Category: Psychology & Personal Growth

Once, in a single day, two different students told me: “I have a psychological block about starting the giro to the right.” Picture my face as a “puzzled” emoji. Another student, after I told him not to take so much care of the partner in the embrace, remarked sorrowfully: “This is a problem in all my relationships. I adapt to my partner to the point of losing myself completely.” And after I told another leader not to run away ahead of the partner, he exclaimed: “Story of my life! Run first, think later!”

It seems like at some point a vast number of people realised “in tango as in life” and figured out that our psychology has a tremendous impact on how we dance. And therefore changes to our psychological makeup must inevitably reflect themselves in our dance. And isn’t it sweet to imagine that we can dance better by doing something else than practicing?

I remember a young woman coming for a private class. She was a beginner, rapidly falling in love with tango and eager to dance well. Shy and soft-spoken, she had a general attitude of someone not willing to attract attention. I was showing her some exercises to open her chest, relax her shoulders and present an upright, proud, “here I am” posture. “See, how beautiful you look.” She glanced at herself in the mirror and quickly turned away, instantly slouching, tears filling her eyes. “Oh, I could never hold myself like this,’ she said. “This would be pretending I am beautiful… and I am not.”

Tango seems to have this uncanny ability to confront us with our insecurities and to unearth deeply buried beliefs. Often tango is literally the only thing capable of doing this, especially if we live a life we no longer question. Teachers joke about classes feeling more like therapy, especially with couples. Students, too, tell me that learning and dancing tango often feels like more than just dance. Tango brings up issues that have been in dire need of a resolution our entire life or – surprise! – something we thought we already resolved in other areas of life.

One of my students tended to rush into each step with so much zest that she frequently stressed out both herself and her leaders. I suggested to slow down and to complete each movement within its given musical time. It immediately changed how she felt inside the embrace but also how she looked. Instead of excessively tensing her muscles she was now calm, graceful and perfectly on time. Not only did it dramatically improve her technique, it revealed a different side to her as a human being. “I always thought that as a follower I had to be subservient,’ she remarked. “To show my leader how enthusiastically I am willing to do what he wants. When I complete my movements I feel like I am dancing for myself, just to feel good and to look beautiful. But inside me there is a voice saying: you cannot be that egoistic!”

Tango has a capacity of reflecting ourselves back to us with an almost unbearable clarity. I vividly remember the moment in my first year, watching a crowded dance floor, when I realised that I saw every single person in that room exactly the way they were in real life. It was as if I could literally see into their souls. I believe that improvising with another person takes up our attention so entirely that we have no energy left for pretending to be somebody else. And because in tango we mostly focus inwards, into the couple, we stop paying attention to what kind of an impression we make on people around the dancefloor. Once in the “flow”, we cannot help it but be who we are. Even if we hide parts of ourselves behind a mask, in tango we will be exactly that: a person trying to hide behind a mask.

In tango, our innermost personality is stripped naked for everyone to see. Or at least for those who know where to look. It then becomes tempting to seek psychological explanations for various problems in dance. I know people who over-psychologise every dance problem, making it about their “issues” rather than skills. They would say things like “I freeze because I don’t feel confident enough to express myself.” Or: “I lose balance because I am not a grounded person in general.” They judge others the same way, saying: “He tries all those complicated steps all the time, he must be very insecure.” Or: “Her embrace is rigid because she can’t let go.” The dubious statement “everyone dances the way they make love” is of a similar kind.

Psychological ideas sound very deep and true but aren’t necessarily, not every time. Daily we are bombarded with all kinds of psychological and neuroscientific knowledge, some of it sound, some blatantly inaccurate. Teachers and dancers praise themselves for knowing the “real” issues behind somebody’s behavior but the reality is rarely that simple. And even dancers with a background in psychotherapy can get it wrong. So how does understanding our psychology help us to dance better?

To analyse this, we need to divide things into different categories.

The first is about INSIGHTS. They come in a flash and feel exciting, no matter how grave and sad their nature seems to be. Insights are never only intellectual, there is always a strong feeling about the situation and yourself. If an idea crosses your mind but excites no emotion then it’s probably not an insight, it’s an educated guess. Or maybe not so educated. If realising “I always take too much care of the other person” releases a sudden avalanche of feelings, memories and realisations about life experiences, then we can talk about an insight. It makes you stop and wonder in amazement. It feels like you suddenly connected some previously separate bits of information. And, most importantly, it feels like you could do something constructive with this new understanding.

An insight helps you get results. No matter how serious it looks at first, an insight is inspiring, even if at the beginning you have no idea what to do. There is always something SPECIFIC about it. As a next step you can work on your psychological well-being and see it reflected in your dance and you can work on your dance in terms of technique, movement and musicality, and see it reflected in your personality. The latter is often much easier!

At some point in my life I realised I held an unconscious belief that I could never be really good at tango because I was, well… not Argentinean. Not a Latina, to be precise. Didn’t have the fiery temperament nor the proud stance nor the sensuous curves. I was a skinny, pale-faced, serious-looking Russian-born Northern European woman with an introverted temperament and a love for ballet. Where was I and where was Argentine tango? And then I said to myself: it is not about who I am and how I look. It is about how I move. I can put all the fire, joy, passion, sorrow and depth of my soul into movement. I can live this music the way I feel it and in dance, I can be a tanguera.

Quite different from insight is JUDGEMENT. No matter how true it sounds, a judgement always makes you feel bad about yourself. When you pass judgement on another person, it gives you a smugly superior feeling of knowing-it-better. A judgement disguises itself as an insight. However, an insight inspires you to look further, whereas a judgement makes you want to smash your head against the wall. It feels like it could easily trigger depression. It feels like there is something fundamentally wrong with you and always has been, you were just too stupid to see. Realising that you have a limiting belief is an insight. Telling yourself “I will never dance well because I am not from Argentina” is a judgement.

An INSIGHT into the psychology of another person makes you feel compassion for that person. For a split second you are looking “in” from the outside and the truth of what you see makes you feel the suffering of the other person as if it were your own. The same is true when you get an insight in your own ways of being. You see your own suffering, paradoxically, as if you were another person looking into it with compassion and understanding. A JUDGEMENT, on the other hand, sets you apart from other people. Both as a judge and as the one being judged. Unfortunately, growing up we all develop a severe inner critic. Any compliment or encouragement bounces off a wall of disbelief: “I surely can’t be that good!” We live our lives convinced that everyone else judges us just as harshly as we do ourselves. The internal pressure this builds can become so debilitating that learning to dance takes twice as long.

A judgement is always an attempt to explain in simple terms what in reality is very complicated. It’s the Dunning-Krueger effect in action. Judgement, when passed by a teacher, can literally destroy a student’s self-esteem. Judgements passed between dance partners can wreck their collaboration and poison the romantic relationship. Being too hard on yourself can push you to improve but it will also make you stagnate regularly instead of progressing. A judgement never yields an improvement, it just produces a high level of stress, the bad kind, and consequently blocks movement, sometimes quite literally.

At some point I made an interesting observation: people who consciously or unconsciously believed themselves to be ugly, struggled to move in a smooth manner. Their movements had a tendency to be jerky. Believing they were ugly created a permanent background of slight stress, resulting in tension which in its turn killed the flow. This doesn’t mean that all people who move jerkily are convinced they are ugly. There could be other reasons. Yet the people who are convinced they are not handsome find it very hard to have a relaxed flow in their movements.

You see, to flow requires you to feel “okay” about your body. To take sensual pleasure in simply moving around to the music. To not be overly self-conscious. To feel that you are allowed to exist, to dance, to play around, to take up space, to make a fool of yourself. Inner judgement makes you feel unworthy of all this. It makes you check your every move, trying to control it, and control is the opposite of flow. Control is also the opposite of mastery. Mastery gives you freedom, control takes it away.

Next to insights and judgements we have EXCUSES. They treacherously parade as insights and sound very convincing, yet do nothing for you whatsoever. At first an excuse brings a kind of relief, but excitement never follows. They serve, basically, to ward off judgement: your own, but especially that of other people. An insight gone stale can become an excuse. You carry it as a white flag, glad to explain to anyone why you are incapable of doing such-and-such. There is a sad comforting feeling about an excuse. Like judgements, excuses tend to be very GENERAL. Both judgements and excuses sound like there is something wrong with your whole life, whereas an insight points to something in the situation.

Let’s look at some of the examples in the beginning of the article. Both leaders who claimed to have a “psychological block” in truth had nothing of the sort: they simply lacked that little bit of skill that would allow them to initiate the turn to the right. We fixed it in five minutes. This lack in skill felt, for them, as stress, insecurity, a flaw. They judged themselves for being incapable and looked for an explanation in their psychology rather than skill. It was therefore a judgement, not an insight, and sometimes it served as an excuse not to try turning to the right at all.

The student who realised she had the tendency to rush, had an insight. Her eyes lit up when she realised it and when she tried to do things differently it brought her a direct result and an “aha” moment. She could also easily extrapolate this insight to a normal-life situation, such as waiting for a person to finish a sentence before rushing to the conclusion. If you do nothing with an insight, you might be tempted in the future to use it both as an excuse and a self-inflicted judgement. “Yep, the story of my life! Always running ahead of the train. Silly me.”

The case with the shy beginner is more complicated. She had stumbled, unwillingly, upon a deeply entrenched belief about herself that released a huge wave of emotion. What brought tears to her eyes was the sudden compassion she felt for herself as she was having the insight: it made her feel her pain as if being a gentle observer. Yet the insight was about something so fundamental, something that felt so difficult to change that it made her sad. At the same time, she harshly judged herself for everything at once: for feeling ugly, for thinking she might somehow be beautiful AND for thinking she was ugly, for crying in front of the teacher, for realising she had been carrying this inside her all her life, for not being able to do anything about it right away.

Let’s take another, very common example. Many women tell their teachers in their first year of tango that they cannot follow. Nope, nada, not me. In their daily life they are strong, independent women who make decisions for themselves! And in tango they must give away their agency? So they either rebel or try to force themselves into becoming a “more feminine woman”. The struggle seems all too real, the explanation seems to make sense. In the majority of cases, however, the concept of following is not properly explained and also profoundly misunderstood. People associate the word “follow” with “passively obey”. Once they get the correct idea and feel it in their body, they realise that not only does it not, in fact, go against their nature, but that they do that very thing (following) every day of their lives in many different situations, just as they lead in others. Yet in the beginning telling yourself “I am not the following kind of person” seems to explain away the confusion as well as any kind of trouble.

I like to show women who struggle with the “passivity” of following how real following feels when they are in the leader’s position. I embrace them gently and ask them to walk forward, without even trying to lead me, while I follow walking backwards. They usually stop after a couple of steps and say in amazement: “Wow, that felt so… active! But so connected at the same time!” Because, you see, even a highly independent, stubborn and impatient person is capable of communicating with someone if she chooses to. Capable of creating harmony, of playing together, of engaging in a conversation. Tango as a model of collaboration fits every personality. All you need to do is to learn the ways to do it and this comes through understanding MOVEMENT.

Of all the three categories only insights are truly helpful. An important aspect of an insight is that you get it yourself, first-hand. It can be triggered by something you are told or something you read, but the insight itself explodes inside your head when you are ready. If you are a teacher, I would caution you not to formulate insights for your students. You can’t. It doesn’t work like that. It’s like trying to make someone fall in love: all you can do is create the right conditions and hope for the best.

To teachers I would like to remind that any gratuitous judgement, even a cunning psychological assessment, is a boundary violation. Any unsolicited advice is a form of violence, even with the best of intentions. Especially with the best of intentions, as it becomes harder for the other person to retaliate without hurting your feelings. You are a tango teacher, not a therapist, even if you are a trained therapist but currently in your role of a tango teacher. Therefore you should be very careful about passing psychological judgement on your students, especially if you are a figure of authority to them. I cannot begin to tell how many people come to my classes with their self-esteem damaged by their teachers and dance partners. If students regularly walk out of your classes looking depressed and ashamed, then you are not a genius who opened their eyes to the truth. You are a bully. And you should know better.

Tango teachers are not therapists and should not try to act as such, no matter their training, background, personal affinity or the trust bestowed upon them by their students. This doesn’t mean you should neglect the psychological aspects of your student’s well-being (or your own). Body and mind, as we come to understand it, are one complex system in which everything influences everything else. It is very good for dance teachers to be knowledgeable in psychology and other bodymind related areas. But you are there primarily to teach people how to dance. So next time you feel the urge to tell that quarreling couple in your class: “You know, tango always brings up all your relationship problems!”, remember that you will pass an unnecessary judgement on two people who are already struggling, giving them no help whatsoever.

“There, Vero, tell them how it is!” you might be thinking. But I am sure you have passed judgement on other dancers just as freely. You might have drawn conclusions about somebody’s psychology by feeling their embrace or watching them dance. You might have been right at times and wrong at others. Maybe you terrorise your dance partners by judging their every move, convinced you can shame them into improvement. Maybe someone does that to you. Maybe you are that person who feels like the “know-it-all” after two years of dancing. Maybe you are convinced that the majority of people’s dance problems are in fact character flaws. We all fall prey to easy conclusions about complex phenomena. It’s not always our fault. Even this article is an attempt to describe in simpler terms something that is infinitely more complex.

Tango, like therapy, helps you realise things about yourself that can lead to positive change. Like therapy, it causes intense and often unpleasant feelings. The point is to process what is arising, allowing yourself to move further in your personal development. Tango offers a playground for this inner work, however, unlike therapy, it will not provide you with the tools to do it. You will have to figure them out for yourself or ask for help. Teachers and experienced dancers can coach you through these transformations by being a source of information and emotional support. So, if right now tango feels like therapy to you, congratulations! It’s a powerful catalyst for personal growth because sometimes, in tango as in life, it takes two to know thyself.

RUSSIAN, GERMAN, CHINESE

August 2, 2019

Tango changes your life, whether you notice it or not. Those changes are not necessarily dramatic, actually most of these changes are so small and gradual that they go unnoticed. However, I don’t know anyone in tango whose life this dance did not change in some way or another, some way that goes beyond tango itself.

Of course, what I am writing here is inevitably a generalization and every case is unique. Nevertheless, I see certain trends in many lives around me that allow me to make these generalizations. In my daily life I am surrounded by people touched by tango in various degrees. I know people who, like me, fell into it completely and forever from the very first moment they heard this music and embraced a partner. People who, like me, thought “This is what I have been looking for my whole life so far.” I also know people who are not necessarily this passionate or involved, but who still devote quite some time to tango among other things they do. We can safely say, I think, that no matter the degree of your dedication, tango has a way of affecting your life quite profoundly.

First, it is the time you start devoting to learning and dancing it. And in this you can go as far as you allow yourself. But even if you don’t go dancing every day, or take classes every week or travel to events, tango has a way of occupying your life that is special. You listen to its music when doing other things. You start a new “tango” category in your wardrobe. You now look at wooden floors in a different way. You pack your tango shoes with you on business trips, and instead of going to dinner with colleagues you go looking for some obscure place you have seen on the internet, where it said there would be a milonga. And when you enter this place in some unknown city, in some unknown country, and you hear that familiar music, you immediately feel as if you have finally arrived where you needed to be.

Tango, no matter your involvement in it, becomes a kind of a world separate from the rest, with its own particular joys, sorrows, difficulties, rules, goals and pleasures. And it is never a solitary world: in tango you will always find someone who loves it in exactly the same way you do, whichever way that is.

Tango is often compared to a drug. And indeed it seems highly addictive: the more you do it, the more you want to continue doing it. You often miss it when you stop (although not always) and you are usually happy to do it again after a break. Like a drug, tango seems to give you an opportunity to escape your life. If you truly want to escape it, tango will provide ample possibilities to occupy yourself with something that has nothing to do with your life, your work or your relationships. Yet, a drug usually ruins your health and ends up also ruining your relationships with other people. Tango, on the contrary, often helps you to become healthier, physically and mentally, and it actually helps to improve your relationships with other people. A drug makes you turn away from yourself while tango makes you turn toward yourself. This is because tango is about your love for it and love always changes your life in some way. You cannot love a drug, not really, you can only crave it. Yet, you would not dance tango if you did not love it at least a bit.

Of course, by itself tango does not do anything to change your life, it is you who changes your life if you choose to do so. Tango is only a catalyst for change. Turning toward yourself, in most cases, is not an immediately pleasant experience. It means understanding what you like and dislike, but also what internal conflicts you are carrying inside. As I wrote in my article on tango and love relationships, you most probably found tango because it is a productive environment to resolve some of your internal conflicts: conflicts that are specifically yours. If in your life you are in some way imbalanced, this imbalance will be exposed also in tango. Sometimes tango is exactly what you need to expose this imbalance and therefore to find a way of dealing with it. Tango will allow you both to play out your imbalances and to heal those imbalances if you so wish. To give you a simple example: if you are someone who needs a lot of powerful positive emotions in order to forget your fears and insecurities, then in tango you will find what you need: a festive, busy environment oriented towards pleasure and pleasant human interaction. Yet, at the same time, you will feel your imbalance even stronger when leaving the tango world, and go into a depression after a particularly happy tango event. The moment you learn not to “sway” so strongly from the positive into negative feelings you find more balance in yourself. You still enjoy tango, but you don’t crave it like a drug.

However, tango as a catalyst for change is not only about unearthing painful emotions. It is an even stronger catalyst for something else: namely, finding your JOY.

Your growth in tango, in a broader sense, is about learning what you like, what makes you happy, what gives you pleasure but also a sense of becoming more you – or a better you. Tango is not only about learning how to dance and how to successfully interact with other people, it is also about giving priority to what you personally like. Tango is an extremely free environment that does not oblige you to anything, not even to follow its own loosely defined rules. It is not an institution. It is not a religion. It is not an organisation. And therefore everything about tango is only about your own choice: from teachers and dance partners to the way you look, where you go to dance, which music you dance to and so on. This freedom is also what makes tango so attractive and so rich in its various expressions. For me, all attempts to limit tango to one specific style or one particular type of movement go against the very spirit of tango.

Tango is life-changing exactly because of that: it makes you give priority to what you personally prefer. Once you start making what you like your priority in tango, there inevitably comes a point that you start giving priority to what you like in other areas of life. You see, when you allow yourself to follow what you enjoy in tango, it becomes more and more difficult to accept what you don’t enjoy in the rest of your life. And so you end up leaving that unsatisfying job or that dead-end relationship. You start detaching yourself from the expectations of others and instead decide for yourself in what to invest your energy.

To the “outside world” tango people often seem strangely deranged and immature. For someone who does not share your passion it is difficult to understand why you start arranging the rest of your life around something so futile as a dance. Why you stop going to their parties and go to milongas instead. Why you start planning so many short trips to strange places. Why you stop watching tv, become disinterested in discussing all that is wrong with the world and instead practice or take classes. Why you no longer accept to have your life be only about work, or only about having children, or only about financial security. Why you go to a dangerous third-world city and spend months there doing exactly the same thing you do back home: dancing. Why you sometimes move to another city or another country altogether, just because the tango there is better.

It may seem at the first glance that being passionate about tango is about turning away from other things, about non-participating in many “normal” activities, about becoming, in a sense, very immature and “irresponsible”. Yet, this is only the visible result. The often invisible result is how people change their attitude toward the activities they still do, their work but also relationships they still have. Giving priority to your joy extrapolated to other activities means doing things differently. It is about doing things with more love. It is about looking for joy even in simple and insignificant daily matters. It is about taking responsibility for your life in a constructive way. This change might not be visible to the outside world but it changes everything in how you feel about yourself. Following your joy means coming into harmony with yourself and by consequence with the outside world.

Your passion for tango is difficult to convey to the outsiders, but not impossible. It can be quite easily understood by comparing it to other activities that involve passion, such as surfing, flying, sports, other dances etc. But because tango has a strong social component, it is much more than just about DOING it. It is also about BEING a certain kind of person.

A student recently said to me: “The good thing about tango is that it serves as a metaphor for other things in life. When I discover that I can get better in tango, it gives me confidence that I can get better in other things. That if I can change my dancing, I can also change my relationship, my work, my life.” Tango is exactly that: a small life inside your bigger life, in which you learn that many more things are possible than you thought. You learn to give yourself permission to put your fulfilment first. Ultimately, tango helps you become a freer person. Someone who has learnt to follow his joy will not be easily pressured into doing something against his heart. Such a person will never blindly follow what others tell him. This is why dance and other joyful, pleasure giving activities are prohibited or strictly controlled by most fundamentalist religions and dictatorships. A joyful and happy person is by definition a free person.

Is tango the only activity that helps you grow in this way? Of course it is not. But tango, in a sense, is a very “complete” activity that allows you to grow not only in what you do but also in how you relate to yourself and other people. To me personally, the courage to give priority in life to what you love is one of the fundamental signs of maturity. The love you feel for something or someone does not come from the outside world, it comes from your soul and your soul always has a good reason for loving something. The closer you stand to your soul, the more you are yourself, a unique being with unique preferences and a unique purpose. It does not matter in the end what you love and how “important” that seems on a larger scale. It only matters how you express this love and how happy and wholesome you allow yourself to be. This is your only true responsibility in life: to always be in touch with who you really are, which simply means following what you love, enjoy and value, in things both big and small. Tango in itself is just another way to come closer to yourself. One of many, but a very effective one.

RUSSIAN, FRENCH, GERMAN, ROMANIAN, CHINESE, POLISH, MACEDONIAN

December 12, 2013

There exists a belief that tango makes love relationships really difficult. I often hear: “In tango people are exposed to romantic temptations all the time. It is very difficult to build a stable couple this way.” Are love relationships really different in tango? And what is the role of tango in all of this?

When two people come to tango in a couple, they bring with them their specific couple dynamic. While they are learning tango together, this dynamic is playing up. Their connection is tested by learning a new activity together, and not only together, but in total dependence of each other. How well they listen to each other, how insecure they are, how much they want to please or criticise the other, how much responsibility they take for their own emotions: all this transpires in how they learn tango together. The learning process does not define the couple dynamic, the couple’s dynamic defines the learning process. In short, the couple can make it very easy for themselves – or very difficult.

Women are often happier in the beginning of tango, while men struggle; then comes a point that men start to enjoy tango and the plentiful choice of dance partners, and women run into their first tango troubles: lack of technique and lack of invitations. Sometimes one partner advances quicker or is a more gifted dancer, and this becomes hard to handle for the other person. Insecurities blossom; jealousy comes into play.

Tango can make your relationship flourish or it can be the beginning of the end. But is it really tango’s fault?

Tango is only a context that life puts us in, so that we can work out our internal conflicts. It is there for our joy, but also for our personal development. Tango will become a playground for your relationship problems, but only if there were problems already waiting to be revealed. It may be that your issue is lack of self-confidence, and tango is the perfect context to bring this up. If you are suffering in tango, it has nothing to do with tango and everything to do with you. There is no specific tango-related insecurity, it is the same insecurity you always carry inside yourself, only now it is playing with a new toy. Blaming tango for making you insecure is like blaming food for making you hungry. Tango gives us ample opportunities to become more wholesome, wiser, better human beings, but we have to want to go there – and find the means whereby.

When two affirmed tango dancers fall in love it is a slightly different story. Each of them already had some tango experience, found his/her favorite dancers, developed his/her own “coping strategies” in tango world. Dance compatibility can fuel romantic attraction and romantic attraction can fuel dance compatibility, which actually feels a lot like romantic attraction. A student of mine, who studies neurology, told me that tango experience (movement, touch, embrace, odors, sweat, intense presence in the moment) can trigger your brain to believe you are falling in love. Unending tandas, full immersion in one another, intense bliss. We all have had that feeling at least once in our tango life. Yet not all dancers who share a good connection on the dancefloor end up falling in love with each other. However, the majority of dancers who do fall in love in tango, do so while dancing.

What about building long term relationships, is it more difficult in tango? Frankly, I don’t see why it should be more difficult in tango than anywhere else. Building a solid long term relationship IS DIFFICULT, period. I know couples who manage and others who don’t. However, there is one important factor. If your primary and only shared interest is tango, building a longterm relationship WILL be difficult. For a relationship to work you will need other common interests, some shared background, a strong friendship, something to talk about, compatible temperaments, compatible sexuality and so on. No matter how deeply you both feel about tango, it is still just a dance. A lot of relationships don’t survive in tango because, except for tango, they don’t have much else to survive upon.

When we start a relationship, we often feel that we somehow own our partner, and that we are entitled to get satisfaction for our needs from our partner. Tango becomes one of those needs and we take it personally when this need is not satisfied. We become unforgiving with our partner and nurture expectations we would otherwise never have. With other dancers we are open to any experience: if it is bad we prefer to forget it, if it is good we like to remember. With our life partner we often expect nothing but the BEST, right now and s/he’d better give it to us exactly the way we like it! We forget the good, but we damn well make sure we remember the worst!

The truth is, your partner doesn’t have to be your favourite dancer, and neither do you. This expectation only puts unnecessary pressure on both of you. Do you like exactly the same food? Exactly the same books? Exactly the same movies? If it does not work between the two of you in the dance, then maybe you are compatible in life but not in tango. Which one is more important, in the end? Wanting your partner to be everything for you in your life (your best lover, your best friend and your best tandas) is not always a realistic expectation. It fits well with what tango lyrics talk about, but we all know that lovers from tango lyrics are not the best of lovers, they are just the most volatile ones. It still can happen that your love partner is also your favorite dancer, in that case enjoy it to the fullest. But if it doesn’t happen, do what you already do with other people: be open to any experience. Forget when it doesn’t work, remember when it does. Take it easy. It’s a dance. There’ll always be another tanda.

RUSSIAN, GERMAN, CHINESE, POLISH

November 5, 2013