Compersion
Compersion is a pleasant feeling that a person can experience when their lover takes another lover. Sometimes compersion is defined more expansively than that, as a feeling of pleasure that arises from the pleasure of another person. In practice, however, the word compersion was coined in the context of a polyamorous community, and is used almost exclusively by people who are in polyamorous relationships or to describe such relationships.
In this episode, we hear from researcher Marie Thouin about her qualitative study of factors that influence compersion, and from educator and author Rebecca Rose Vassy about her personal experiences with compersion within her polyamorous relationships.
Full Transcript:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast about emotion. My name is Jonathan Cook. I’m an independent researcher who studies emotion. After three decades of asking people about how they feel, I’m still hearing new things.
Last week’s episode explored the emotion known as friluftsliv, the pleasure people feel when they spend time in nature. The word friluftsliv is foreign to everyone who isn’t Norwegian, but the concept is familiar to most people.
This week, the opposite dynamic comes into play, as we consider an emotion that was first described and defined by speakers of English in the United States, yet remains unknown to most Americans, and is conceptually foreign even to many who do know the word.
This week, we’re talking about compersion.
Compersion
Compersion is a pleasant feeling that a person can experience when their lover takes another lover. Sometimes compersion is defined more expansively than that, as a feeling of pleasure that arises from the pleasure of another person. In practice, however, the word compersion was coined in the context of a polyamorous community, and is used almost exclusively by people who are in polyamorous relationships or to describe such relationships.
Another term for the broader experience of pleasure in another person’s pleasure is mudita. The concept of mudita comes from Buddhist philosophy. There will be another episode of this podcast will be devoted to the emotion of mudita.
This episode will focus more specifically on the experience of compersion as an emotion that’s felt within a polyamorous context. I know that some people who practice polyamory will disagree with my narrow usage of compersion, but that’s what it’s like to work with emotions. Different people have different definitions of emotions, and the boundaries between emotions are often difficult to pin down.
So, I’ll repeat the definition of compersion that I’m using for the purpose of this podcast episode. Compersion is a pleasant feeling that a person can experience when their lover takes another lover.
Note that I said compersion is something that a person can feel. Not everybody does feel compersion. Many people will insist that compersion is not a genuine emotion at all.
A few months ago, someone wrote on a Reddit discussion board that “Compersion is not an innate human feeling, it is a fear response, a defense mechanism, akin to Stockholm Syndrome or Battered Woman Syndrome, where you feel trapped and helpless, so rather than resist the hurt, pain and trauma, you go along with it. Compersion makes as much sense as to find joy and pleasure in seeing a burglar gaining wealth after he just robbed you at gunpoint.”
For the purpose of this podcast, I’m trying not to take sides in any conflicts about how to define any emotion. I do think, however, that the controversy around the emotion of compersion has something important to teach us about concepts of emotion in general. Although some people have claimed that emotions are biologically-determined and universal among all human beings, when you get out and talk with a variety people about their emotions, it quickly becomes evident that people have different experiences.
Some emotions, like friluftsliv, are felt by most people, whether they have a word for the feeling or not. Compersion is not like that. That doesn’t mean that it’s not real. It also doesn’t mean that everybody feels compersion, but some people just don’t have the guts to admit it. Human consciousness is full of subjectivity, and if we respect the reality of that, we can’t go around telling people that their emotions are objectively false.
Marie Thouin
To begin to understand what compersion feels like for those people who do experience it, let’s hear from Marie Thouin, a researcher who completed a dissertation on the emotion. Her interest in compersion arose from her own experiences.
My name is Marie Thouin. I am a relationship and dating coach. Also, I'm a researcher. I've completed my Ph.D. in the East West Psychology Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies back in 2021, where my Ph.D. dissertation was on the topic of compersion. So, that really got me started on that inquiry. Really, the origin story of that research was from my own interest in intentional relationships and going outside the normative paradigm of romantic relationships, because as I was growing up, as I was going through high school and college and starting to experience my own sexuality, my own relationships, I always felt really uncomfortable with what I will call mononormativity. That is a big word that means the assumption that monogamy is the only valid and the only healthy and morally superior way of conducting and creating romantic relationships, and the fact that monogamy was always the default and anything outside of that was considered perverse, immoral, problematic. That just didn't match what I was feeling, which was a very fluid way of approaching relationships that could include monogamy or that could include non-monogamy and that really wanted to create relationships from a place of freedom and collaboration and consent rather than from a place of a default model. So, I set out to research people who went outside of those bounds, outside of mononormativity, outside of those default models of relationships. I realized that there were communities that were polyamorous or consensually non-monogamous, to use an umbrella term.
As with most people, Marie was not taught about compersion as a child. However, when she encountered the term, it seemed to fit with the way that she perceived the potential space for romantic relationships.
Compersion was a word I encountered at a conference in 2014. It was the conference about the future of monogamy and non-monogamy hosted at UC Berkeley in California, and there was a workshop on compersion. I remember hearing that word and feeling that this was, in a way, a foundational block of my definition of love or the paradigm of love that I wanted to live in, which meant that I would want the best for the people I love, not in a sense of like I determine what's the best for you, but you determine what's the best for you, what makes you happy, and I will do my darn best to support that, even if it is not to my own personal benefit.
Before long, Marie chose compersion as the topic of her dissertation research.
I did qualitative research with about well, at the time 17 interviewees who I selected on the basis of having been in consensually non-monogamous relationships and having experienced compersion. I sat down with them for 60 to 90 minutes each and asked them about their experiences with compersion. How do they experience compersion? What does that feel like to them? When do they experience it? When do they experience jealousy instead or in addition to compersion, and what are the factors that promote compersion, and what are the factors that hinder compersion for them?
Marie didn’t just work to define compersion. She also sought to identify different aspects of the feeling.
There were two research questions. One was, what is compersion? What is the experience of compersion? That question yielded three things. The first one was that a component of compersion is empathic joy. It's really about kind of merging into someone's experience, like feeling what they feel or imagining what they feel. There's kind of two kinds of empathy. I hope that's okay I'm going granular with you because your project is about emotional granularity. Cognitive empathy is when you imagine what someone feels and then embodied empathy is when you actually resonate with your body and you feel what they feel. So, there was that distinction that I came up with between attitudinal and embodied compersion along those lines of embodied and attitudinal empathy. Another component was gratitude. Gratitude showed up for people in relation to their romantic partners’ other relationships bringing them benefits. So there is, I would say, a very practical component to compersion where when you feel that you benefit from someone else's relationship, you're naturally going to want to support it more. That's the more functional aspect. People named a lot of different benefits, for example, relief from the pressure of having to satisfy all of your partner's needs. Let's say someone really wanted to go dancing and their partner really wanted to go camping. They found a partner outside of their primary relationship who wants to go dancing, while your partner finds another partner who wants to go camping, and all of a sudden you don't feel at odds about not meeting each other's every need and preference. Another form of gratitude could be my partner is growing in ways that are so beautiful, like they're becoming more sexually attuned, they're becoming more emotionally attuned, and they are developing better communication skills because they are engaging with someone else, and then they're bringing back those benefits to me and to our relationship as well. Another one could just be like, oh my gosh, my partner is dating someone else that I really like, and I'm making friends with them, and I would not have met this person otherwise. My social life has expanded, so there were a lot of different contributors to that gratitude factor.
Compersion is fluid, dynamic and on a spectrum. I'm bringing that up because that's where we look at the fact that no one really forces compersion to happen. Compersion emerges in different contexts that promote compersion, and it doesn't necessarily emerge all the time, and it doesn't emerge in the same way.
Rebecca Rose Vassy
Let’s step aside from Marie’s research for a bit to hear a more personal perspective, from a person who works to educate others about compersion, but is also willing to talk about her own experience of it in the context of her polyamorous relationships. Meet the author and educator Rebecca Rose Vassy.
Because I associate compersion primarily with polyamory and non-monogamy, I don't think it's impossible to have in a monogamous context, but it's a word that definitely came out of polyamory culture. I have been actively polyamorous pretty much my entire adult life. In fact, I've only had one monogamous relationship, which I had when I was 18 years old, and then from then on it was like, Nope, this is who I am. So, it's been the story of my entire adult life. I am also a sex and relationship educator and coach at the Pincus Center for Inclusive Treatment and Education. A big part and my specialty there really is working with people who are either actively polyamorous or who are trying to figure out how to get started.
The Pincus Center is D.C., Maryland, Virginia based. It was started by Tamara Pincus, who was a sex therapist. It kind of went from being her individual practice and then expanded to being a larger practice that is largely sex therapy based, is very queer and trans inclusive, very kink aware, very polyamory friendly. So, you know, we like to joke like we're the home for all the misfit toys. So, if you ever felt like you didn't belong, you probably belong with us. About a year and a half ago, she decided to expand further into doing education, offering workshops and things like that, and also to start including coaching. I was brought on to do a lot of content writing and also to structure the education program and to do a lot of the workshops myself. So, I do like all of the programing and a lot of the actual facilitation.
It's a pretty great place. Like, we're definitely not your typical therapy practice. Everybody is, you know, tattooed and has wild colored hair and, you know, has radical justice views and all kinds of things like that. So, it's a very it is a fun place to be in addition to doing some really important work, I think. I came to all of this from a very circuitous background. I started it out as a theater actress right out of high school and moved away from theater after a while, for a number of reasons, left New York and came down to the D.C. area. I started in the burlesque scene. I still do theater from time to time, and it's still a great love of mine, but I'm a burlesque producer and performer. I also produce a storytelling show called Smut Slam DC, which is an open mic sex storytelling show. So, it's audience members coming up and talking about their sex lives on stage. It's a lot of fun. It was created by a former sex worker and artist named Cameron Moore who created this thing that's now an international, we have branches all over the world.
I have three books out. There's one that just came out in December, the best Women's Erotica of the year, Volume Eight, which is edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. The very first book I ever put out was one of my pandemic projects because we have this International Smut Slam juggernaut going on. One of the things that's also an aspect of the show is people contributing anonymous confessions that get read from the stage, so sexy confessions about their lives. So, we had long wanted to do a book, so I edited and learned how to publish. It's like, let's just dive in and figure out how to layout and publish a book. We created a book called Anonymous Sex, and it's a selection of the confessions that we've gotten over the past seven years that Smut Slam has been running. We commissioned five artists from around the world to do original erotic art for it. I've published an urban fantasy novel again, self-published. And so, doing the anonymous sex book was also partly my practice for figuring out how to publish this book that I wrote. And this particular one was, it's called Metamorphosus.
Rebecca is quite busy in her work with the Pincus Center, but compersion is personal for her as well.
The funny part is I have my mom to thank/blame for it, and she'd probably be real horrified to hear me say that, because she was she was a very conservative Catholic, you know, monogamous, straight laced, all of those kind of things. When I was growing up, she looked at, how people were my age were dating, and she was like, "Why is everyone so serious about dating one person so quickly? Back in my day, it took time before you went steady with somebody and you just dated a whole lot of people and then it took a while," and she just kept harping on like, "Why don't people just go on a lot of dates with a lot of different people?" Apparently, I really internalized that, because I did that all through high school. I just dated a lot of different people and I didn't know there was a word for it or that it was a thing. It was just kind of what I did. Then I had my one monogamous relationship and I was like, well, I don't ever want to do that again. By the time I got together with my most longstanding partner, I met him when I was 19, and we were together by the time I was 21. It took us about two weeks into our dating relationship before we were like, this monogamy thing is kind of nonsense. We were dating other people when we were just friends with benefits and that was fine. Do we need to stop? We were like, well, let's just keep doing it. So, it was probably a couple of years beyond that, a couple of years beyond that, in fact, that I learned that there was such a word as polyamory and that there was a community and there were groups we could go to and publications and books. Of course, this was still in the early stages. This was the early nineties. So, we're still kind of in the early years of the modern polyamory movement. So, everyone's kind of figuring everything out and you kind of had to really know where to look to find your resources and find your people and all that kind of thing. It was so exciting to be like, oh my god, this is a thing. We didn't just make it up. We're not just freewheeling bohemians, you know? So, finding that was like, oh, okay, there are other people that we don't have to explain this to and we can just go on dates and have fun. We were kids in a candy shop and it was pretty great. So, it's kind of just always been there. It just was took a little bit of time to figure out that there was actually a framework for it.
Of course, it’s one thing to learn about polyamory in the abstract, and something else to put it into practice. Rebecca explains how that happened for her.
I think one of the things that was key is that my partner, who have been with for all of these years now, he and I were best friends. We decided to be roommates because we both we were both going to the same acting school in New York, and we both want to live in New York. We moved in together, and he developed feelings for me, which I didn't return initially, and he was very understanding about that, actually. That really made the difference, that he was like, okay, look, I respect that you want to be friends, even though I have these feelings. Then we reached a point where we were still effectively just friends, but we were also sleeping together. Because we didn't have a love relationship at that point, we were like, well, we're still free to see other people. This is just a fun thing that we do, like roommates do. Sure, that's normal. We both did see some other people have some other partners. Neither of us was doing anything very seriously. Then, when we did get together, like I said, it was like literally a week later. What ended up happening is that the girlfriend of a friend of ours spent, we were all at a weekend event together and she spent the entire weekend hitting on him very blatantly. We talked about it, because at first he's like, no, she's just being friendly. I'm like, no. No. No. She's really into you. Then he came into our hotel room and he was like, "Yeah, she just tried to French kiss me in the elevator. So, I guess you were right." We talked about it afterwards, and I was like, "Look, I wasn't bothered at all by her hitting on you. It just bothered me that she was kind of giving me the cold shoulder and being really rude to me in the process." Like, you know, back off. At least say hi to me, you know? In the course of talking about it, I was like, well, we agreed this woman is toxic and we're not dealing with that. But I was like, I was the one who said, we had things going with other people while we were like, quote unquote, just friends, and that was relaxed, and we felt good about it. We enjoyed this feeling of like, ooh, we're bohemian, free spirits, you know? I was like, "Why does that have to stop?" He was like, "I'm kind of okay with keeping that going." I was like, "Well, then, let's just do that. Let's make our own way. It still took us probably a good, I would say, two to three years after that before we actually put that into action, because we were still in this very new relationship energy of we're together and we're so in love, and so we were very focused on each other because it was so new and exciting. Then once we got to the point of okay, we're actually exploring stuff with other people, I will say there was a lot of, we had a lot of fun. We had a lot of good experiences. We dated the same person a few times, which is unusual to be able to start out doing that successfully. We were not trying to date the same person, but it kind of worked out that way. So, there was a lot of good stuff that happened. But also those first, I would say five to seven years that we did it, were incredibly difficult too. There were points at which we almost broke up. There were points at which we weren't sure if we were going to be able to survive it, and so there was a lot to overcome. Then, we kind of reached a point where we sort of, a lot of the drama settled down. We kind of had worked through a lot of stuff and it was like we sort of, without realizing it turned a corner, was okay. All of us, not just the two of us, but our other partners and larger polycule and community, like we kind of had been through a lot. We're tired. We just want to hang out and enjoy each other, and we all kind of got better at managing stuff and understanding where people were coming from and realizing that the other people that we were interacting with, other partners or partners of partners, they're not the enemy. We're all in this together. We all presumably care about each other's happiness and want the best for each other. So why are we, what are we struggling about?
Rebecca isn’t painting a perfect picture of her polyamory. She’s acknowledging the challenges that come with negotiating a romantic relationship that’s open to the possibility of other partners getting involved. However, Rebecca also began to feel some emotional benefits to having a partner who was romantically active with other people.
I can’t point to it exactly, but it was some time in that late 80s, early 90s period where a lot of like stuff was being written and created about polyamory to try and understand the stuff that we were doing. So it's probably somewhere in there that I first heard the term. So it's a little bit different from feeling joy on their behalf because they got a promotion at work or, you know, like they, you know, had had some other accomplishment. It is a little bit unique to non-monogamy in that monogamous people are not in a situation where they have to see their partner in love with or being sexual with or flirting with somebody else. We were both interested in a woman that we were friends with, and I was like, you know, I'm pretty sure she's flirting with both of us. We're like, well, let's kind of see if we can explore down that road. It turned out, you know, I was right. She was interested in both of us, and we ended up having a triad for a while, and I can definitely remember just feeling this elation of there's a little bit of, I guess, pride in sort of being like, oh, look at us. We're doing polyamory for real. This is so great. But I also like watching the two of them hang out and, you know, be affectionate with each other and joke together and banter and like whatever. Because the three of us would sleep together, and sometimes I would occasionally sit back and just watch them, you know, enjoying each other physically. It was like, man, it's great. I knew he was excited and happy and she was loving every minute of it. Those were like, I love both of these people and I love that they love each other and, you know, and that they're having a good time together. I love watching that dynamic, and so finding out the word compersion was like, oh, yeah, I totally get that. My long-standing partner has another partner who he's been with for, I don't know, probably 17 or more years at this point. And initially, the three of us were a triad as well. And that all fell apart, and it was very messy. Several years later, the two of them got back together. She and I at that point really became very close friends. And to this day, she's still one of my best friends. And so, I was not part of that. You know, it was not a sexual or romantic dynamic between me or her or me and her at all. Getting to the point of seeing them together, seeing how much she cares about him, seeing her, take care of him, seeing him, you know, be protective of her and like, you know, the ways they were silly together and, you know, just being able to, it's almost sort of like having a having a seat on stage. Like, I'm not part of the show, but like, I'm closer than just being in the audience. It's just a wonderful feeling of like, yeah, there's somebody else in the world who, like, gets this person on the same level that I do and is so invested in his happiness and wants to make his life better and why wouldn't I want that for him, you know?
Rebecca has felt the pleasure of compersion, and teaches others about how compersion can be a part of a polyamorous experience. However, she also believes that compersion can’t be taken for granted. It’s not something that people in polyamorous relationships experience all the time.
I touched on this very briefly before, but I do want to emphasize that the experience of compersion doesn't depend on the relationship that you have with your partner's partner. It is possible that you never meet that person. Some people are very compartmentalized that way, but you can still feel the feeling because you're experiencing your partner's side of it. The other thing that I really want to emphasize is that it's not a downfall if you don't feel it. It is completely normal, natural, common, to not particularly feel, like you might be okay with everything, but not feel especially joyful about it. You might be struggling with it. I really want to emphasize that nobody can demand compersion from their partner. It's going to happen or it's not, but it's not fair to place that expectation or to accuse your partner of not being polyamorous enough because they're not feeling compersion. A lot of things can get in the way of that, and it's great when it happens, but it is by no means a requirement for a successful relationship.
Marie Thouin also encountered this idea in her research. Sometimes people in polyamorous relationships accuse their partners of not being poly enough. Other times, people make the accusation against themselves.
One of the myths about compersion, especially within polyamorous communities, is that if you don't feel a compersion, you're not poly enough. There's that pressure of feeling compersion that I think is very destructive because, one, we're all wired differently and people have their different emotional maps and to pressure someone into feeling something that they're not feeling is never a good way to go about it. It never works. Two, sometimes people don't feel compersion because there is actually something not that great happening in their relationships. Maybe their partner is holding back or maybe there is insecurity within the relationship. There are people who come to me and they're seemingly in kind of toxic situations with their partners, and they ask me like, Oh gosh, I'm really jealous because my partner is, you know, with this other person, but then they don't want to talk to me about it or they don't. They're not really open about it, and I feel all of these kind of red flags or things that would lead me to think like there's actually something not healthy going on relationally. They're asking me for help to feel compersion, and my response to that is like, I don't think compersion is the answer here.
Both Marie and Rebecca reject the idea that compersion can be taken for granted in a polyamorous relationship. Even when people agree in principle to a romantic relationship with space for other romantic relationships, putting the principle into practice isn’t always easy. Social arrangements may involve agreements about mutually acceptable behavior, but emotional interactions aren’t so simple. What we want and what we want to want don’t always match.
The emotion of compersion is personal. It’s not just a matter of abstract ideology. It’s like friendship, in that someone can believe in the value of friendship in general, and yet not want to be friends with everybody. The fact that someone in a polyamorous relationship is willing to feel compersion doesn’t mean that they will feel it in every circumstance, any more than a person looking for love is going to fall in love with anyone they happen to meet.
Marie’s dissertation research wasn’t just about people’s definitions of compersion. Her study also explored perceptions of the factors that foster compersion, and the barriers that interfere with the feeling.
What are the factors and the contexts that promote and or hinder compersion? So, what factors impact compersion? I had it divided in the factors that positively impact compersion and the factors that negatively impact compersion. So, that yielded six different themes, and these six themes were grouped into three categories. I'll start with two categories. So, the first one was individual factors. The second one was relational factors and the third one was social factors. Some people are very on board. They know that this is who they are. This is what they want to do, and this is who they are meant to be. Then there's people who might have been dragged into non-monogamy by their partner, and they're not really on board. Maybe they kind of see how this could work and they don't want to lose their relationship. They're like, okay, let me give this a try, but really, I would much prefer monogamy.
It’s striking to me the way that Marie’s research describes the impact of factors beyond the individual on the feeling of compersion. People’s romantic partners have an impact on the emotion, of course, but so do the partners of those partners. The influence of one’s immediate community and one’s position in society as a whole play a role as well.
I don’t think that this dynamic is something unique to compersion. We like to think of our emotions as something that we feel alone, and ultimately, the feeling of the emotion belongs to us. However, our cultural identities and social connections strongly influence the tone that these emotions take on, and what we decide to do as a result of them.
I've met a lot of situations where, for example, like one woman would have two boyfriends or two husbands, and both of these guys in that situation were very introverted. They didn't necessarily want, you know, like a full-time partner, and they like to have maybe like a relationship on one day and then another day to be alone. And then, for the woman, she was more of an extrovert and she liked the diversity of having two partners.
I had one research participant, a woman who was dating a man who was part of a marriage with another woman, and she was telling me she had a lot of compersion for their marriage because it was allowing her to have this really amazing relationship with her boyfriend without having to be part of a marriage, without having the pressure of being a wife and being a mother. She didn't want any of that. She was really happy with having, like you said, a more laid back relationship. So, she was happy that he was getting that need of being in the family unit.
We don’t have time to go through all the findings of Marie’s research, but luckily, we don’t have to. Her dissertation is available online in its full original format and in a shorter version for those who are looking for the high points.
For people who don't want to read all six hundred pages of my dissertation, which is free and downloadable online, by the way, I have created a small e-book, which really distills a lot of what I've talk about today, but really to the most practical gems of my research about what are the factors that promote and hinder compersion. So, people can find both of those things in my full dissertation or at a small e-book as well as a lot of other resources and blogs on WhatIsCompersion.com.
One of the things I’m trying to do with this podcast is to represent an emotion from different perspectives. So, I want to round up this episode by sharing my own perspective on compersion. When I first started interviewing people about compersion, I didn’t think I had ever felt the emotion. As I was listening to Marie talk about how compersion is experienced on a spectrum, however, I thought back to my past romantic relationships.
I thought back to the 1990s when, for a brief time, I married an anarchist. You’re probably not surprised to hear that it didn’t last for long, because she didn’t really believe in the institution of marriage except as a way to share health insurance coverage, and shortly after we got married during her lunch break at work, I quit the job that was giving me health insurance coverage anyway. We never even moved in together.
The thing is that I was aware almost from the very start of our romantic involvement that she was already in a romantic relationship with another person. He lived in another city, but she would see him from time to time.
I didn’t gain any pleasure from her relationship with him. It didn’t enhance the relationship I had with her in any way. But, at the time, I wanted to be with her, and so I decided at the time that accepting that her relationship to me was not monogamous was worth it. I also didn’t wish her unhappiness in this other relationship.
Was that compersion? I guess it depends on how you define compersion. Marie Thouin might say that my experience was on the compersion spectrum. I certainly never defined it in that way, though, and I have never particularly wanted to feel compersion. Before I began work on Stories of Emotional Granularity, I didn’t even know that compersion was a word.
I reacted to the blowup of my brief marriage to the anarchist by getting married to a more conventional woman. That marriage lasted for twenty years, and was monogamous for the entire time. I’m proud of that monogamy, because it was an expression of my commitment and a way for me to feel true to my feelings of attachment.
I don’t think I ever want to be in a polyamorous relationship. I don’t feel emotionally impoverished for not being in the kind of relationship that Rebecca and Marie have described. I don’t think compersion is for me.
That doesn’t mean that compersion doesn’t exist. The boundaries of my own emotions don’t define the boundaries of other people’s emotions. There are plenty of things in life that other people feel passionately about to which I am indifferent. What’s more, some people have emotions that make me feel uncomfortable, or even angry. That doesn’t make those emotions unreal.
There are many people who are zealously attached to the idea that monogamy is the only real and proper way to experience love. They want everybody to live in a way that makes them feel comfortable, conforming to an emotional path that suits them.
Underlying that attitude is the belief that everybody is emotionally the same, that all people have the same fundamental psychological needs, and that those needs can be met in the same ways. That belief doesn’t match the reality of what you’ll find if you talk with people, listen to them, and try to understand where they’re coming from.
I have an identical twin. Genetically, we are identical. However, we are not emotionally identical. There are things that he feels that I don’t, things that he enjoys that I don’t enjoy.
I don’t know why we have become different in those ways. Maybe it has to do with different experiences we have had. Maybe it’s about decisions we made, or just the influence of random chance. A human life is too complex to pick apart and definitively understand, as if it was a piece of machinery. I can’t explain it, but I can observe that, although we have many similarities, we are not the same.
It might be easier to live in a world where everybody had the same kinds of feelings. It would also be rather dull.
Regardless of what we would like, diversity exists. Emotional diversity is as real as cultural diversity. What makes one person feel secure can make another person feel miserable.
I’m producing this podcast because I believe that we’re more likely to have a society that works for everyone if we enhance our ability to recognize the nuances of our emotional differences. Over the last few years, it’s become popular to worry about social divisions, and to pine for a time when everyone could come together in perfect harmony.
What no one can agree upon, however, is exactly when everyone lived in harmony. There might have been times when the expression of diversity has been suppressed, but diversity has always existed. Whenever people gather to sing together in perfect harmony, you can be sure that there are people who are straining their voices in order to sing the part that’s been assigned to them.
This is just the second episode of the podcast Stories of Emotional Granularity, and already we’ve entered contentious territory. That’s just how it’s going to be sometimes. We don’t all want the same thing. Emotion divides us as often as it unites us. Emotion can be negative as well as positive.
Working with emotion isn’t all puppies and kittens. Besides, the truth is that puppies and kittens can be a load of trouble sometimes.
Maybe you’re feeling comfortable with the concept of compersion. Maybe it bothers you. Both are authentic reactions. Encountering other people’s emotions often feels disturbing, because emotions focus us on the things that matter to us, the things that are worth worrying about. With emotion, there’s always something at stake, something to lose as well as something to gain.
So, let’s push forward, because there’s a lot of emotional territory left to explore. Next week, Stories of Emotional Granularity will be back with a different sort of feeling.
I’m not going to tell you what emotion will be the subject of next week’s episode. You’re going to have to wait and see. Come back here a week from now, if you’re curious.
Until then, thanks for listening in.