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A few years ago I wrote about a dance situation where I was sliding into a depressive state but putting on my best pretend-happy face (https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/387838.html). I went out dancing and met up with 2 friends that night - one dancer and one non-dancer.
The non-dancer and I had been having some incredibly intimate conversations recently and we were getting to know each other *really* well. He saw the effect that the endorphins had on me and thought I looked happy. I was smiling, outgoing, and having one of my best dance-skill nights where I was totally killing it on the floor. The non-dancer saw all of that and remarked on how happy I looked.
The dancer friend and I had not had that same level of intimacy and we only knew each other marginally well. But after one 3 minute song of full-body contact, he could see the depression behind the smile and the dance endorphins.
So now I want to give another example of how partner dancing gives people amazingly good non-verbal communication skills.
In 2019, I started a casual relationship with another dancer. We were becoming pretty good friends, but we still had some barriers up in the emotional intimacy department. We were having fun, but that's about it. But he's a fantastic lead and can build very good partnerships with his follows on the floor. I'll call him Michael.
We had not told anyone in our dance communities that we had been sleeping together. First of all, we weren't *dating*, so it felt weird to be making announcements about a casual relationship, but second, we are both community leaders and we didn't want to make things weird with overlapping our private and public lives.
Plus, he's ultimately monogamous and available for a dating relationship, so eventually he would want to find a romantic partner (probably from within the dance community) and having everyone already know that he's hooking up with someone else tends to make potential monogamous dating partners keep their distance. He would, of course, disclose to anyone to whom that information is relevant, but it didn't need to be public knowledge. Ah, the complex, twisty rules of mono culture.
I have another friend, who I'll call Anne, who is also a dancer. She and I have a similar level of platonic emotional intimacy - decent friends but still getting to know each other. Anne and Michael have their own friendship with each other, and it's possibly a closer emotional relationship than I had with either of them.
So, on this particular Wednesday night, I went to my usual dance event, and I met a guy there who was interested in using the venue. The manager wasn't there that night, so he wandered over to my event to make connections. So we chatted and I let him in on how our event was arranged and stuff. I'll call him Nick. I was feeling some chemistry between us, but I wasn't sure how much of that was real and how much was just because I had really good sex earlier in the day and I was still all after-glowey.
I found out that, in addition to Nick being a promoter, he's also a Latin dancer. So I invited him up to my DJ booth to pick whatever song he wanted and to dance with me. So we did and he's a fucking amazing dancer - one of the best I've ever danced with.
Earlier, he had given me his business card, offering to help me with promotion of our event. It felt like a pretty typical networking type of exchange. Later, while bent over my laptop looking at music (he also gave me a ton of his own music, so we were talking and exchanging files), he suggested I call him to get together and do more music exchange when we had time and more drive space, and he gave me his personal number.
Now, this could have gone either way. It could have been more networking, or it could have been a soft flirt to see if there was interest. I enthusiastically accepted his number, y'know, to exchange music. Then we danced. He said several times that he was impressed, given that I'm not a Latin dancer, I'm a Ballroom Latin dancer (which is different) and a beginner at that.
So I put on a bachata, which I like better than salsa, and we danced again. Then he mentioned another style of dance that I might like and when I asked him what it was like, we danced again. I was definitely feeling the chemistry. After the 3rd dance, the conversation lulled, and I excused myself to mingle with my other guests and friends. Here's the relevant part...
As I was walking across the rather large dance floor, apparently I was smiling. Anne and Michael were standing next to each other, both watching me (everyone had stopped what they were doing to watch me dance with Nick just a moment before). Michael remarked to Anne that I looked happy.
Anne, knowing that I often get trapped by men in uncomfortable conversations because a) I'm a woman at a nightclub and b) I'm the event host who has to make the rounds and talk to everyone, suggested the possibility that it might have been a tense smile. Keep in mind that I'm still a good 50-60 feet away and it's dark with flashing, disorienting lights.
Michael, without taking his eyes off me, said "no, that's a happy look". Apparently Anne glanced sharply at Michael as she realized that he was able to tell the difference between my happy smile and my pasted, polite but tense smile. She looked at him, looked back at me, back at him, back at me, and on the third glance back at him (all of which I could see as I walked towards them), she asked him if we were sleeping together.
Surprised, he looked at her, admitted it, and then asked how she knew. She said that the first clue was his knowing the difference between my smiles, and what confirmed it was the expression on his face as he watched me walk over to them and his relaxed posture, as well as my own body language while I walked towards them.
All of this happened in the span of time it took me to walk across the dance floor. When I arrived, I told them all about who the guy was and mentioned that I got his number. Michael said "see? Happy smile!"
So, here is someone I have been dancing with for months able to tell at a glance from across a *dark* room the difference between genuinely being excited about something and being polite to a new person and my general enthusiasm for the activity. Because he is getting to know me very intimately through dancing. The sex helps, but that's relatively new compared to how long we've been dancing together, and also sex is very contextual. Dancing expresses a lot of different emotions, and we can feel that with the music and the body contact. And here is someone else who I have *not* been dancing with but who has general non-verbal communication skills, and who *has* been dancing with the other person in this scenario so she knows *his* body language almost as intimately as I do.
He can read me, she can read him, and through our mutual connection with him and our general skills, she can infer my mental state too. Kind of like the dance version of metamours.
I know that a lot of people don't like dancing or think they're bad at it. But I can't stress enough just how valuable those skills can be in interpersonal relationships. I've known some people who are just naturally that intuitive, but I don't know of any other activity that people can practice that develops this level of intuitiveness and awareness of other people. This is an activity that can *teach* and *improve* exactly this kind of non-verbal communication and intuitiveness regardless of one's starting point in intuiting non-verbal communication.
I would like to encourage more people to try partner dancing, or at least to learn lead / follow exercises, to add one more *incredibly* powerful tool to their relationship toolkit.
The non-dancer and I had been having some incredibly intimate conversations recently and we were getting to know each other *really* well. He saw the effect that the endorphins had on me and thought I looked happy. I was smiling, outgoing, and having one of my best dance-skill nights where I was totally killing it on the floor. The non-dancer saw all of that and remarked on how happy I looked.
The dancer friend and I had not had that same level of intimacy and we only knew each other marginally well. But after one 3 minute song of full-body contact, he could see the depression behind the smile and the dance endorphins.
So now I want to give another example of how partner dancing gives people amazingly good non-verbal communication skills.
In 2019, I started a casual relationship with another dancer. We were becoming pretty good friends, but we still had some barriers up in the emotional intimacy department. We were having fun, but that's about it. But he's a fantastic lead and can build very good partnerships with his follows on the floor. I'll call him Michael.
We had not told anyone in our dance communities that we had been sleeping together. First of all, we weren't *dating*, so it felt weird to be making announcements about a casual relationship, but second, we are both community leaders and we didn't want to make things weird with overlapping our private and public lives.
Plus, he's ultimately monogamous and available for a dating relationship, so eventually he would want to find a romantic partner (probably from within the dance community) and having everyone already know that he's hooking up with someone else tends to make potential monogamous dating partners keep their distance. He would, of course, disclose to anyone to whom that information is relevant, but it didn't need to be public knowledge. Ah, the complex, twisty rules of mono culture.
I have another friend, who I'll call Anne, who is also a dancer. She and I have a similar level of platonic emotional intimacy - decent friends but still getting to know each other. Anne and Michael have their own friendship with each other, and it's possibly a closer emotional relationship than I had with either of them.
So, on this particular Wednesday night, I went to my usual dance event, and I met a guy there who was interested in using the venue. The manager wasn't there that night, so he wandered over to my event to make connections. So we chatted and I let him in on how our event was arranged and stuff. I'll call him Nick. I was feeling some chemistry between us, but I wasn't sure how much of that was real and how much was just because I had really good sex earlier in the day and I was still all after-glowey.
I found out that, in addition to Nick being a promoter, he's also a Latin dancer. So I invited him up to my DJ booth to pick whatever song he wanted and to dance with me. So we did and he's a fucking amazing dancer - one of the best I've ever danced with.
Earlier, he had given me his business card, offering to help me with promotion of our event. It felt like a pretty typical networking type of exchange. Later, while bent over my laptop looking at music (he also gave me a ton of his own music, so we were talking and exchanging files), he suggested I call him to get together and do more music exchange when we had time and more drive space, and he gave me his personal number.
Now, this could have gone either way. It could have been more networking, or it could have been a soft flirt to see if there was interest. I enthusiastically accepted his number, y'know, to exchange music. Then we danced. He said several times that he was impressed, given that I'm not a Latin dancer, I'm a Ballroom Latin dancer (which is different) and a beginner at that.
So I put on a bachata, which I like better than salsa, and we danced again. Then he mentioned another style of dance that I might like and when I asked him what it was like, we danced again. I was definitely feeling the chemistry. After the 3rd dance, the conversation lulled, and I excused myself to mingle with my other guests and friends. Here's the relevant part...
As I was walking across the rather large dance floor, apparently I was smiling. Anne and Michael were standing next to each other, both watching me (everyone had stopped what they were doing to watch me dance with Nick just a moment before). Michael remarked to Anne that I looked happy.
Anne, knowing that I often get trapped by men in uncomfortable conversations because a) I'm a woman at a nightclub and b) I'm the event host who has to make the rounds and talk to everyone, suggested the possibility that it might have been a tense smile. Keep in mind that I'm still a good 50-60 feet away and it's dark with flashing, disorienting lights.
Michael, without taking his eyes off me, said "no, that's a happy look". Apparently Anne glanced sharply at Michael as she realized that he was able to tell the difference between my happy smile and my pasted, polite but tense smile. She looked at him, looked back at me, back at him, back at me, and on the third glance back at him (all of which I could see as I walked towards them), she asked him if we were sleeping together.
Surprised, he looked at her, admitted it, and then asked how she knew. She said that the first clue was his knowing the difference between my smiles, and what confirmed it was the expression on his face as he watched me walk over to them and his relaxed posture, as well as my own body language while I walked towards them.
All of this happened in the span of time it took me to walk across the dance floor. When I arrived, I told them all about who the guy was and mentioned that I got his number. Michael said "see? Happy smile!"
So, here is someone I have been dancing with for months able to tell at a glance from across a *dark* room the difference between genuinely being excited about something and being polite to a new person and my general enthusiasm for the activity. Because he is getting to know me very intimately through dancing. The sex helps, but that's relatively new compared to how long we've been dancing together, and also sex is very contextual. Dancing expresses a lot of different emotions, and we can feel that with the music and the body contact. And here is someone else who I have *not* been dancing with but who has general non-verbal communication skills, and who *has* been dancing with the other person in this scenario so she knows *his* body language almost as intimately as I do.
He can read me, she can read him, and through our mutual connection with him and our general skills, she can infer my mental state too. Kind of like the dance version of metamours.
I know that a lot of people don't like dancing or think they're bad at it. But I can't stress enough just how valuable those skills can be in interpersonal relationships. I've known some people who are just naturally that intuitive, but I don't know of any other activity that people can practice that develops this level of intuitiveness and awareness of other people. This is an activity that can *teach* and *improve* exactly this kind of non-verbal communication and intuitiveness regardless of one's starting point in intuiting non-verbal communication.
I would like to encourage more people to try partner dancing, or at least to learn lead / follow exercises, to add one more *incredibly* powerful tool to their relationship toolkit.
