Five ways to build more playfulness in a relationship

Psychologists who study adult playfulness keep landing on the same finding: some kinds of playfulness track with closeness far more than others. René Proyer and his colleagues at Martin Luther University have spent years sorting silliness into categories, from gentle teasing to a shared taste for the absurd. One kind, built on easing tension and inside humor, turns up again and again in couples who report real closeness. Playfulness in a relationship has a shape.

The five things below are not about becoming the funny one in the relationship. They are about reintroducing a specific kind of lightness on purpose, the kind that eases tension rather than performs for an audience. This matters most for couples whose days have quietly turned into a stretch of sameness neither one chose. Some feel almost too small to count. That is closer to the point than a grand gesture would be.

Playfulness in a relationship often starts with the boring parts

A grocery run does not need a soundtrack of complaints about what’s missing from the fridge. Two people can turn it into something else: a race to spot the weirdest item on the shelf, a running bit about the self-checkout machine’s tone of voice. Researchers who study adult playfulness call this the other-directed kind, the type built around easing tension in the moment. It is the most reliably linked to relationship satisfaction of anything they measure. That shift takes no planning at all.

Argue about something that doesn’t matter

Not every disagreement needs a resolution. Some are better as a running argument nobody expects to settle: whether cereal counts as soup, whether the dog secretly prefers one of you. This is what researchers call intellectual playfulness: enjoying ideas and wordplay for their own sake. The 2019 study that first mapped these types onto couples found it was one of only two facets tied to how satisfied partners actually felt. The other was the tension-easing kind from the first item. Lighthearted goofiness alone, oddly, was not.

Let a joke defuse the hard conversation before it starts

A conversation about a shared credit card bill goes differently if it opens with a small joke than if it opens with a sigh. Wendy Patrick, who has a Ph.D. and writes about relationships for Psychology Today, points out that couples who bring some lightness to serious topics, money among them, tend to find the conversation itself more bearable. The joke does the smaller job of warming up the room. It works for a stalled conversation about the electric bill just as well as a bigger one. The actual talking still has to happen.

Build a private language only the two of you understand

A mispronounced word from three years ago can turn into a permanent nickname for the coffee maker. Nobody outside the relationship would find it funny. That’s fine. This kind of playfulness, built on shared references and a private vocabulary, sits in the same other-directed category as the grocery-store bit from earlier. It is also how a couple’s private language gets built, one small accident at a time. By now neither of you remembers why the name stuck.

The weirder kind of playful comes with a cost

Not every type of playfulness behaves the same way. The same 2024 study that mapped these categories across more than 300 couples found that whimsical playfulness, the kind built around unusual objects, invented characters, or activities most people would find strange, was tied to more cognitive jealousy in the person being playful. Inventing a whole alter ego for date night might be delightful. It might also be the thing that keeps someone quietly comparing their partner’s interest to everyone else’s. The researchers do not fully explain why. Playfulness, it turns out, is not one thing with one effect.

This comes down to trying one small foolish thing on purpose, on an ordinary Tuesday, and seeing what your partner does with it. Sometimes they will not bite. That still tells you something worth knowing.