The playful list
On the case for levity alongside seriousness.
"You can have a long conversation about trust and end it with animal noises.
That's resilience."
Toward the end of a long and at times heavy conversation, I read my partner a silly list.
It was from Instagram: one of those posts that circulates periodically about what makes relationships work, and it was a collection of small, absurd habits that can add some levity. Butt-slapping competitions, kitchen dancing, animal noises when you’re annoyed, having a code word for when stress has peaked, and someone needs to tap out.
I read it out loud after a long discussion about something warm but heavy, and we both laughed. The vibe lightened in a way that didn’t sweep the previous topic under the rug, but sat alongside it. We both felt lighter, and it sat with me as a useful thing to keep versions of in my back pocket.
That shift felt important. Nothing got fixed by the list, and the hard things were still hard. But the evening ended differently.
I haven’t always done that. There have been times I’ve left the heavy stuff to sit between us, particularly when I’ve been asking something of my partner. Holding the seriousness of it, keeping the weight in the room. What I can see now is that doing that can deny both of us the chance to feel more than heavy. I could have been warmer, for both our benefit, and wasn’t.
It reminded me of how we can settle into thinking of playfulness and seriousness as opposites. Serious conversations, serious relationships, serious people: these things don’t often get associated with butt-slapping competitions and animal noises. Play is for when nothing important is going on. When you can afford to be silly.
Or is it?
Playfulness isn’t the absence of seriousness, it’s evidence that we can hold both. That people can go deep into the difficult stuff and then, at the other end of it, return to being the particular kind of fun they are as people.
The capacity to play is a sign of safety. Animals play when they feel safe. Children play when they feel safe. Research on adult relationships points in the same direction: couples who can be silly together tend to be more resilient. Silliness is a sign that the underlying bond is strong and can hold both weight and lightness in balance.
We can’t force this, though. Playfulness that’s performed rather than felt is its own kind of loneliness. The cliche version of this is the gear-shifting question: desert island companions, dream dinner party guests, that kind of thing. We reach for them because they’re known as mood-lighteners, but because they’re known as mood-lighteners, we both see through them. The moment becomes a performance of trying to go lighter rather than actually going there. Performed playfulness is managing the other person’s discomfort rather than sharing your own lightness. Those are different acts, and people can feel the difference.
You know when it’s real because it arrives without effort: a thought followed immediately by a laugh, a moment that didn’t need to be engineered.
But we can create conditions for it. We can notice when we’ve been very serious for a long time and ask whether we’re avoiding the light or just forgetting it’s available. We can give ourselves permission to be a bit ridiculous with the people we love, even when the stakes feel high. Especially when they do.
The playful list wasn’t a diversion. It was a kind of proof that we could sit together in something heavy and then, at the other end of it, still be people who laugh at animal noises and butts.
I’m still working out the calibration: how silly is useful, how absurd is too far. Pitch it wrong and instead of lightening the room, you’ve just left the other person wondering whether your faculties have vacated the premises. But that’s the ongoing experiment. Finding the degree of ridiculousness that enables a genuine shift, rather than a confused one.
The list was from Instagram, which is a strange place for something that turned out to matter. But here we are.
Three things to try.
Bring one small silly thing.
Think of a relationship that’s been mostly serious lately. Find one small ridiculous thing to bring into it this week, as a reminder of who you are together when things are lighter.
Notice the real laughs.
Pay attention to the moments in your relationships when you genuinely laugh. The real kind of laughing, the kind that catches you.
What creates that? It’s worth knowing.Make a code word.
If there’s a recurring high-stress dynamic with someone in your life, try agreeing on a word for when you’ve both hit the wall.
Make it absurd. The absurdity is the point. It gives you both somewhere to go that isn’t further into the difficulty.
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