Dance will not cause relationship problems, but it will expose every problem that's already there.
(I believe @JournalInTime often says something similar)
I say that all the time because I lived through it.
My ex was not and is not a bad person, but we met at a time when I was going through a major crisis: I was 19 and had lost two sisters in rapid succession (one when I was 18, one when I was 19). I was also embarking on a tough degree program that kept me in the lab and up all night. My parents were forced to step back from life to confront the loss of children, and then there was the usual distancing people suffer when death is in the air, so I had a shaky support network at a time when I needed a lot of support.
My ex was someone who had – due to family problems – more or less raised her younger brother.
Her parents weren't bad people, but nobody's life is perfect. Anyway, this defined her relationship with men of about her own age as "parental." It's a common consequence of what psychologists call "parentification."
You can see what happened next, right? Her parental attitude met my need for parental support. Our whole relationship was based on her seeing me as being in need of being looked after. That meant it started with an inherent imbalance of power, because parents make decisions for children . . . and that's how it went in our marriage.
As I said, my youth basically ended at 18 because I had to confront death, so I was deprived of the usual period of messing around – at first by depression and losing myself in academic work, then by being in a relationship. So, I never got to ask, "What do I seek in a partner?" I already had one, and was committed to them. I sort of assumed that lopsided control was normal.
I had moments of doubt, when I was the sole income earner for many years and yet wasn't in control of anything but the taxes and utility bills. When I voiced that, I was gaslit. Specifically, I was told I was creating it in my head because I had a psychiatric problem caused by emotional trauma at a young age. It seemed to fit my depression at times, so I accepted it.
Then tango lessons happened.
I soon realized that assuming the leader role, inviting women to dance, and so on were not things I was equipped to do. In stepped my partner, who proceeded to tell me how to dance, with whom, where, when, etc. If she saw me getting along too well with someone she didn't like, she "protected" me by getting in the way.
That got increasingly stressful for me, but I was ill-equipped to understand why. Then tango partners started to mention what they saw: "Are you happy letting someone else call all the shots in your life like that?", "What do you mean you're crazy? Who told you that? You're fine!", etc. Then my father died, I had therapy, and it all came to light. Separation and divorce followed very quickly, largely guided by therapy that showed me that the relationship was unhealthy.
But it was tango and tango people who cast the light on the problem before therapy gave me better tools (and proved I wasn't crazy). Afterward, so many dancers told me similar stories. To this day, I have tango friends whose link to me isn't that we dance together, but that we lived through similar situations. In each case, tango was not the cause of new problems but a spotlight on existing ones.
For example. My main coach does significant business in preparing betrothed couples for their wedding dance. Sometimes they are more successful with the dancing and sometimes less. But coach claims that she can usually tell just from those lessons which marriages are likely to be successful and which are likely headed for disaster. And this is in an environment where you don't even have the drama of partner switching to complicate things.
Yeah, my coach does and says the same. In fact, she sometimes let slip her feelings about specific couples learning wedding choreos. Given that she isn't a doctor, lawyer, priest, or whatever, I don't think that's the worst thing ever. I think couples kind of need to know that, to be honest.
️Valeria Solomonoff & Iakof Shonsky
