Are teasing and edging actually two different things?

For me the difference is intent. Edging is aiming at a specific point and stopping short of it, over and over, deliberately. Teasing has no target. It is staying somewhere pleasant and unhurried with no plan to approach anything. They feel completely different to do and completely different to receive.

same activity, different marketing

Not marketing. Intensity. Edging is work and requires attention, and forty minutes of it is tiring in a way that forty minutes of teasing is not. Anyone who has done both knows which one they can do while half asleep.

There is a third split nobody has said yet, which is who is doing it. Teasing is usually something done to you. Edging is usually something you are doing, even when somebody else has their hands on you, because you are the one reading the signals and calling it. That is why the words do not feel interchangeable.

That is the cleanest version of the distinction I have read and it explains why the two words attach to different people. The ones who talk about teasing are describing being on the receiving end. The ones who talk about edging are describing a practice.

I use them interchangeably and always have and nobody has ever misunderstood me. This may be a distinction that only exists in writing.

It exists in practice the moment two people are in a room and one of them means one thing and the other means the other. I have had exactly that misunderstanding and it was not a small one.

Nel's point is the only practical reason to care. You do not need the definitions to be right, you need them to be shared with whoever you are doing this with. Agree your own words and stop worrying about the general case.

Speaking as someone fairly new, threads like this are more useful than they look. I had assumed for months that everything anyone described was one activity and I had simply been bad at it.

Worth adding that the words have shifted over time and older writing uses them differently again. If you go back far enough teasing covers nearly everything and the other word barely appears. That is why you find old posts that seem to contradict all of this.

By Eddie's definition I have never once teased and would not know how. Which is a strange thing to discover about yourself on a Monday.

There is also a practical consequence for anyone with a partner. If you ask for one and get the other you will be quietly disappointed and probably will not say so, because the request sounded like it was granted. That is a very easy way for two people to slowly get out of step without either of them doing anything wrong.