Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

We may imagine that nature dictates what emotions we feel, but the reality is that society plays a powerful role in shaping our interior lives. The sight of two gay men marrying each other would once have evoked emotions like contempt or pity from most Americans. Now, however, the public mood is increasingly shifting into supportive feelings of joy for the happy couple.

But how malleable are our emotions? Could we change society or ourselves in such a way that we no longer felt an emotion like jealousy? Blanche was interested to learn of a utopian community that tried to eliminate jealousy and replace it with an emotion called compersion. The community was the Kerista Commune, which existed in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco from 1971 to 1991. They defined compersion as an emotion which is the opposite of sexual jealousy -- taking pleasure in the fact that your sexual partner is having good sex and/or relationships with other people.

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The Keristans practiced what they called polyfidelity, in which the members of a group have sex with each other and don't have sex with anyone outside the group. Since Kerista was a heterosexual commune, what this meant was that all the men had sex with all the women. The commune actually had a "sleeping schedule" that determined who slept with whom on which night. The Keristans also stressed non-preferential polyfidelity, meaning that none of your relationships were more important or primary than the others.

So rather than feeling jealous because last night's partner was having sex with someone else, Keristans were encouraged to feel compersion for their lovers' physical and emotional pleasure (or their lovejoy, to use another Keristan coinage).

For various reasons, the reality often did not match up with ideals of the Keristans, and Kerista.com has a number of fascinating essays from former members discussing what worked and what didn't in this arrangement. One problem mentioned by some ex-Keristans is that people in the commune didn't necessarily find each of their opposite-sex communards equally attractive or sympathetic -- or compatible at all.

Keristan thought is comparable to the ideal Marxist vision of communism, where there is no greed or individual property, but a free sharing of whatever is needed. And in some ways, Keristan sexual non-preferentiality worked about as well Marxist idealism in the real world.

But even if the idea of non-preferential polyfidelous groups seems unrealistic, Blanche thinks that there might be something valuable in the idea of compersion. Taking the material analogy again: it should be possible for us to be happy for the good fortune of others. If my friend Joan wins the lottery, then I can be happy for her, rather than envious. Similarly, if my friend John spends a night with a gorgeous man, I can be happy for him as I hear the fascinating details.

In the case of our friends, we don't begrudge them economic or sexual good fortune. So why are our lovers different? Why would most of us be happy to hear that our boyfriend won the lottery, but unhappy to hear that he spent the afternoon with a hot man? In both cases, he is happy and fortunate, so why do so many of us feel threatened when the outside pleasure is sexual?

Presumably we are threatened because we have subscribed to the cultural norm of sexually exclusive monogamy as the only model for a relationship. This is in spite of the abundant evidence that people's inability to maintain sexually exclusive monogamy leads to misery, divorce, violence, and even murder.

Blanche agrees with the ex-Keristans who say that lovers will always pair off and form tight sexual and emotional bonds with each other. But these bonds with our lovers need not lead us to a jealous and self-defeating emphasis on exclusivity. A touch of compersion could make many marriages last longer by encouraging us to honor our partners' needs for sexual excitement and variety.

We can be glad of the fact that emotional reactions to gay marriage are in the midst of a change in American society, moving from condemnation to celebration. But as we call on those around us to be flexible in thinking about what makes a marriage, let us remember that we need to be flexible in our own thinking as well. We need not imitate the aspects of heterosexual marriage that do not work; instead we can try to reach new ways of instilling gay relationships with love and passion.