Anita Wagner of Practical Polyamory, while flagging a positive article about polyamory at YourTango.com
There’s a good article on compersion on the women’s sex and love webzine tangomag.com. I love that this subject – something most people have never heard of or even imagined – is being explored on a women’s mainstream venue.
I’d never heard of compersion either but it sounds like a useful word. According to the still-mostly-a-stub Wikipedia page compersion is
...the positive feelings one gets when a lover is enjoying another relationship. Sometimes called the opposite or flip side of jealousy.
[or]
...the feeling of taking joy in the joy that others you love share among themselves, especially taking joy in the knowledge that your beloveds are expressing their love for one another.
I can’t think of a lot of other words in English that carry that sentiment even in the general sense of feeling glad about someone else’s good fortune. There’s a link on the page to a Pali/Sanskrit word, mudita that means “rejoicing in others’ good fortune” Which, they say is “sometimes considered the opposite of schadenfreude.” Although, come to think of it, we don’t have an English word for that either.
To be honest on my tongue and to my ear neither “compersion” or “mudita” seem very evocative of the sentiment. Seems like a pretty useful sentiment though so if any poly-linguist and/or deep-vocabulary readers know of other similar words let me know in comments.
Tin ear or not I have to chalk up another one for the poly folks.
Submitted by 2456 (not verified) on Tue, 2008-10-21 01:21.
Cunning Minx of Polyamory Weekly uses "frubble" a lot. I like that better than "compersion," as it sounds less scientific and more fun.
[Pretty cute! Thanks, Skywind. --fl]
Submitted by 2456 (not verified) on Tue, 2008-10-21 08:53.
From Greek derivations, you could produce the word "allochary" (literally, "another's joy"). The "ch" could be pronounced either as a 'k' sound or as a 'ch' sound, I'm not sure which would be better.
(Although, a slight twist of pronunciation could make "allocheery" with the implication of "cheeriness"!)
[That works too, either pronunciation. You'd think we had more pre-existing ones though. Thanks, SE. --fl]
Submitted by 2456 (not verified) on Sat, 2008-10-25 22:54.
This particular unword is one of the standing flamewars in the poly community -- with the people who think it's a nice noise on one side, and the people with an aesthetic sense, who give two shakes about comprehensible etymology, or who find the concept of the opposite of an emotion flatly ludicrous on the other.
You can guess which camp I'm in. (The camp that wants to respond to "I'm feeling compersion!" with "Oh, hon, I'm so sorry, have you been to the doctor?")
[Interesting. I think it's a principle of brand-naming things that even names that sound bad to begin with (I think the classic example was "Accura") grow on people if the thing that's actually *referenced* is cool. Still, the phonic allusions in "compersion" sound more like something you'd read in one of those neighborhood watch fliers and not so much what you'd want to hear mid-sonnet. It sounds too much like "aspersion" and "perversion," and maybe "convict." I *do* think the feeling isn't just the opposite of some other emotion like jealousy so I'm fine with it having *some* kind of word for it. Just none of the ones I've heard so far. Thanks, Five. --fl]