"I hate you!" my wife said, hiding a crooked smile behind her hands. I had just pulled another one of my signature pranks: the forgotten child. I picked up the kids from day care and sent them to play in the yard. She gets home a few minutes later and asks where they are. What? I thought you were getting them today! Hysteria ensues.

It's easier to have fun with a wife who's extremely gullible. Mine has learned most of my tricks, which only forces me to amp up my acting skills and power of persuasion. It's actually good practice for life skills that help elsewhere anyway. After all, being able to maintain a normal face through an emotionally charged situation is foundational to your frame - only this time you're employing frame on the other end of the emotional spectrum.

Something is Better Than Nothing

Women can't resist a man who can make her feel something. It seriously does not matter if it is deep hatred or abounding joy. Emotions are confusing. There's an old saying that you cannot hate something that you don't first truly love. The idea is that you have to be emotionally invested before you can hate. The same concept applies to anger, jealousy, fear, and a host of other negative emotions.

For women, any emotion is better than no emotion at all. It's like a drug to them. It doesn't matter if it's designer weed and high-end pharmaceuticals or some hash a guy grew in his back yard. One end of the spectrum is preferred, but it's all good, regardless.

What a man must really avoid in his relationships with women is indifference. When a woman stops caring about him enough to be either elated or enraged at him, he has lost her attraction.

Push-Pull

Women want to know that their man cares about them. "Does he really love me?" she subconsciously asks herself countless times a day. Unlike men, she doesn't look to objective measures to answer that question. She looks to her own feelings. A woman's perception of the extent of a man's love for her is not defined by the man's behaviors toward her; it's defined by her emotional state. A guy could wrestle a bear to save her, buy her a mansion, or take her on an elaborate cruise - and if her emotions aren't into it she just assumes he doesn't love her. "He must have some other agenda - like getting sex from me," she thinks. That's another of many reasons why it's so important that she live within your frame. That's when your point of origin defines her emotional state.

How do you get her emotionally charged? The push-pull technique is a great one. This is really the broader category behind the art of teasing. The idea is that you want to create an emotionally charged environment by precluding a sense of normalcy and complacency.

  • If you push her away all the time, the angst normalizes and just becomes a way of life. It stops helping.

  • In the reverse, if you're pulling her toward you all the time, showering her with wonderful gifts, passionate poems, and all the time and attention she could ever want, these wonderful things normalize and stop holding any value. Rather than it being an emotionally charged treat, she just expects it.

That's one of many reasons why the blue pill "nice guy" strategy doesn't work. By creating a destabilized emotional environment, where the dynamic is always changing, a man's bride is kept on her toes, never knowing what to expect. If the fluctuating dynamic is maintained appropriately, her anticipation will be a longing for what he has to offer rather than a fear of what he might withhold.

When I read the Bible, this dynamic is evident in the relationship between God and his people all over the place. The most obvious books to find it are Judges, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, and the Psalms. In Judges, Kings, and Chronicles we see God constantly shaking up his nation as soon as they become complacent and stop caring about him. At some points we see him blessing them and drawing them toward himself. Other times he pushes them away. The goal is the same either way: to remind the Israelites of their intense need for God and to restore their passion for his ways.

God's no dummy, of course. He patterns his push and pull with the flow of their behaviors, conditinoing his people to expect a push when their complacency leads them to reject him or a pull when they have lived long enough in the muck and he sends a prophet to restore them to his glory. This pattern of conditioning his push-pull dynamic on their behavior not only precludes complacency, but also emphasizes the value of obedience and faithfulness.

TYPES OF TEASING

Teasing can be employed in different ways to effectuate a push or a pull. The story I opened with is only one of three main types of teasing. Can you guess which one?

Passionate: The most positive and enticing form of teasing is to unveil a restrained passion - enough to show the person all that's in store, but not enough to satisfy their fill. This is why lingerie is so freaking attractive to most men. Why would adding clothes to raw, naked flesh make a woman more appealing? Because ripping them off is gratifying. Because a little taste leads to a larger hunger. The very existence of lingerie is a form of passionate teasing.

  • Look: Men can wear forms of lingerie too, but it's rarely quite the same. A better bet is to buy some form-fitting clothes and let your shape shine through. But women aren't nearly as visual as men.

  • Touch: A better bet is to get her feeling the trickle before the flood. Ever notice how much she loves it when you sneak up behind her and hold her in your arms, kissing the back side of her neck and breathing lightly in her ear? Kino is powerful. It gives her a small taste of the full entree.

  • Talk: The pen is mightier than the sword. A man's words are more powerful than his sword. You could certainly send her a dick pick or grind your crotch on her, but few things will rev her up more than taunting her with thoughts of what you're going to do to her. Women love to fantasize. That's why romance novels are consistently one of the top selling genres. Get her fantasizing about you before you even start.

Playful: This is when a man just has fun with his wife. He's not necessarily foreshadowing his momentarily veiled desire. He's enjoying life at her expense. The effect it has, though, is to bring her out of a state of emotional neutrality toward him. It's not enough that she is emotional at all - she must be emotional about him.

My wife has 4 months out of the year where she works 80+ hours a week. That's major stress. She occasionally comes home in tears (though it's far rarer since I have learned to be her oak). She is emotionally invested in her job. The more invested she gets in her job, the less invested she is in me. This isn't always a bad thing, as there is value in her being invested in her career. But it does preclude me from being able to lead her through the emotional whirlwind that she experiences during these busy seasons. How do I break through? I get her emotionally invested in me again. Rather than her employer's frame, she needs to come back to mine.

Engaging in passionate teasing doesn't work when she doesn't have enough time to be interested. She might want it, but she'll still intentionally avoid it, as work is the higher priority in the moment. So, if I want her emotionally invested in me again during these times instead of her work, I can't use temptation toward sex. Instead, I play with her. I get her riled up over something - or even better: over nothing. I play pranks, make silly jokes, or prey on her gullibility. Sometimes she laughs (pull) and other times she becomes frustrated (push) - but in either case, she's feeling something toward me again. Once I have her emotionally invested I can steer that emotional investment whichever way I want to lead her - whether into happiness, comfort, joy, or lust.

Piercing: The third form of teasing is that biting form of word-play that's thinly veiled by a light-hearted attitude, usually coupled with AA. For example, my wife once complained about one of her male coworkers being a total douchebag. She went on for about 20 minutes with her story about how frustrating he was being. She was emotionally invested in him. I called her out on it: Aw, I think you like him. "No, it's not like that," she insisted. You want to screw him, don't you? "Yuck! No." You think such dirty things, and you won't even admit it. She punched me in the arm, saying with a smile, "You're so mean!"

My wife has a "good girl, holier than thou" image of herself a lot of the time. Accusing her of being anything less is a blow to her ego. The fact is: she is less. Nobody's perfect. Rather than getting wrapped up in her emotions about this guy, I redirected her emotions to be toward me. I was a little mean ... but also a little playful. She liked it. She'd rather be mad at me than him. At least she trusted me. If I could get her to care about me, she'd stop caring about him. Problem solved - and to my great advantage, as the power play was quite arousing.

You have to be careful here because too harsh a word can leave the realm of teasing and become outright cruel. While that can still get her emotionally invested in you, it's a more difficult emotional investment to steer in a more arousing direction. Of course, once again, any emotion is better than no emotion. There may be times when a straight-up neg is appropriate, though the motivation behind it matters greatly.

Back to the Bible

Do we see God doing this? Well, at least the first two methods I derived straight from Scripture. In writing this post, I asked myself: "How does God keep his people emotionally invested in him?" and the "passionate teasing" and "playful teasing" methods came to mind.

It's not hard to find passages where God shows us hints of his glory to make us desire the full thing - like when he let Moses see his back side. It won't take long to find many other places where God gives a taste of himself to make us long for more.

I could probably also reference several places in the Bible where God had fun with his people, laughing at our idiocy and displaying his dominance. That's one of the many reasons I love our God. He's humorous and playful with us, not some ultra serious prick all the time. Psalm 2 is a great example of this. God looks at those who oppose him and says, "The one enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them" (v4). Immediately after, in verse 5 God employs the push: "The Lord rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath," followed by verse 8 with a pull: "Ask me and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession."

Piercing teasing, though? I'm not going to pretend there's a clear Scriptural example for it. I know God uses outright negging in appropriate contexts. There are countless biblical examples where God calls his people out for their faults - Romans 3 containing a nice little compilation, for example. I also know that God's negging is designed to expose those parts of us that we must turn from in order to be drawn back to him.

Does he do this in a playful way too? I can't say from Scripture. What I can say is that when the Spirit convicts me of some of my flaws, I often can't help but laugh. There's a subtle remorse and anger at being reminded that I'm not perfect - and never will be in this lifetime. But it is often overpowered by the fact that God makes me feel silly for not having picked up on it before. The Spirit calls me out in a way that maintains my positive attitude toward God rather than a rage-filled contempt or a hopeless depression. I pray he does the same for you.