compersion
/kəmˈpɜɹʒən/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Vicarious joy associated with seeing one's partner have a joyful romantic or sexual relationship with another person.
Uncountable
noun
The feeling of joy one has experiencing another's joy, such as in witnessing a toddler's joy and feeling joy in response.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "A major component of jealousy, for many people, is the suspicion or resentment of the rival. In Kerista, on the other hand, the relationship that every man had with the other men and that every woman had with the other women elicited what they called "compersion" rather than jealousy. "Compersion is the positive warm feeling you experience when you see two of your partners having fun with each other. It's the antonym of jealousy.""
- "There is nothing either magical or wrong with sex with more than one person at the same time. […] The beautiful thing about this dynamic is that it offers opportunities for compersion (the opposite of jealousy) and is symbolic of the expansiveness and unity we can feel in our love for each other."
- "Some polyamorous people experience compersion, which means feeling joy that one’s partner is sharing closeness with another person[…]. [M. C.] Keener's (2004) study participants noted an absence of worry as to whether their partners might be cheating, since the permission to take other lovers was granted freely."
- "One last quality that cannot go unmentioned in any discussion of open relationships is compersion, a concept that may be new to many readers. Compersion is taking joy in your partner's pleasure or happiness with another partner. […] Some practitioners of polyamory think of compersion as the opposite of jealousy, or at least the antidote to jealousy. Given the problems (and drama) ignited by jealousy, you can see how compersion can go a long way toward creating a foundation for pleasure and generosity in any relationship."
Etymology
Coined in the early 1990s by a group of members of the Kerista Commune, a polyamorous group based in San Francisco, California, U.S.A., in existence between 1956 and 1991, apparently randomly using an alphabet board (similar to a Ouija board), with -ion (suffix forming nouns). The hypothesis that the word is derived from French compère (“partner”) + English -sion (a variant of -tion (suffix forming nouns)), based on an earlier use of French compérage by the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) to denote the practice of brothers-in-law sharing wives observed among Tupi people of the Brazilian Amazon, is less plausible: a website run by former members of the community states that neither the word compérage nor Lévi-Strauss’s work was known to them at the time, and the formation of the word in this way does not correspond to any known morphological process.
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /kəmˈpɜɹʒən/
- British English: /kəmˈpɜːʒn̩/