When you hear the word “teasing”, it sounds a bit..negative isn’t it? It often relates to bullying or in simple term, hurting someone’s feelings.
Here’s one classic example from the Harry Potter book series where Draco Malfoy called Hermione Granger “You filthy little Mudblood” (just in case you are not an HP fan, that’s an insulting term used to describe people who are not from a wizard family AKA pure blood).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1UytBbJpE
This is what I called nasty teasing. You can see not only anger from Hermione’s eyes but that the insult has also triggered her friends too. It’s like pinpointing someone’s weakness, and giving it a direct punch to make he/she feel even worse about it.
Teasing at the “Sweet Spot” is a different story.
However, being able to tease your loved ones at the “sweet spot” is a sign of close relationship. Teasing someone at the sweet spot requires the right tone, the right language and at the right time. You might think, “Wow that sounds a lot of work!” but if you know that person well and have developed a deep and quality relationship with him/her, this kind of teasing (affectionate teasing) should come naturally during your conversations and add a lot of fun to it too.
If nasty teasing is a direct punch to the victim, affectionate teasing is like playing water splashing with your friends at the beach. It’s a natural thing to play, it might hurt you a bit if sea water gets into your eyes but it’s fun to do and no one will end up feeling sad or angry (it typically ends with laughter).
“Ron, just because you have the emotional range as a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all do”, this is, again a classic teasing scene from the Harry Potter series where Harry, Hermione and Ron discuss Harry’s feeling for Cho. You can see from the clip the 3 of them burst into laughter after listening to Hermione’s teasing.
Affectionate teasing from others can help us reveal our true self to the world, in a nice way.
Affectionate teasing won’t create tension. It only brings joy and adds a sense of humor into the conversion. This can only happen between people with close relationships. It’s a sign of deep understanding of your weaknesses, your true self and personalities or simply some precious moments (most likely embarrassing yet funny moments) that you and your loved ones once shared together.
Other than that, a video created by The School Of life suggested that we enjoy being warmly teased because deep down we know the teaser understands we are sometimes not what we presented to the world, we hide some parts of our true self due to the norms society imposes on us.
The feeling of not being able to be ourselves is awful and a warm teasing at this moment can make us feel better. It touches our hearts because we know there is someone in the room that at least understand us. After all who doesn’t love to be understood?
Take a moment to watch the video and see if you deepen your relationship with your partner, friends or families by teasing them “nicely”.
