The moment I came out of seven days of silence, I was convinced all of my non-monogamy problems were solved.
I had been abjectly terrified going into my first meditation retreat. I was in the early throes of new relationship energy with not just one but two partners, which meant my mind was on a spin cycle between bubbly, fantastical mush feelings and bristly, sickening, sludgy despair when one of them took too long to respond to a text, or when one of them was spending the night with someone else. The idea of being locked up for a week straight with that same brain sent chills down my spine – no phone, no conversation, no books, no distractions to keep me out of the thick of my own wild feelings.
The retreat center, Spirit Rock, had adopted a cutely Buddhist naming convention for the dormitories. I was to stay in the “Mudita” dorm - so named after the Buddhist concept of “sympathetic joy,” or, the experience of joy at the good news of someone other than oneself. I’d been stewing myself in polyamory PR terms for the past few years, and the non-monogamy subculture term “compersion” seemed like an identical match. How fitting, I thought, perhaps a bit begrudgingly.
I don’t need to gush about the details of my retreat experience, lest I sound as beatific and alienating as all of my Burner friends sound. Suffice to say, tears were spilled, mind was blown, and I came out of the retreat all but floating on a cloud of my own enlightenment and self-realization. Mudita? Check. Compersion? No problem.
I hadn’t even left the retreat center grounds when I eagerly sent a text to my partner Brad, and another text to my partner Adrian. Radio silence from both. But that’s okay. I’ve been sitting doing literally nothing for hours at a time on this retreat. I can wait.
A few moments later, I get a call from Brad. He’s so pleased to talk to me after the retreat! It’s so wonderful to hear his voice! He informs me that he’s on a spur-of-the-moment trip to the wilds of Colorado with his other partner Kelly to look for Forest Fenn’s hidden treasure! He’s on a literal treasure hunt! With my metamour! Who hates my guts!
The cloud of enlightenment and self-realization wobbles a bit, but I stay strong. I breathe. I remember all the breathing I’ve done this past week, and I breathe some more.
“That’s so fun. I’m excited to see you when you get back,” I manage to squeeze in before the poor cell phone reception in the wilds of Colorado ends the call.
It goes a little smoother with Adrian, but just barely. “I extended my work trip in New Orleans, because I’m having such a great time,” he texts. “Congratulations on making it through your first retreat!”
But once I’m back home, the plot thickens.
He’s met a stripper during his trip to New Orleans. Not just any stripper, but the woman who was for sure his soulmate. Roxanne, an angel, the sweetest human being on the planet. In fact, they had only known each other for a week but were deciding to get married. Monogamously.
Enlightenment cloud is losing altitude at an alarming rate. There is no oxygen mask to put on. He’s flabbergasted by my reaction. He thought what we had wasn’t that serious. I’m crying in the shower. There is no sympathetic joy. There is no sympathy. There is no joy.
There’s nothing remotely resembling compersion in me when Brad returns, not with any actual treasure, but with a figurative treasure trove of adventure photos and exuberant memories, all made with someone who is not me. Made with someone who would rather I weren’t in the picture. At this point, the feeling is mutual.
As a fiercely identified polyamorous person, I fiercely label myself a disgrace. I resolve to find a way to get back on my enlightenment cloud, despite the catastrophic failure of its maiden flight. I set out to construct my own ill-fated Jenga-like tower to climb, built up with spiritual bypassing, brute forcing my way through jealousy, denial, control, and so many good intentions. I’d start feeling close, feeling like I’ve finally figured out this polyamory thing, when – oh no, I didn’t think my partner was gonna grab that piece. Wobble, panic, crash, lather, rinse, repeat.
It’s not just me struggling to grasp mudita, compersion, sympathetic joy, or what have you. A brief search on DharmaSeed.org, a repository of recorded dharma talks given by Western Buddhist teachers, produces over 2,400 different hits for the search term “metta” or loving-kindness. For mudita? A measly 300 recorded talks. With metta practice, one can play the role of the magnanimous saint deigning to bestow loving-kindness upon that sorry asshole who annoys the hell out of you. With mudita, one must drum up positive feelings when that sorry asshole who annoys the hell out of you just got the promotion you were hoping for. Mudita: the problem child of Buddhist psychology.
In the same way, compersion is a problem in American psychology. In a culture of individual exceptionalism and winning at all costs, every time I have tried to explain compersion, it’s been met with scoffs and disbelief. The existence of functioning consensual non-monogamy is already a difficult pill to swallow, so to even suggest that there might be joy in the process tips the needle into the realm of fairytale – naive, ignorant, laughable.
Not that consensually non-monogamous people fare much better. We just have a tendency to grab that idealistic fairytale image and paste it on a vision-board as a guiding star, shining so bright that it erases the reality of messy, complicated feelings. To not feel compersion is to withhold support for a partner’s other relationships. To be too full of sadness or confusion or envy to feel joy speaks to a weakness of character and an abandonment of good polyamory principles.
And so the hunt continued. When the distress was extreme, it seemed that the only cure might be compersion in the extreme. When bombs of envy were detonating, I sought out fireworks of mudita that might draw my attention away from any discomfort inside. Sometimes this looked like throwing myself into close relationships with my metas as soon as possible. Other times it looked like exuberant, sweaty group sex. I’m happy to report that while this approach did net me some wonderful meta relationships, along with some fantastic group sex, none of these could keep me in a permanent state of enlightened, selfless joy on a partner’s behalf.
As I struggled to meet my arbitrary polyamory compersion quota, all bets were off when it came to exes. My now ex-partner, Adrian, became the target of my righteous indignation. He hurt me, he abandoned me, and he had certainly lost the right for me to feel any joy in common with him. I told myself the most wicked, vilifying stories about the woman he’d married. I harbored judgment about their shotgun marriage. I mean, who does that? There’s no way it’s going to last. He’ll be sorry. He’ll see.
This, I’ve found, is the biggest hindrance to compersion. Not jealousy, not envy, but vyapada – a Buddhist term usually translated as “ill will” but which runs the gamut from aversion to downright hatred. Instead of sharing in joy, I chew on resentment. Instead of wishing for success, I call down curses. This is a surprisingly easy place to go, even with those we cherish the most. I watch my clients slide into this abyss: fingers crossed that their partner’s weekend getaway with their other partner might be interrupted by food poisoning, guilty confessions that they hope their partner will totally crash and burn with that hottie they’re hitting up on a dating app. The soft, tender, wounded parts cry, “If the other person is in misery and pain, then they’ll understand me. Then they’ll pay attention to my own misery and pain.”
Many of us who have been around the block with consensual non-monogamy can recognize that jealousy and compersion often coexist, sometimes maddeningly so. Your partner is excited to be heading into a second date, when it’s been crickets for you on the dating apps. You turn green with envy, but you’re also giving them a genuine high five and helping them fix their hair on the way out the door. It’s dizzying and confusing, but ultimately it leaves an open pathway to compassion, connection, and support.
Harboring vyapada, on the other hand, closes the gate. There is no way to squeeze sympathetic joy out of a heart that is wrapped around the handle of a dagger, desperately guarding the painful spots. And so I’ve learned that to follow the ill will, to follow the extreme lack of compersion, to follow the hatred is to find what needs to be healed. Is there pain that is going unacknowledged? Do I need my hurt to be heard and validated? Or am I prodding at old emotional wounds like compulsively picking at a scab, refusing to let it heal?
It was a few years later when Adrian reached out to invite me to coffee. We hadn’t spoken much (other than the angry, imaginary conversations I had in the middle of the night). While the time had dulled the hurt, it was still sour in my throat as I sat across from him. He had hurt me, more than I had even realized at the time.
“I think I hurt you more than I realized at the time,” he said.
My body froze in surprise, and simultaneously something unyielding inside me softened. As we sat and unknit together what had happened back then, there was a strange feeling of spaciousness arising inside me. The conversation wasn’t a grasping attempt at rekindling a romantic relationship. It wasn’t me trodding over a litany of grievances and extracting precise apologies. It was both of us listening, reaching for understanding. And that was enough.
It was enough to have me leaving the conversation genuinely looking forward to meeting his wife. This specter that I had tried so hard to hate, that I had desperately wanted to hate, had transformed into someone that I could see in her humanity. When I finally got to know Roxanne, I had to admit to myself – she really was one of the sweetest human beings on the planet.
I don’t want to paint too saccharine of a picture here. My friendship with Adrian still required finding the appropriate emotional distance and putting in mutual effort. But I did find myself knitting little toys when their first baby arrived, making tangible the sympathetic joy that I couldn’t quite put into words.
I’ve sat in many silent retreats since that time. I still haven’t found the retreat environment that will solve every non-monogamy problem. But not long ago, a Buddhist nun facilitating one of my retreats offered some brief comments on mudita.
“Joy and success that I didn’t even have to earn myself,” she said, smiling. “Joy that I didn’t even have to work for.”
I continue to dance with vyapada and mudita, with ill will and compersion, but I’ve learned that I don’t need to work so hard, and as a result, both are quieter for me now. When I catch myself plucking away at strings of resentment and hatred, instead of denying them, I know how to follow them to the hurting spots. When the moments of compersion and mudita arrive, they arrive in their simplest form. Sometimes as simple as finding joy when my partner isn’t suffering. Sometimes as simple as knowing that I don’t want my meta to experience pain. But mostly, the compersion arrives on its own, without my striving, without having to work for it.
About the Author
Dedeker Winston is an educator, relationship coach, and co-host of the Multiamory podcast, a research-backed relationship advice show that centers non-traditional relationships. She is the author of The Smart Girl's Guide to Polyamory and Multamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships.
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