One popular topic among the 130 attendees was polyamorous relationships, and presenter Leanna Wolfe discussed a concept I find essential to a successful polyamory: compersion. Compersion, defined by polyamory theorists, means being made happy when those you love experience pleasure and happiness. In day-to-day poly life, that means when your partner has sex with someone else, instead of being jealous, you're pleased for the person. When Max comes home from a date with his secondary partner and I say, "I'm glad you had fun, darling," that's compersion.
It's not always the easiest state of mind to achieve. But polyamory requires you to critically reexamine the usual concepts of good and bad behavior. Hurting people is bad--except when they've asked you to. Having sex with someone other than your partner is bad--except when you've both agreed it's all right. Once you understand how a spanking can actually be pleasurable, then you can make the jump to understanding how compersion works.
The payoff to compersion is it frees you from jealousy. I've had lovers who treated my love like a finite resource, and who were enraged that I'd give any to another person. But their attempts to control me just made me pull away from them, and so they brought about the very thing they said they feared. People say, "How can you not be jealous when your partner sleeps with someone else?" I'm not saying I've never had moments of jealousy. But I've learned to remind myself that it's an irrational fear, and so I don't respond to it as if I was truly being threatened. Max and I love each other deeply, but we have enough love to give some to other people as well. Compersion teaches you to operate from a place of love and trust rather than fear.
Pretty touchy-feely stuff from someone who identifies as a sadist, isn't it? I know poly isn't for everyone, but compersion is a concept worth examining, if only because life is too full of interesting choices to ever just blindly accept the default position.
See me in person: I'm appearing at Club Medusa Halloween night, and I'm teaching SM 101 at Toys in Babeland on Sun Nov 9.
