bring that up. And so I think that that's one thing that I really took away - it was creating really safe open spaces for folks to discuss their compersion and their jealousy without punishment, without judgment, too. Flo and I’s goal: there is no one way to experience this, and it's okay to not have it all figured out. And that's something that we can sit down and do together.
Leanne: Yeah, completely. I think that's a really good point that both of you brought up was the appropriate time and space to bring up compersion and jealousy, or to express compersion or jealousy. Similar to you Flo, I tended to be the more compersive one in my relationships with my partners or my metamours. And I definitely messed up in the past, where I was not mindful of how my partners and metamours were feeling about the situation. I was just, like, bouncing off the walls and just being like, “Yeah!” and then everyone was just like, “Oh, God, this makes me feel bad, because I'm not there yet, and what does this mean about me? What does this mean about my relationships and that kind of thing? Will our mutual partner think differently of me because he has one partner who's more chill with it, and I'm struggling with it?” And there's a lot of competitiveness and kind of insecurity stuff around that. So I do absolutely think that there is a time and place to kind of express that. And if your partner is having a bad time, you don't want to be going like, “Yeah, I'm joyous!” No, you can express your emotions in more compassionate ways. Don't suppress it. Don't tamp it down. Don't pretend it's not there, obviously. But then there are ways to express emotions, whether positive or negative, right? Whether it's like joy or sadness or anger, there are healthy ways to express that and considerate and tactful ways to express that, and being mindful of your partner's triggers and current emotional state.
I think another thing is - so far in this conversation, we've talked a lot about working towards compersion, I guess, or in what situations we would feel more compersion. But then I also kind of want to bring up the flip side of when you experience too much compersion. This is probably not the most relatable experience, but I do think it's still important to cover. Because sometimes my compersion has been overwhelming for people. It has been really kind of disorienting, even. As I said in the past, if I've been really happy, and I have a metamour who's kind of struggling with it, then that can kind of bring up feelings of insecurity or inadequacy in the other person, which I have not been mindful to.
And I think it's also important not to let your compersion turn into an invasion of your partner's privacy. Sometimes I can get so overexcited about my partner dating other people, and I want to hear details because it makes me really feel very happy to hear about it, that I end up massively intruding on what my metamour wants me to know. And so I think it's very important to talk boundaries in that situation as well, because you don't want to be - So the term that I use, and this is not a term that I coined, it is a term that I believe Page Turner of the Poly Land blog coined, a “compervert”. Which is basically like someone who feels so much compersion to the point of low-key objectifying other people because they really feed off that energy in the other relationships to feel the sense of happiness and joy. I think it's particularly applicable to me, given that my compersion is sometimes tied in with arousal. And obviously, there is a time and a place to objectify people, right? And that has to be carefully negotiated and that kind of thing. So I think it's important to talk about the flip side. There are people who struggle with not experiencing compersion and feeling like a lot of jealousy, and then there are people who are in the middle who just generally kind of experience neutrality about it and they don't feel one way or the other. And then there are people like me who have the opposite problem completely. So yeah, I think those are all important things to discuss.
The conclusion with all that is being mindful of your partner's emotional state, like if you're having good time and they're having a bad time, having to navigate that. And then, also understanding that different people have different perspectives on something. Something that you might feel a lot of joy about, your partner may not, and vice versa. And it isn't so much good and bad or how evolved or progressive you are on your journey. Keeping in mind, our personal upbringings, our trauma histories, and our attachment style, and various other factors that contribute to whether or not we're able to experience compersion and jealousy, and how much of it we experience, and the timeline of that and that kind of thing.
Honestly, I feel like this is such a rich topic that we could talk about forever. And I feel like there's so much to be said for how compersion doesn't have to be the Holy Grail. It doesn't have to be this thing that you have to get, in order to kind of get your polyamory card, as you said, Alexa, and how people can function perfectly fine in polyamory without ever experiencing compersion. I think as long as you get to a point where you're not feeling majorly distressed and cut up about something, as long as you're able to appreciate your partner's journey being beneficial to them, and you're able to feel some level of acceptance and fulfilment from both of you seeing other people and that kind of thing, compersion is not necessary. And I think it's time for people to be able to free themselves from the narrative that they need to work towards it.
It's more like, well, it's like a nice bonus, right? It's a nice bonus. And it's a nice thing to feel. And obviously, everyone wants to feel nice things! But then if you're not jumping for joy, if you're just kind of going like “eh” about the whole thing, that's fine, too. And that is completely valid, as long as you feel empowered in the decisions that you are making, and you're engaging in ethical and consensual relationships and all that jazz. (laughs)
So I think that's all we have time for today in terms of talking about jealousy and compersion and all that stuff within polyamory. I thought that your post was really valuable, Flo and Alexa. And I think that it's definitely like a springboard to people to queer compersion and to deconstruct the binary of compersion and jealousy. And it's definitely something that I would love for more people to discuss in the future. And I think that was a really great starting point.
This has been a really amazing chat, and I've really enjoyed speaking to both of you and hearing your perspectives and experiences on compersion. So where can people find you? You're both on Instagram, but are there any other platforms that you're on? Please tell the audience where people can find more of your work.
Flo: So my handle is the same for Twitter, TikTok, and my Instagram: @lifewflo. I also have a website, lifewflo.com.
Alexa: And I just have my Instagram!
Leanne: Well, it's been great to meet the both of you. And I hope that people have learned a lot from our chats about compersion and jealousy within polyamory. Thank you so much.
Alexa + Flo: Thank you!
Leanne: And hope to work with you more in the future. Alright, bye!
Leanne: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Happy Polydays series. If you’d like to support my work, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com/polyphiliablog. You can also follow me at @polyphiliablog on Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, and Twitter, buy my polyamory merch at polyphiliashop.redbubble.com, or book a peer support session with me on my website polyphilia.blog. Until next time!