We kid 'cause we love

Maybe teasing is just love in a different font

Painting, “My Wife’s Lovers,” by Carl Kahler, 1891. Kahler’s sense of humor shines here: He chose this title in jest, to tease his spouse, but the painting itself is an act of devotion. He spent three years studying cats and their poses just so he could create this piece for his wife in honor of her beloved pets. Kahler gets it.

One winter two years ago, my husband Max and I returned from a long trip to find that our alley cats had vanished. Well, not our alley cats; they belonged to the wilderness of the space behind our patio wall—burrows of weeds and brick and cinder block where they made their home.

In the cats’ stead, a scourge of sparrows and pigeons had taken over and were ruling the alley’s kingdom tyrannically. The birds, drunk with power, and finally free from the predatory threat of cats, wreaked havoc on us and our neighbors: They were eating everybody’s plants, nesting on phone wire, and pooping all over the place.

We hadn’t realized it until they were gone: The cats had been keeping a peace we knew nothing about.

Much to my surprise, I was bereft. For years prior, we’d made a big show of how much we despised the cats, resenting their brutish entitlement to our outdoor space. We’d laugh to each other, indignant, “Who does the orange one think he is, galivanting around like he owns the place?”

And we’d regale our friends with mocking stories, “I swear, the tabby cat glared at me the other day like I was standing in HIS patio!” We talked about them a lot, always teasing.

No doubt our friends grew weary of our not-that-funny (but hilarious to us) stories about the grungy feline gang living beyond the wall. They’d smile, nod, throw a sympathetic chuckle our way if they were feeling generous.

Probably, our friends humored us because they instinctively knew what I didn’t understand until the alley cats were gone: We pretended to hate the cats. But we secretly loved the cats. Thinking back on it now, it’s obvious—people only joke that much about things they adore.

It wasn’t the first time I was shocked by the realization that I loved something I’d long-purported to dislike. Before Max and I got together, (almost twenty years ago now, which is hard to believe), I often groused about him in a posture of grievance e.g., he always disagrees with me, and he’s so mischievous, and he’s always teasing me.

After one series of gripes, a friend accused me of having a crush on him, to which I replied, aghast, “What do you mean, all I do is complain about him?”

Their response? “Sure, I guess, but you still talk about him all the time.” Touché. Obviously, this pissed me off into a righteous lather, because how dare my friend go telling the truth like that, and to my face no less.

The thing is, I couldn’t make sense of our dynamic either, which is partially why I was always trying to process and parse it out aloud. Max and I were close friends—inseparable—but our tete-a-tetes were legendary. It was confusing. Ostensibly, we were always at odds and yet we spent every possible moment together ribbing each other, debating, and perhaps most importantly, laughing.

Again, what was obvious to everyone else remained a mystery to me. I found it puzzling when onlookers observing our sparring would say things like, “Geez, get a room,” and “would you two just get together already?”

Genuinely, I was perplexed: Why were people always making these remarks to us?

To my naive eye, we were bickering, poking, prodding. Surely we were terrorizing one another, not flirting?

Clearly I’d never taken the classic 1980’s-era conventional wisdom that “boys tease you because they like you” to heart. And, while in retrospect I now realize the glaringly obvious fact that Max and I were indeed flirting with our particular brand of playful taunting, it’s not as simple as painting all teasing with a loving brush.

Here I am pretending to bite Max at a Renaissance Faire circa fall 2004 in Massachusetts in some kind of deranged mating ritual fueled by cigarettes and mead. We didn’t actually start dating until Feb. 2005. Our friend Anna, the blond on the left, is averting her gaze and probably dissociating (and who can blame her). Anyway, enjoy the early aughts fashions!

Yes, sometimes a person is poking you, and you are poking back, because you are slowly falling in love via verbal banter, like you are protagonists in a Jane Austen novel or a Shakespeare play, and you will end up getting together and adoring each other for many decades (as in the case of me and Max).

And other times people are teasing you because they are mean-spirited or insecure and they want you to feel bad. Or they are acting out a well-worn dynamic inherited from their family, or trauma, or whatever else, and they are not self-aware enough to notice it, interrupt it, or change it. In this post, I’m not talking about that type of malevolent kidding. Here, I’m lauding what I call “loving teasing.”

The litmus test is the intention: Loving teasing is a bid to deepen connection, to turn towards one another, to quite literally make fun.

Being an asshole is the opposite: It is a bid to hurt someone, sever or turn away from connection, to create distance.

Teasing can be a glorious expression of love—but only in deft hands.

Having given this years of thought, here are my two (admittedly non-scientific) takeaways about lovingly razzing that which you adore.

Teasing is an expression of delight.

Let’s go back to the cats. I’ve long considered myself a “dog person,” and this position had become more entrenched over the past decade as the internet broke all of our brains into tribal disasters.

Now, the de rigueur approach to existence is that once we pick “a side,” even about something as idiotic as pet preferences, we dig our heels in, defending even the most frivolous of opinions as fiercely as our identity itself. (I hate tribal internet brain. I wish I were immune to it. But, alas, I am not. I am a mere mortal.)

I think my burgeoning affection for the cats was at odds with a tiny pocket of my identity—a trivial one, being a “dog person,” how meaningless—yet still, the cats created an inner tension that elicited rebellion and surprise.

And so we teased. We teased as a way of processing new information about ourselves and the world, we teased to explore an evolving sense of self, we teased to roll around in the delight of growth and change.

Often, the people we love surprise us in similar ways, challenging the parts of us we thought were hardwired, upending and deepening our self-knowledge.

Exploring the little knots of tension there—between the things we admire in others and the things we thought we knew about ourselves—and then delighting in those sparks of discovery, often results in joyous moments of laughter, joking, gentle ribbing. We are finding out together how much more there is to learn about each other, reveling in the mystery, acknowledging that while other people are fundamentally unknowable, sometimes the most fun you can have on this Earth is to try like hell to know each other anyway.

Fumbling through this dance, of perceiving someone else and being perceived: Isn’t this central to being alive—seeking insight about ourselves, the world, and each other, and how it all interconnects? I think so.

Verbal volleying can be an exploration of the magical friction between you and me, self and other, a way to relate and connect.

And when it’s not malicious, it is a compliment, a way of saying, “I find you endlessly fascinating, so no matter how much it challenges me, I am committed to expanding my knowledge of you, and to allowing myself to be known by you too.”

A relatively normal picture of me and Max, as a palate cleanser.

Teasing is a specific expression of understanding.

Teasing is most effective when it’s specific because it demonstrates to the tease-ee that they are profoundly understood by the teaser.

Perhaps you’ve heard of RBF, “Resting Bitch Face,” which describes when a person’s default facial expression appears unfriendly.

Well, I have RIF, “Resting Idiot Face.” At rest, my features reflexively sag into a slack-jawed, furrowed expression of utter confusion. The amount of times I’ve been approached by strangers asking me if I’m lost and/or need help is ridiculous (and I’ve lost count long ago). Every time, I have to rearrange my mouth, widen my eyes to signal that my brain is in working order, and say cheerily, “No, I’m good, thanks!” And offer as explanation, “That’s just my face.”

Not surprisingly, Max gets a lot of mileage out of this very specific fact of my experience in the world. While he doesn’t usually use the term RIF, he has joked a thousand times in a thousand different ways about my default confused face, and we have laughed about it together, because knowing this about me is a testament to our level of intimacy. Only people closest to me are aware of this odd little facet of my life, of my having to repeatedly explain my face to random passersby.

A very rare picture of my RIF in the wild (and this doesn’t really do it justice). It’s hard to capture. Imagine me looking 25% dumber than this.

Some might take offense. But to me, joking about this says: I know you. I get you. I love you.

And that’s my favorite. When teasing is comprehension on display. When it means, “I see all the things about you that make you, you. Not just the glossy stuff but the idiosyncrasies, the peculiarities, the funny flaws. And I see it enough to fold it into my understanding of you and to cherish all of it—not in spite of your unique strain of weirdness, but because of it.”

Teasing is a celebration of knowing someone else deeply, better than other people do, in a way that is special and set apart.

Jokes between family, old friends, and lovers are garlands of rare understanding, a shorthand signifying years of time spent together, a testament to hours invested in bearing witness to them, and allowing ourselves to be witnessed in kind. I may have Resting Idiot Face, but I’m smart enough to recognize: That’s a beautiful thing.

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What about you? Tell me in the comments, what does “loving teasing” mean to you, what are your rules of engagement, observations etc.?