285 - Compersion Research with Marie Thouin
Marie Thouin is a PhD candidate in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is developing her dissertation on the experience of compersion in ethically non-monogamous relationships. She is also a dating coach, and founded Love InSight to help people of all ages, genders, orientations, and relationship styles navigate the path to healthy and happy relationships.
In this episode, Marie goes into a little bit of detail about the qualitative research she’s conducted for her dissertation, as well as:
Why compersion is important to study,
The importance of language and its common usage,
Other research done on compersion in the past,
What people get wrong about compersion and any misunderstandings she experiences in her work,
How the study of compersion relates to things other than just multiple partners, and
The permeation of mononormativity in academia.
Listen to the full episode to get Marie’s perspective on compersion and learn about her experiences researching for her dissertation, and check out the website and Facebook page for her study, What is compersion?, as well as the page for her coaching, Love InSight. Follow Love InSight on Instagram at @love_insight_dating, or visit its website.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're talking about compersion research with Marie Thouin. Marie Thouin is a PhD candidate in East-West psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her dissertation research focuses on the experience of compersion in consensually nonmonogamous relationships. She's also a dating coach and founder of love insight, where she helps people of all ages, genders, sexual orientations, and relationship styles navigate the path to loving and healthy relationships. Thank you for joining us, Marie, we're excited to have you.
Marie: Thank you for having me.
Dedeker: We've had some researchers on the show before usually doing this kind of specialized research and researching consensually nonmonogamous relationships and jealousy and things like that. I'm always curious to know what brought you to this topic specifically?
Marie: Well, it's been a lifelong interest. I would say that it started, well, in childhood. My parents were in a nontraditional relationship. They never wanted to be married. They never wanted to be a traditional couple living under the same roof. They wanted to have a child, but they wanted it to keep their independence. I grew up with a model of relationship that was not really a polyamorous context. They were not poly, but they didn't give me a normative model to look upon.
I always knew that there were many ways to do relationships and then when I grew up and went to college I realized that the way that most people conceived the romantic relationship did not totally resonate with me. I remember engaging with a guy that I really liked and wanting to make out with him one day and him saying like, "Well, I can't because I have a girlfriend," and me being completely stunned and wondering what that had to do with us.
Emily: Like so?
Marie: I'm not saying you should break up with her, but I want to kiss you right now. What's the problem? I've always been aware that the normative model didn't fit the bill completely for me and I knew that there were other options. When I kept studying, psychology was always a big topic of mine. I always loved studying different ways of doing relationships and in particular, consensual non-monogamy like how can people make it work outside of the monogamous model and compersion felt like the epitome of success when we're talking about non-monogamy. It felt like the point where the paradigm really shifts from one of monogamous thinking to one of sexual freedom. It felt like if something needed to be studied, it was the turning point.
Dedeker: That makes a lot of sense. For you, your first contact point with compersion as a topic was that more like a personal experience of that feeling, or was it in a more like research or academic setting?
Marie: A little bit of both. I had the feeling that in my personal life I wanted to operate from a place of freedom. I wanted to operate from a place of loving people for who they were without putting possessiveness and control on them. I never had a longterm nonmonogamous relationship where I experienced compersion substantially per se. It was a combination of me having the intuition that it was possible, but also looking at the research and saying that there's not much out there. It's a combination of personal and professional interests.
Jase: We did an episode a while back. Gosh, probably almost two years ago now with Dr. Alex Beauvais about some research that he had done specifically about men in nonmonogamous relationships with women and their feelings of compersion. I forget the name for the type of this study, but it was like based on an interview rather than a scale or a questionnaire or something like that and it was more than looking at the content of the words that the men used and trying to find trends that way, do you know what I'm talking about?
Marie: It sounds like qualitative research.
Jase: Qualitative research, thank you. That's the one.
Marie: That's the kind of research I'm doing as well.
Jase: Okay. Cool. It seems like for something like compersion, you really need to do that kind of thing because it's not just on a scale of 1 to 10, how compersive or whatever do you feel because part of the problem is how do we define this? What is it really? With that, why to you is compersion important to study?
Marie: That's a great question. I do think that qualitative research is so appropriate for that topic partly because it hasn't been studied very much and there aren't ground rules or ground definitions of it yet. Why is it important to study it? Well, first, we know that compersion correlates positively with relationship satisfaction in consensually nonmonogamous relationships. If we can establish some roadmap to facilitate compersion, we can help consensually nonmonogamous people achieve greater satisfaction in their relationships.
Also, I would say for psychology in general and the psychology of emotions, compersion is like an undiscovered gold mine in my opinion. We don't have a word in the English dictionary yet, compersion is not unfortunately in a dictionary. There's a lack of awareness around that emotion specifically at least in English speaking countries, which is a lot. I think the more we define it, the more we research it, the more we can create this awareness that jealousy is not inevitable.
It's not the only outcome possible to a jealousy-invoking situation or traditionally jealousy-invoking situation, so because of that the word compersion has the power to dismantle compulsory monogamy or the idea that monogamy is the only healthy way to do relationships because of course, people who say that polyamory is not possible or not healthy always go back to jealousy and the fact that it's so inevitable and it's a suffering that people are going to have to live with and it's just going to make them miserable. If we document the fact that some people experience compersion, then we can dismantle that idea that polyamory is bad. Very important topic.
Emily: Last week we did an episode on language and I think this is a great segue way into this whole talk on compersion and language and how it needs to be melded into our current language in order for people to understand it and to start maybe thinking about it and using it. Can you talk a little bit more about that and just why it's so important to have a word like this in our collective language and psyche?
Marie: Absolutely. Actually, I did email the Merriam Webster editors a couple of times to ask them to include the word compersion and the word mono normativity into the dictionary. They said no on both occasions because it's not widely used enough, but I do believe very firmly that once a word gets integrated into the collective psyche, it facilitates the experience itself of the emotion. I would say, for example, if we did not have a word for gratitude, we might not be as likely to practice it, to experience it, to benefit from it.
I think with compersion, it's very similar. We need to have a concept that dismantle what we have learned, which is the fact that if your partner is going to be with somebody else, you have no choice but to feel jealous and to be angry and to be resentful and to be blameful. The word compersion in itself comes and challenges that idea.
Jase: I have a question actually. I'm curious about this, how you've approached this in your research, but when asked to define the word compersion, I feel like there's two definitions, two slight variations that tend to come up for me. I'm sure you've looked into this even more than I have, but one definition is the very polyamory non-monogamy focused definition, which is, it's like the feeling of joy at your partner having a good time with someone else or your partner having good sex, or there's some little subtle variations, but it's that meaning. Then the other definition being just this feeling of happiness at someone else's feeling happiness rather than jealousy of it. More of an opposite of jealousy, maybe like the word mudita or something like that in, that's a what? Sanskrit word.
Marie: Yes. It's Sanskrit, yes.
Dedeker: I'm curious about in your research, we come up against terms like mudita, which is also not really in the common parlance as far as what we talk about as a culture or talking about things like sympathetic joy. I guess I'm wondering like outside of the word compersion, what are the other terms or language or labels that you've found that are maybe used a little more frequently that most closely match what we understand to be compersion if you found any?
Marie: Well, mudita would be the main one. I haven't found any other ones, so mudita is one of the four qualities of the enlightened person according to Buddhism. It does mean sympathetic joy, and it is practiced in an effort to dismantle the illusion of separation between us and other people. It is a vehicle for getting out of our egos and for really getting into the paradigm of connection and togetherness and we're all one. In that paradigm, your joy is my joy versus a more individualistic paradigm where more for you, less for me. I really love that analogy or just to really look into the significance of mudita as a spiritual word and a spiritual practice in Buddhism, and then apply it to compersion in all kinds of situations.
Dedeker: I really like the way that mudita was once described to me by a Buddhist nun was this idea that the way that she said the way she thought about it was, yes, I get to be joyful for free. Basically, I get to be joyful about someone else having done the work to get something good. Why wouldn't I take advantage of that? Like I didn't even have to work to get that boost and it sounds great. It's very hard in practice I find if I try to apply that to all arenas of my life, but I really liked that take on it.
Marie: Yes. It's a great ideal to look up to and to remind ourselves that it's possible, that it's humanly possible not to take it as "Well, I'm bad if I don't achieve that," because that's a trap. Of course, it can be a lot of pressure if we take that as the way to do poly right or to feel the right emotion, but it's nice to know that it's a possibility.
Jase: To go back to where I started with my question is for your research, are you taking more of this general mudita style definition for it or is it more specifically about just romantic partners being with other people? How are you approaching defining it in the study?
Marie: I'm doing it specifically for consensually non-monogamous individuals. I'm specifically speaking about partners, about intimate partners.
Jase: Got it. Okay.
Marie: It would be interesting to do a research about compersion in a wider sense though, that would be amazing to ask people about their other experiences with compersion and the rest of their lives, which are very common. People don't have a problem usually feeling happy for their kids who get a good placement in school or maybe like a friend who gets a promotion or just generally speaking, feeling happy for the success and the happiness of others. We just don't think about it in intimate context only.
Emily: It's interesting thinking about it for potentially maybe layperson who's not as interested or knowledgeable about nonmonogamy or even someone who is monogamous who would consider themselves monogamous to think about like their partner may be doing much better than they are successfully in work or something along those lines. I guess, yes, I'd be interested to integrate compersion studies into things like that, just so that people maybe can understand better how to be supportive of their partner if they get like a big promotion at work and things like that happen.
I definitely have found in my own life, like at times, oh well, something great happens for a friend of mine or my partner and then I feel a little jealous because of it like that's still a universal experience regardless of whether or not you're nonmonogamous.
Marie: Yes, for sure. It's useful in those moments when we are feeling those tinges of jealousy to think, "Well, am I really losing something here?" to interrogate ourselves and look at the big picture? It's important to validate the jealousy because that's a real human emotion, but I do think it can be so useful to think about the concept of compersion in all life situations.
Emily: Absolutely. We were curious, has there been other research on compersion out there or is yours it or the first or the biggest?
Marie: Well, there's been very little, surprisingly little I would say because the field of consensual nonmonogamy research has been exploding in the last couple of decades. There's been a lot of research on polyamory and other form of consensual nonmonogamy, but compersion has only been the focus of about five empirical studies since 2003. Most of them quantitative, so based on scales and measurements and what different factors can contribute to compersion, but there hasn't been a lot. There's been I think only one very in-depth qualitative studies in 2015 in Canada.
Mine will be one of the few. I wouldn't necessarily say the biggest because it's not easy to say which one is the most impactful at this point, but it's going to be probably pretty important in the field because the lack of qualitative studies and really going in-depth with interviews.
Dedeker: Again, before we start talking about your research, just to frame it in context a little bit, you did mention earlier on that like we do know that feeling compersion in relationship is linked to relationship satisfaction. Of the scant number of studies that do exist about compersion, what were the things that we already knew? What were the things that had already been measured before you started your study?
Marie: Well, one thing that we knew is that there is trait compersion and state compersion. Trait being more of a personality trait, something that people have as an attitude and then state compersion being something that people experience in the moment, like an emotion that comes and goes. That was already a pretty fundamental thing to discover which is being reflected in my study. Then, like you said, the idea of sexual relational satisfaction being linked to compersion was one of the biggest contributions of prior research. It confirmed that and the idea that inculturation into polyamorous communities. The idea of people being already familiar with the values and committed to the values of polyamory is a big factor in promoting compersion. These are probably the three biggest takeaways of prior research.
Dedeker: That all makes sense.
Jase: Can I ask real quick about the thing about the state versus trait thing?
Dedeker: It rhymes, so Jase loves it.
Jase: I know. I love it because it rhymes. Yes. I was curious, again to give a little bit more context, I've come across things like that before in research, but is that fairly universal with emotions that are studied or is there a subset of emotions that tend to show that aspect of being a trait and something that can happen in the moment? Can you give us a little context? I'm like, what does that mean? Is that unique? Is that not unique? What's the deal?
Marie: Honestly, I am not sure how unique it is in terms of other emotions or not. I would imagine that it's not unique if I think about other emotions like joy or gratitude. I would see how there would often be a distinction between trait and state, but it's not something that people think about a lot, especially when like I was saying earlier, people might feel bad about themselves when they're not feeling compersion in their poly relationships. I think that they're thinking about state compersion. They're thinking like, "Well, I'm not getting high on you having sex with somebody else so there must be something wrong with me." If they have a compersive attitude, which simply means feeling supportive of your partner's relationship and you can still feel jealousy at the same time as you feel compersion or at the same time as you have a compersive attitude, then it enables you to feel like, "Well, it's not a black and white thing. It's not a switch that's on or off."
Dedeker: Now, that's really interesting. I feel like that's something that you're saying that reminded me of a very early episode of Multiamory. Probably the first time we ever did an episode on compersion if I'm remembering correctly. That was six years ago now
Emily: Yes, six years ago. I'm impressed you remember.
Dedeker: Yes, but that very simple truth, that compersion and jealousy are not necessarily mutually exclusive. That I know for myself, when I think about my own embodied experiences of I guess what we would call state compersion often have feelings of jealousy mixed in with it is hardly ever this very pure, transcendental exciting experience, and I do think that that truth is not something that necessarily gets a lot of airtime in a lot of nonmonogamy or polyamory focused content.
Marie: Right. It helps to see it as a spectrum or as a gradient rather than this you either have it or you don't. It helps normalize it and makes it more accessible.
Jase: Right. Yes, that it's not some magical thing that once you achieve it, you never experience jealousy.
Emily: You don't have forever.
Jase: Yes, right, you don't have it forever. It's more, I guess, normalizing it just like any other emotion. I keep coming back to the example of a friend getting a promotion where absolutely every time some of my good friends get huge, great promotions like, "That's so awesome. I'm so happy for you, and also a part of me is going, 'Ah, man. They make so much more money than I do or god, that job seems awesome.'" Whatever it is, and I think that. We all get that, but when it comes to relationships, there's a block of, "Oh, that's not possible."
Marie: Exactly. That's a very good example because you're not going to react to your friend, exposing the very jealous part of you that's underneath the scenes, you're able to make the distinction and look at the jealous part and say, "Well, okay, I am jealous, but I'm not going to let that part influence my respect for this friend or influence the bigger part of me that just wants to give him a hug and say, 'Congrats, man.'" It's good to be able to see and embrace both parts.
Jase: We're really excited to get into your study and what that's all about, but before we get to that, we want to take a quick moment to talk about how our listeners can support this show and to keep it going and keep amazing content like Marie's research coming at the world for free. Maybe we can help normalize that word compersion.
All right, Marie. I've been looking forward to this part of the episode, can you tell us about your study? What is it that-- Give us the whole thing. How's the study work, and then we'll get into the results.
Marie: All right. Like I said earlier, it's a qualitative study. It's based on interviews, which are between 45 minutes and an hour and a half long. It's a lot of content per participant. There's less participants than you would see in a quantitative study. In my case, there's 17 participants. It sounds low, but it's still a lot of data when you go deep into the questions that you're asking. The participants were mostly American, couple Canadians, and they were all over the country. I did all the interviews over Zoom or Skype. I asked them two categories of questions. My research meant to answer, first of all, what is the experience of compersion, really go deep into their mental and bodied emotional experience of compersion, and then what are the factors that either promote it or hinder it? These were the two research questions, and then I went into details with each one of them.
Jase: As they answer it, you would ask follow up questions or--? Tell me more about that.
Marie: Exactly. Yes, just like you guys are doing.
Jase: We've been doing a study for six years now.
Marie: Exactly.
Jase: About 45 minutes to an hour-long each time.
Marie: You should get some academic credit.
Jase: What have you found so far? Are you still in the process or is this ready to be published?
Marie: It's almost ready to be published. I'm just finalizing the last chapter which is going to be conclusions. I mostly have the results. I am just going to give you some sneak peeks because I can't talk in a final way, okay, this is it because it's not published yet, but the main things that I found that I can talk about is that there's three great categories of factors that help people or hinder people from feeling compersion. There's going to be individual factors such as self-confidence, well being, and also the ideology, the commitment to polyamorous values and ideals. These are the individual factors.
There's going to be relational factors. How safe do you feel in your relationship? How do you relate to your metamour? How do you perceive benefits from your partner's relationship on your life and your partner's life? Then third, there's going to be social factors. These are you within a community that promotes your identity as a polyamorous or consensually nonmonogamous person, and do you feel like that greater community is supporting you? Or on the other hand, is it shaming you? Is it trying to diminish your polyamorous identity, and is it being an obstacle to you feeling pride in who you are? These are, I would say, the broad lines of what I found so far.
Dedeker: Wow, okay, there's a lot there. There's a lot there to think about. There's a whole lot there to think about. Did you find pretty consistently, I guess, I don't quite know how I want to put my question, but the individual factors, the relational factors, and the social factors, was it pretty consistently that these things could help or hinder quite equally? As in if your relationship feels pretty secure, it's most likely going to have a positive correlation with you being able to access compersion versus if it's not feeling secure, it's probably going to hinder it, did it feel like those things married each other pretty equally in that way?
Marie: Yes, I would say so. There wasn't many surprises there. I would say that it was quite intuitive in the way that it worked. Where you would probably hypothesize that security in a relationship would promote compersion and that was one of the things that came up most often.
Dedeker: Was there anything that did surprise you when you were looking through your data?
Marie: Well, there was the idea that compersion and jealousy can co-exist. I thought this was a very interesting finding and it was repeated by so many people. The idea that it's not you have it or you don't. It is something where you can have a big part of you and maybe the more cognitive part of you be in a compersive state, but yet there can be an underlying feeling of jealousy, perhaps at the gut level. The idea that there are so many layers to those experiences and those emotions and these layers don't necessarily align.
Dedeker: Yes, that makes sense. Finding what you have found from this, how do you think that people might apply this practically or pragmatically or how would people operationalize this? I'm thinking of all the people who are listening to our show, some people who are compersion junkies and feel all the time and absolutely love it, and some people who are like, "I've never felt this and I don't understand why anyone would feel it." Knowing this, that there's these three big pillars that you're looking at, how do you think that someone might take these findings, this knowledge and apply it in their own lives and relationships?
Marie: Of course, the people who feel it all the time probably don't need me, and the people who might want to feel more of it can look at the different pillars and the different factors that do generally promote compersion or those that hinder compersion and look at their own experience in comparison and say, "Well, am I feeling secure in my relationship? If not completely, how can I work on that? Am I feeling secure within myself? Am I practicing self-care? Am I getting my needs met? Am I well informed about the broader ideologies surrounding polyamory, and am I feeding my mind with those ideas rather than just mainstream content around relationships?" Of course, what we feed our minds becomes influential on our emotions.
"Am I surrounding myself with people who are validating my identity as a poly person, or am I surrounding myself with people who are implicitly shaming me?" Someone can just go down the list of those factors and identify where there's room for improvement and where they're already doing great.
Dedeker: There's one thing that you mentioned that perked up my ears. Perked up or pricked up, one of those. I think pricked. I don’t know. Under the relational category, you mentioned something that can help or hinder is how you perceive the benefits of your partner's relationship on your life, which I think is really interesting. I'm curious to know if you can share what were some of those perceived benefits that people felt when thinking about their partner's relationship?
Marie: One of the biggest ones was to diminish the feeling of pressure of fulfilling all of your partner's needs. There were people who gave example like, "Well, my partner really likes to go dancing, but I don't really like to go dancing, and I don't want to feel like I'm the only resource for my partner to do that." It makes me really happy if they have another partner who really likes to go dancing, and then I feel like my partner can be happy, and I don't have to feel guilty because I don't like dancing." That's a big one that comes up all the time.
Dedeker: I can also easily see how people can very easily go to the flip side of that, of even if I don't like dancing, I know for some people it can be really hurtful that your partner is--
Emily: You'd still go dancing with someone else.
Dedeker: Yes, exactly. Yes, definitely. It makes sense how it's two sides of the same coin there.
Marie: It comes back to really wanting your partner to be happy and also letting go of the idea that you have to be the source of that happiness. Another one that came up was sometimes differences in sexual desire, where one person, and sometimes it happens over the course of a long term relationship, one person starts wanting more sex or maybe different kinds of sex. Maybe one person really wants kinky sex and the other person doesn't. It just creates more fulfillment for this person to have another sexual partner outside of the primary relationship, if that's the primary situation, that is a kinky partner, specifically. Basically, the benefits usually have to do with fulfilling more needs.
Jase: Yes, definitely. The thought that just came up with that thing about do you feel jealousy that they're getting to experience something else without you, to me, it seems to be related to how guilty you feel over not liking that thing that your partner likes. I think that that would be something interesting to look into. I feel like I notice it a lot with partners who were previously in a longer-term monogamous relationship who then opened up. I feel like there can be this kind of embodied sense of guilt over the fact that I don't like camping and you love camping and it's been a problem. Then when you start dating someone who goes hiking all the time, they love it. I'm going to feel more jealous because I've internalized this feeling of guilt about it versus--
Emily: You like hiking. You just don't like camping.
Jase: I know.
Marie: Do you still feel guilty about not liking camping?
Jase: I do feel a little bit guilty about it because--
Emily: It's come up a couple of times.
Jase: Because everyone gives me shit for it constantly. Then I think about getting into a relationship with someone who maybe already goes camping a ton with their partner, and I don't like camping, and I'm like, "That's not something I'm going to do." It's like, "Cool, I don't feel as guilty about it." I think that's an interesting dynamic pair of have you internalized guilt about that aspect?
Marie: That is interesting. I would imagine, and I don't know for sure, but I think it could have to do with internalized mono-normativity. It's like internalized homophobia for gay people, that little voice that just comes from the dominant culture and keeps telling you, "Well, we're doing this poly thing, but really, I should be able to fulfill all of my partner's needs. They're doing this with somebody else because I'm deficient somehow."
Emily: Because compersion is this abstract concept to so many people, do you find that people get things wrong about it? Are there any misunderstandings regarding the work that you're doing or the research that you're doing that you've run into?
Marie: Well, there's a lot of people who think it's just not possible, that people are just maybe bypassing their jealousy and not being really sincere with their emotions. It's really hard to believe for people that someone can experience compersion in the context of an intimate relationship. Maybe for some people, it is not possible. It's hard to imagine that it is for somebody else.
Again, the idea that it's not a on-off switch can help reconcile that idea that it's not just one or the other, that it's a spectrum, that it's a blend, most of the time. The other thing that also, like I said earlier, is a pitfall is for people to just latch on to that idea of compersion and then set that as a standard for their partners and for themselves, and then put themselves down or put other people down when they're not just experiencing compersion. These are the two main pitfalls.
Dedeker: To speak to that first one, I know Helen Fisher, who's a really big well known social anthropologist, what is she? The official anthropologist or sociologist for Match.com or was for many years. Dan Savage calls her the corporate shill for Match.com.
She's historically very, very anti-nonmonogamy and anti-polyamory. She's definitely one of those who's just convinced like, "No, our brains just can't do that. Just can't do that. We're not built for it," and also pushes this narrative that people who claim that they feel that or that they want to feel that, that they're just in denial and making it up, which is I guess another reason why, again, researching this is so important, is to help go against that narrative as well.
Marie: I think we have to remember that all researchers are humans, and no one comes to a research project without bias, whether it's disclosed and conscious or not. We all, and me included, come into it with certain hopes and beliefs. It's very extreme in the case of consensual nonmonogamy because once we start acknowledging and toying with the idea that, yes, maybe we can have consensually nonmonogamous relationships that are successful and sustainable, it threatens the status quo of our narrative of relationships. It threatens the Disney Princess narrative of love being all about one person and just being a lifelong monogamous affair. It's not surprising to me that even scientists argue about that.
Emily: While we're on the topic of personal bias and mono-normativity, you have a great website where you talk about all of your research and your findings and stuff, whatiscompersion.com. Everyone should go check it out. It's really lovely. I enjoyed reading it. In there, you talk about how mono-normativity permeates our culture in general, and specifically academia. That's just like a place in which I never really thought about mono-normativity coming into play, maybe because I haven't been in college in a while. I'm interested to know how that happens in academia. Just for those of our listeners who are in academia in any way, I'm curious.
Marie: Well, in the field of relationship research, we are starting to see more research on consensual nonmonogamy which is great. Every year I look at the schedule from a few conferences on sex research, and there's an increasing amount of inclusion of research that is not mono-normative. I want to acknowledge that. At the same time, it is still the mainstream narrative being that jealousy is inevitable. I do think that we're late in starting to discover alternatives.
I always say, "Well, we have iPhones. We have biochemistry. We have aerospace. We have so many areas of science that are incredibly evolved, but in the realm of relationships and love, it still feels like a black box." We still don't know very much. We still operate on a lot of assumptions, a lot of movie type Disney narratives as our baseline of what relationships should be like. It's very culturally grounded into the fact that academia is mostly controlled by Western people, white people, middle to upper-class people. A lot of research subjects are college students who are also mostly white Western, upper-middle-class people. That is where a lot of our data and our "knowledge" on human relationships is coming from. A lot of room for improvement there. If we were going to start to look at other cultures and other age groups, other races, we would probably find a different picture that might be less mono-normative.
Dedeker: I will say when I think about my college relationships, I hope no one's getting any data from that.
Emily: Likewise. I had a lot of people in college who I was dating. You all had very monogamous--
Dedeker: I had very monogamous college experiences.
Emily: I was less so.
Dedeker: It is interesting that you point out that the area of relationship research while it exists, of course, but compared to so many other arenas, there's still so many outdated models that get used and outdated assumptions that get applied to it. Actually, something that really struck me watching a video of the Gottmans presenting a little while ago then talking about the fact that there's also just very little incentive for relationship research to be funded as well. That another challenge is the government is certainly not funding relationship research really.
Emily: They don't care.
Dedeker: Unless it's for figuring out something that's directly going to benefit the government in some way but as far as knowledge that would benefit all of us, it's just already hard to get that off the ground is my understanding of it.
Marie: True, especially non-monogamy research, the government's not going to fund that.
Jase: I keep saying that I feel like non-monogamy research will blow up when someone figures out a really good way to monetize it because with monogamous relationships-
Dedeker: To sell to us.
Jase: -we sell weddings, which are a huge billion-dollar industry. Weddings are a significant portion of the economy, significant enough that it's worth sites like Match.com hiring people like Helen Fisher to--
Emily: The government incentivizes marriage.
Jase: Well, of course, that too. There's a lot of incentive there. There's money to be made from saying we've got data about relationships if they're monogamous. I feel like there's just not that for non-monogamy and that's, I almost want to say by design, where it's taking away this idea that we all have to strive for this one monolithic goal for how relationships should look that everyone wants to sell us with their magazines and movies, and all of that but harder to motivate people to fund research for that.
Marie: Well, it's part of the settler-colonial culture in this country. When the colonizers came and found the natives not being monogamous and not abiding by European rules, one of the things that they made them do if they did not kill them first was to start pairing up in monogamous marriages. It is part of the "machine", the economical machine that runs society and just the cultural norms. It's not something that just occurred to all of us naturally.
Dedeker: I always think about it as we're in just this weird place where monogamy and especially married monogamy is the state-sanctioned relationship and when you put it that way, people get uncomfortable but it's true, it is the state-sanctioned relationship, that's just what it is. It's the only state-sanctioned relationship other than maybe the parent-child relationship. That's about what we got. Now I'm trying to think of what bizarre world would we have to be where the government would actually be funding research on non-monogamous relationships.
Marie: It would to be very sex-positive folks.
Emily: We got a long way to go for that.
Dedeker: Or else, again like you were saying, Jase, if we're going in more- if we keep staying on this very hyper-capitalist track, that once non-monogamous communities become enough of a commodity or enough of a market. If someone is able to launch the app like Airbnb that is able to connect you to your little polycule commune with weekly D&D nights or something like that.
Dedeker: Once that market gets cornered, then maybe we'll get more research. I don't know. I'm just spitballing here.
Jase: We'll have a company meeting, we'll figure out how to do that.
Emily: Yes, we'll try to figure out how we can monetize non-monogamy best.
Dedeker: Where the real money is at. Looking over, again, the findings of your research and looking at those three really big factors that influence compersion in either positive or negative ways. I'm thinking back to what we were talking about in the first half of the episode talking about the example of how you feel when a friend gets a promotion or gets something that you really wanted. I'm wondering, do you feel like those particular factors, the individual relations and social factors, do you feel like that's knowledge that we could also use to apply to this non-relationship setting or this nonmonogamy setting?
Marie: Absolutely. It's a very good point. I had not thought about it until now.
Dedeker: Well, you're welcome.
Marie: That's going into my discussion section. I would say, of course, the individual factors in terms of "Am I getting my needs met? Am I mentally on track with the idea of compersion and shared joy and sharing somebody else's happiness?" are completely relevant. Then the relational factors, I would say mostly the quality of the relationship, if it's a friend that's very close to you, you're going to be more likely to, I would say, feel the compersion and the sympathetic joy more strongly than if it's just an acquaintance when they get a promotion. Let's take that example.
Then the social environment as well, I think is very relevant. It's about, "Does my social environment promote cooperation?" Let's say you're in a company that promotes cooperation between colleagues, it's going to be more easy to feel that kind of compersion towards your friend than if you're in a very competitive environment where it's cutthroat and everyone fights for the same crumbs.
Dedeker: No, that's interesting. I know that your research isn't published yet and so it's not official yet but I am excited of thinking about these three pillars and applying it to areas of my life where I'm more likely to feel envy or jealousy. I know for me, these days, I tend to have much more of a jealousy response around professional success of seeing close friends of mine who gets something that I feel like I want to be the next step in my career or things like that. I'm definitely curious about using this framework to look at all those different factors and think about like, "What area might I shift in a particular way?"
Marie: There's so many good ways to deal with jealousy and one of the gifts I would say of jealousy in itself is to eliminate the things that we want and give us an example of how this person can achieve them. Sometimes I think, "Well if I'm jealous of somebody, I'm just going to imitate them." I'm going to be inspired, then it takes the confidence to say, "Well, if it can happen to them, it can happen to me." That's the individual factor of self-confidence, but also to really look at an example as an inspiration rather than a putdown.
Dedeker: I like that reframing. It's not that easy but--
Emily: Easier said than done.
Jase: It is. Well, gosh, I have so many things that I would love to keep talking about and asking you and telling you that you should do studies about-
Jase: -but we're at the end of our time for this episode. Can you just tell our listeners where they can find more of you and your work?
Marie: Absolutely. I have two websites, one is the compersion website where I talk about my work, about my research and I also give a list of resources and prior research about compersion. It's really helpful for anyone who's interested in reading more. It's www.whatiscompersion.com. If you are interested in doing some coaching with me, I have a coaching practice for love and relationships and the website for that is loveinsight-dating.com. Love insight all in one-word, -dating.com