A dear happiness to women! They would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humor for that. I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.
BENEDICK
God keep your ladyship still in that mind! So some gentleman or other shall scape a predestinate scratch’d face.
BEATRICE
Scratching could not make it worse, an ’twere such a face as yours were.
BENEDICK
Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.
BEATRICE
A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours.
BENEDICK
I would my horse had the speed of your tongue, and so good a continuer. But keep your way, a God’s name; I have done.
BEATRICE
You always end with a jade’s trick, I know you of old.
With age, as sexual partners move in with one another, sharing the conduct of everyday life, partners develop their own personal idiom, including provocative nicknames and teasing insults. Partners develop teasing insults about each other’s sexual proclivities, their bodily functions, their sleep habits, their manner of eating, the anachronistic hairstyle they dogmatically prefer—all threats to connubial bliss. These teasing insults mark partners’ quirks and foibles as deviant, and problematic if carried to extremes, but endearing foibles nonetheless, uniquely appreciated by the partner. Studies of married partners find that partners with a richer vocabulary of teasing insults are happier, and enjoy a better long-term prognosis.
The teasing of romantic partners—nicknames, ritualized insults—not only signals their unique intimacy together. It also provides a realm of pretense in which the two can playfully negotiate their conflicts. To explore this possibility, I had couples who had been together for several years tease each other with the nickname task. Roughly a quarter of the nicknames they generated involved universal metaphors of love—references to their partner as pieces of food (apple dumpling) or small animals. Once again, a nod to the benefits of teasing in the merry war of intimacy: The more satisfied couples were more adroit at teasing; they were more likely to use off-record markers in their fifteen seconds of teasing—exaggerations, repetitions, mimicry, playful intonations, shifts in pitch, tongue protrusions, contorted facial expressions. They had developed a nonliteral, off-record dimension to their intimate life, one which they could readily transport to, to enjoy the levity, antiphonal laughter, and lightness of the realm of pretense. The playfulness of their fifteen-second teasing, we additionally found, predicted how happy the couples were six months later.
In another study we examined the precise instances in which partners criticized each other. We identified specific moments as they haggled over a serious conflict in their relationships—money issues, future commitment, infidelities, questions about how they spend time together. Much of the time partners delivered the criticism in well-reasoned, on-record, literal prose that would satisfy any juror or local rhetorician. Other times partners teased to criticize—with exaggerated claims, a ritualized insult, a playful imitation of the other, a nickname, mock anger or frustration. They delivered the same content—some provocative criticism, for example, about the partner’s bevy of ne’er-do-well friends or tendency to spend too much money—but did so in nonliteral fashion, employing off-record markers to indicate a nonserious side to what they were saying. Couples who playfully teased, as opposed to resorting to direct, cogent, but ultimately hackle-raising criticism, felt more connected after the conflict, and trusted their partners more. The playful dramatizing of conflict is an antidote to toxic criticism that can dissolve an intimate bond. Teasing is a battle plan for the merry war.
THE PLAYGROUND PARADOX
On April 20—the birthday of Adolf Hitler—1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, armed with semiautomatic weapons and a hit list, and proceeded to kill twelve of their fellow students, a teacher, and then themselves. In a burst of soul searching, Americans raised muted questions about guns, games, and drugs. Harris and Klebold had made over ninety-nine bombing devices, and had an astonishing collection of firearms, hidden from adults. They were avid players of Doom, one of many violent videogames known now, thanks to research by Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman, to short-circuit compassionate tendencies and to amplify aggression. After going on Zoloft and then Luvox for bouts of depression, Harris became increasingly prone to homicidal and suicidal thoughts.
In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine shootings, I received a call from a counselor who had been working with children there. Harris and Klebold had been bullied by the jocks at Columbine High. This bullying, some suggested, had been condoned by administrators at the school—a fact that led to many zero-tolerance policies toward bullying in schools. Her deep concern, in reading my research, was that I was condoning bullying by saying that teasing is good.
The simple answer to her query is that the heart of bullying has nothing to do with teasing. What bullies largely do is act violently—they torment, hit, pin down, steal, and vandalize. This has little to do with teasing.
The more subtle matter we confronted is the paradox of the playground. Scan a playground of any grammar school for fifteen minutes and you’ll see the full spectrum of teasing, its lighter, playful side as well as its darker versions. Children have an instinct for teasing. It emerges early (one British psychologist observed a cheeky nine-month-old mocking her grandmother’s snoring with a delightful imitation). As with adults, teasing can instigate and mark deep friendship. At the same time, teasing can go horribly awry. The teasing of children with obesity problems, for example, has been found to have lasting pernicious effects upon the target’s self-esteem.
What separates the productive tease from the damaging one? Data from our studies yielded four lessons about when teasing goes awry, lessons that can be put to use on the playground or in the office. A first is the nature of the provocation in the tease. Harmful teasing is physically painful and zeroes in on vulnerables aspects of the individual’s identity (for example, a young man’s romantic failures). Playful teasing is less hurtful physically, and thoughtfully targets less critical facets of the target’s identity (for example, a young man’s quirky manner of laughing). The literature on bullies bears this out: Their pokes in the ribs, noogies, and skin twisters hurt, and they tease others about taboo subjects. Not so for the artful teaser, whose teasing is lighter and less hurtful, and can even find ways to flatter in the provocation.
A second lesson pertains to the presence of the off-record markers—the exaggeration, repetition, shifts in vocalization patterns, funny facial displays. In studies of teasing we have found that the same provocation delivered with the wonderful arabesques of our nonliteral language, the off-record markers, produced little anger, and elevated love, amusement, and mirth. The same provocation delivered without these markers mainly produced anger and affront. To sort out the effective tease from the hostile attack, look and listen for off-record markers, those tickets to the realm of pretense and play.
A third lesson is one of social context. The same action—a personal joke, a critical comment, an unusually long gaze, a touch to the space between the shoulder and neck—can take on radically different meanings depending on the context. These behaviors have different meanings when coming from foe or friend, whether they occur in a formal or informal setting, alone in a room or surrounded by friends. Critical to the meaning of the tease is power. Power asymmetries—and in particular, when targets are unable through coercion or context to respond in kind—produce pernicious teasing. When I coded the facial displays of the twenty-second bursts of teasing in the fraternity study, amid the laughter and hilarity I found that over 50 percent of low-power members showed fleeting facial signs of fear, consistent with the tendency for low power to trigger a threat system—anxiety, amygdala hyperreactivity, the stress hormone cortisol—which can lead to health problems, disease, and shortened lives when chronically activated. Bullies are known for teasing in domineering ways that prevent the target from reciprocating. Teasing in romantic bonds defined by power asymmetries takes the shape of bullying. The art of the tease is to enable reciprocity and back-and-forth exchange. An effective teaser invites being teased.