motardmom said:
Baby steps.... *sigh* Maybe one day he'll be open to the idea of taking lessons and maybe we'll find a teacher as sensitive to the needs of their students as the person who taught DW1.....
Actually, I didn't really have such a teacher. My first teacher (intermediate salsa; I know you're tired of that story by now) had been dancing for years as a kid ("L.A. Salsa Kids", if I remember correctly). I just went in assuming that I'd be terrible at it, so I adjusted my attitude to do my best while at the same time not taking my many mistakes too seriously and be ready to laugh at my mistakes and at myself as needed (I've always had a reputation for being the guy who's smiling and laughing all the time, even though my personal life has been hellish these past two years). I relied heavily on my aikido and his counting to make it through. He was very curt with me once for my "Irish salsa" (during warmups I was leaving my arms dangling straight down because I was concentrating on getting the steps) and I still keep them up in all my dances. He also did not offer any guidance on not using my thumbs, which led to a kind of humorous (but sadly typical) altercation with my wife*.
Our next teacher (beginning salsa and ECS) was geared more towards working with beginners, but he also did not work with us on getting the beat or developing rhythm, except for providing the count through the steps.
Our third teacher has a good reputation for working with beginners, but there again after giving us the basic step and rhythm, she would just provide us with the counts, plus break a particular step down count-by-count. Her husband was our next teacher after that and he tended to be rather strict and often gruff (such that my wife stopped going just because of him). Though one night he did explain phrasing.
Now with my current teacher (Lindy), he does work more with beginners on getting the rhythm and on explaining what the music is doing (phrasing) and how to find the 1. But I didn't find him until I'd been on this journey for 2.5 years.
So it wasn't really that a particular teacher had found a way to reach me, but rather that I was working it out for myself all along and incorporating and using anything useful that my teachers would offer, even when that wasn't much more than providing the count so that I could eventually correlate it with the music.
I don't know how much this contributed, but I was taking beginning piano at the same time, so I was getting very much into the habit of thinking about the structure of the music and of counting my way through a piece. I'm sure that it reinforced the counting; I'm just not quite sure whether it had contributed greatly in other ways of helping it all fall into place in my mind.
Of course, I am also the over-analytical type who's always thinking his way through what's going on. As a result, during the weeks I'd not only Google for more information, but I'd also think about the lessons and about certain moves and try to break it all down in my mind and figure it all out. I'm guessing that had to have counted for something too.
[*Footnote: The "thumbs" story.
Like all beginners, I felt that I needed to hold on to my partners' hands, which meant that my thumbs were on the backs of their hands. Then one day in salsa class, my wife and I partnered up in open position, I took her hands as always, and she just yanked her hands out of mine. I looked at her puzzled but she just glared at me, so I tried to take her hands again and she just yanked them away again, saying nothing. I asked her what was wrong and she just told me to look at the teacher's hands. Not knowing that I was supposed to be looking at his thumbs, I couldn't see any difference in what I was doing. So I tried to take her hands again and she yanked them away again. I asked her "What?" and she just indicated to look at his hands. Again I could see no difference, so I tried one more time and she yanked them away yet again. So I went over to partner up with another girl. Everybody was surprised that I would choose this girl over my wife, because even the teacher had problems leading her. She was very strong from weight lifting and because of her karate training her stepping back would turn into a forward stance (kind of like the calf stretch before you go running).
Later on, I tried to get my wife to tell me what was wrong, yet again without success, until another girl (an experienced social dancer) got involved and finally got her to say that it was because of the thumbs.
And that is how I learned about keeping the thumbs off my partner's hands. And that was fairly typical of how my wife would treat me, though this was a somewhat more extreme example. And that was even before she had started hating me.
BTW, every beginning teacher I've had since then establishes the "pop the thumbs off" rule from Day One. ]
I'm so blown away! I had no idea! He said he doesn't like to talk about it because he failed. 
I tried to gently suggest that perhaps his teacher taught him with the assumption that he could naturally hear the rhythm of the music, and I told him about DWise1 and his experience with learning musicality, yadda yadda. My dh is generally quite sensitive about his rhythm problem, it has caused him a lot of grief over the years. We had a light conversation but at the first indication that the conversation was taking a turn for the worse, I dropped it totally. 
