One of the hidden difficulties of tango is learning as a couple. Every couple I have seen start taking tango lessons, be it boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife, has always had greater difficulty than the individual who started at the same time as them.
Pourquoi?
Because the couple think “But we know each other, we should be able to do this”. Yes they may be no stranger to each other but they are a stranger to tango. It is this presumption that familiarity will get them through the difficult bits that causes so many couples to drop out.
Couples, mix, change partners, avoid each other as much as you can for most of the class and when you rejoin work with your partner in the same manner that you worked with those strange to you.
Do you not feel that they also drop out because they worry – quite reasonably, I think – that it will endanger the relationship? Not so much because of the other people involved, although that certainly often does make them feel insecure, but because of the difficulties of working together on such a thing without just heating all their insecurities into a blazing row?
On that side of things: when an individual has a problem doing a step with someone they can rotate away and leave the difficulty behind, a couple on the other hand may bring that problem and difficulty home with them.
There are also “power” issues that come into play with couples. It can make tango a tug-of-war for “control”. And the “intimacy” associated with the dance can raise all sorts of insecurities as well.
On the other hand, those same intimacies can lead to a much more profound relationship.
Indeed. At this point I would like to make it clear that tango is a wonderful dance for a couple to learn. The object of this post was to point out that tango is a different minefield for couple than that faced by individuals. However once that is made clear it makes the minefield easier to navigate.
Recently, I was fortunate enough to take workshops with M&M Erdemsel (wonderful people and very knowledgeable and skillful teachers). I though it a bit strange when they insisted on partner rotations, until they explained why. When you stay with the same partner, you tend to compensate for each other or develop your own special “signals” instead of learning the lead and the follow correctly. Its just natural to want to please your partner, and when you know what you have to do….
There is also the tendency to get jaded/numb when learning a new move/skill, with the addition of frustration when it doesn’t happen. After a few minutes of this, and the blame demon tends to rear its ugly head.
Contrast this with switching partners often during classes/lessons. You cant develop your own personalised signals so you are forced to learn the lead/follow correctly. You feel fresh when you meet your new partner, so you try harder, thus frequent rotations means always trying your best to learn. In addition, when you find something that helps you to learn what you are learning, you can pass it on to your subsequent partners. If it was a bad experience, you can leave it behind…