I’ve known for years that I’m not very fond of the thing commonly referred to as “teasing”, or more technically “casual interpersonal antagonism”. I made that term up. But there’s something helpful in thinking that there could be technical terms for stuff like this. Another technical term is “friendly countersignaling“. It seemed people were trying to justify saying mean things by saying “well I didn’t really mean it” but it seemed that often they did mean it.
I realized this way back when I had my first break-up at age 16. My partner at the time really liked a certain kind of teasing that I found very aversive (for example, saying “you’re weird” in a way that made it sound like this was a bad thing) and this was one part of what made things tense enough to prompt a breakup (although maybe it just exacerbated existing tension?). I don’t blame her: at the start of our relationship, a year or so prior, I’d actually been quite teasy myself, but I think that that teasing (which was fairly flirty I guess) itself came out of a lot of insecurity and fear that I had had at the time. Like I was trying hard to pretend I didn’t like her because I was afraid she mightn’t like me. Whereas once we’d been dating for awhile that didn’t really make sense, on my end.
Anyway, enough about Malcolm’s early love-life. The point is that I had an aversion to teasing, not just abstractly but from a specific instance of it being problematic. I even had a model of myself as someone who didn’t like teasing, and I warned some later romantic partners about it going into the relationship. But I didn’t really think much more about why I didn’t like teasing: it just seemed like the natural state of affairs.
Until this summer.
