Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

A few years ago I was vacationing with my family on a cool, whitesand beach near Monterey, California. While we were building sand piles, bodysurfing small waves, and looking for sand crabs in the shallows of the frothy surf, a group of Mexican-American teenagers descended upon our peaceful place in the sun. Clad in the blue trousers and pressed white shirts of their Catholic school, they approached the beach under the watch of their teacher in gender-segregated, orderly, single-file lines. Once situated, with the sound of the surf and away from their teacher, who was enjoying a well-deserved moment of repose, they broke into a bedlam of teenage teasing.

The five boys and six girls were like molecules bound together by the attractive forces of teasing. There was a continuous stream of pinching, head rubbing, poking, squeezing, name calling, howling, and laughing. As rhythmic as the sound of the ocean, two boys would grab a girl, hold her by her arms and legs, and dangle her over the ebb and flow of the waves. Three demure girls sneaked up on a boy and tried to tug his low-hanging pants down. He forcefully countered with fistfuls of sand. Water was dripped on necks. Sand was pressed into others’ pants. Seaweed dangled in front of faces. Dog piles occasionally broke out. In a surprise attack one girl managed to nearly drop a dead crab down a boy’s pants. When their teacher called them back to the bus, they regained their composure and left in two lines, one of boys, the other of girls.

As they departed, my daughter Serafina, then 5, asked me: “Why did that girl put the crab in the boy’s pants?”

“Because she likes him,” I responded.

This left Serafina dumbfounded. So I mumbled something unintelligible about how we actually tease people we like, Grice’s maxims, and the playful realm of off-record language, and told her that we often mean the opposite of what we say or do. What Serafina took from viewing this teenage drama, I hope, is wisdom about the invaluable place teasing has in intimate relations.

There is no relation more vital to the survival of our species than the intimate bond. There is no relationship more fraught with conflict or more fragile. Our ultravulnerable, big-brained offspring require more than one caregiver to survive, thus binding us into long-term caretaking relations, which have no parallel in our close primate relatives. And from their moment of inception to their end, intimate relations roil with conflict, sacrifice, and matters to negotiate. In early stages of intimacy, sexual strategies—interests in short-term exchange or long-term devotion—require navigation. As children, housework, and mortgages arrive, partners can feel like beleaguered managers of a halfway house, moving from one crisis to the next. Intimate life is a “merry war,” as noted by Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing.

So we turn to teasing to solve many problems of intimate life. We tease to flirt, to discover others’ affections and sexual interests. Monica Moore surreptitiously observed teenagers at a mall, and found their moblike meanderings to be punctuated by bursts of teasing. Young boys and girls would routinely veer into each other’s orbits to pinch, tickle, poke, and squeeze, creating, of course, opportunities for physical contact and brief mutual gaze—so highly regulated during the self-conscious teenage years. For young teens, teasing is a drama in which telltale signs of attraction—the blush, the lip pucker, the mellifluous, “voiced” laugh, the gaze that lasts beyond the .45-second eye contact that defines more formal social exchange—are sought with hormonally charge voracity amid the razor-sharp surveillance of peers. Teasing is an entrance into a playful world in which potential suitors can test and provoke one another. Were contemporary teens more restricted in their physical contact, they would resort to the war of words that marks the first encounter of Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, sure signs that they are to fall in love:

       

BEATRICE        

I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick. Nobody marks you.        

BENEDICK        

What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?        

BEATRICE        

Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence.        

BENEDICK        

Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am lov’d of all ladies, only you excepted; and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart, for truly I love none.        

BEATRICE        

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