I'm sorry to hear that you're missing your friends lately. I can relate. It's interesting you bring up communication between you and your wife and trying to communicate with her the way you might with a guy friend. I think communicate is definitely the correct word and it's something touched on in the article. Communication, people forget, is much more than what people say to each other. It's a cluster of signals including body language, expression, tone, the framing of context and even the chemical. It's so entangled and subtle that if we had to sit down and learn it in a classroom, we might never learn it. Now that I think about it, when I used to teach English as a foreign language, that was a large part of what students (and I) felt was missing as they learned English.

Anyway, I think that the way your wife might perceive ribbing isn't entirely inaccurate. There is aggression and if not insult, challenge in many male to male exchanges. You mentioned sitting around and drinking scotch with those friends you've been missing and that hits home for me too. What we used to do was down a couple liters of Jameson, break out the guitars to make up shitty songs and howl about whatever it was we had in us. If that's not an act of undirected aggression, I don't know what is. What I do know is that it felt damn good.