Relationships and Tango - How Tango Helps To Strengthen or Abandon Relationship
The Argentine Tango has evolved drastically ever since its creation in the 19th century. What started as a dance performed only by the poor working-class of Buenos Aires is now a global phenomenon and one of the world’s most popular dances.
Besides teaching us the colorful history and culture of the “Porteños,” the Argentine Tango also teaches us a lot about our relationships and connections. As Tango is a dance of improvisation, it requires ongoing communication with our partners to execute the steps and routines and to create a dance.
The need for communication holds true when it comes to our relationships. It’s not just ‘being on the same page,’ it’s an around-the-clock, telepathy-like experience, that only very few can really find.
Hernan and Anita’s wedding Tango way. Were you there?
Tanda like a lifetime
In Tango, when you invite someone onto the dance floor is like inviting them onto the ride on the magic carpet. First - it’s not just one dance, but 3 or 4, depending on the DJ and local customs. The first dance is like a date. You meet someone for the first time and you learn about each other. What they know, what they like, what they really good at, how they respond to danger, to the challenge, will they back up or coil onto the safe space. The whole first song gives you time to recognize your partner. You showcasing yourself, not by showing off, but by carefully probing the waters.
Then comes the second song. And now you know, or you think you know. Based on your assumption you braving into more involved movements, you look to taste more detailed flavors of the music, you might propose space for adornment, or maybe hear the counterproposal to your movement. Now you are a couple. Two people united in the persued of the dance.
And then the 3rd song comes and now you are the seasoned couple. You no longer need the lengthy explanation. It seems like almost no lead is required and she responds with the step you exactly wished for. You read and feel the music together. You feel the upcoming explosion of the accent. You just know. You found someone who knows. Just like you do.
It might take a tanda. It might take few tandas, It might take a milonga, it might take few milongas. It might take years. Whatever it takes, it is a journey. On the way, you meet people who ‘just get it,’ ‘your people’. Your Tango circle.
Dancing Tango with Sexteto Milonguero life
The Link Between Tango and Relationships
The Argentine Tango is similar to our relationships because the two partners require constant and clear communication throughout. To properly execute the steps and movements of the Argentine Tango, we must learn how to connect with our partners through verbal and non-verbal cues when dancing. We must also learn how to be sensitive to their needs and adjust the dance, our proposals of the lead, and our responses to it, accordingly.
Since Argentine Tango is improvised, we need to consider our partners’ skills to dance together well. If we’re going to take the lead, we should pay attention to what our partners can and can’t do on the dance floor and change our way of being to ensure that both of us are enjoying the journey through togetherness, while dancing.
Proposing elements that are too advanced, challenging, or extreme to our partners will prevent us from dancing the Tango with grace and can even cause conflict and resentment on the dance floor and beyond. Imagine you talk to someone who just learned few words in English. You will not make them read Shakespeare. Instead - propose an entry-level book and see their eyes lucid with glee. They can do it. They are grateful. They know you know what they know. That listening and lowering yourself to the level of your partner is the essence of tango. Not pulling them up right then, explaining, pulling, forcing, or teaching, but being with them at that moment. That ability to create the beautiful dance out of what’s available at hands - is what makes the true master.
Relationships work the same way — we need to talk to our partners as often as possible to discuss differences, manage conflicts, and remain conscious of their needs as well as our own. Dancing the Argentine Tango and being in a relationship will also require us to take cues on our partners’ body language so we’ll know how and when to adjust.
When learning how to dance the Argentine Tango, we gain many valuable skills and insights for improving togetherness. Though it may come as a surprise to many, the Tango is an excellent platform for personal growth and becoming a better and more engaged companion in, friendships, relationships, and work comradeship.
Endure
How Tango Helps To Strengthen or Abandon Relationship
Many ingredients are required to execute Tango’s steps and movements. The same components are often crucial in maintaining and strengthening our real-life relationships.
But there is something else. Endurance. What Tango does, and it’s probably the most unexpected, yet unavoidable part of learning it, is that the Tango teach you to FEEL.
It might have been years since you had felt something. I’m not talking about big feelings, but something very small and very personal. The tiny whisper of sensation that tells you that you ARE. When that sensation captures you unexpectedly you regain the sense of your body and all of the sudden is good and bad, happy and sad, right and wrong. The sun shines, the sky is blue, and for the first time in years - it matters. Do not get too excited. It also opens Pandora's box of bad feelings, regrets, and yearnings. Accidently, by encountering tango - you had encounter yourself.
Have you experienced that yet?
When you reacquaint yourself with yourself you often discover that you are enduring something you had not planned, that you are on a wrong path, that you are running in circles. And then the change becomes possible.
Non-verbal Communication
Effective communication is important in both the Argentine Tango and in our relationships. But aside from talking verbally with our partners, Tango teaches us a lot about non-verbal, body-based language. You do not talk. You do not exactly look at each other. Yet we are able to tune our bodies to the slightest changes of energies, the warmth of the body, or lack of it.
Once we learn how to take non-verbal cues on the dance floor, that ability transitions over to real life. Life becomes tango and tango becomes life.
Builds Trust
The Argentine Tango is a partner dance performed by a leader and a follower. The male usually takes the lead, and the female responds by following the leader’s cues. However, for this structure to work, trust should be present between the dancers. Regardless of how skilled the leader is, if the follower doesn’t trust him, the two can’t sustain their dance-floor relationship. Lack of trust can prevent us from progressing or improving
Trust can be interpreted in many ways. Physically. When you whole-heartedly respond to the volcada or colgada - you trust. Not only that your partner will be there to catch you, but also that he is aware of his abilities, that he knows what he is doing, and is confident that he can handle it. When the leader is proposing the movement to the Follower - he trusts that she feels it, analyzes it to honestly decide if she can or cannot do it. It takes seconds and often is totally subconscious. There are no mistakes in tango. Each movement can create something unexpected. We just have to listen to our bodies and trust.
But trust is also letting your partner go dancing with someone else without fear of losing. And taking them back with the perfume of other men or women on their necks. And seeing them letting you go with embedded certainty that you will be back. There are a lot of emotions passing through your heart within one night of tango. Are you happy here and now?
There are several codes in tango helping you steer clear from the danger of… yourself and sometimes of favorable or unfavorable (depending on what you are looking for) circumstances. The first and last tada of the night belongs to the companion you came in with. That’s the feeling you came with and the ones you are taking home.
Tango Encourages Spending Time Together
Start early. And continue forever. Tango will give you pretext and excuse to be together, not for chores, but for entertainment. As adults, we are often so busy in our lives that we fail to regularly spend time with our life partners. More often than not, couples often only communicate at the end of the day or, in worse cases, only when there is conflict.
The more inexperienced we are, the more time we’ll need to learn the dance. Practicing for long hours may seem tiring, but when we’re doing it with someone we care about, learning how to dance help us to take our relationships to the next level.
Signing up for a dance class with our current or future life partner allows us to break free from the monotony of our daily routines and experience something exciting together in a different environment. Spending time with our life partner while learning the Argentine Tango allows us to catch up and connect in a healthy, romantic way. And since Tango translates into life so easily - while learning to Tango, you learn how to live.
Tango Creates Conflicts. Tango Resolves Conflicts
Conflict is common in every relationship. In fact, conflict is necessary. Conflict understood as a contradiction to apathy. If there is no conflict it either means you always agree - possible, though unlikely, or - that one of you does not care. We talking here about average relationships, not the ones filled with violence, in which conflict might mean something else. Indifference, in most cases, indicates loss of interest. Loss of passion follows. Conflict allows for resolution and cleansing.
Regardless of how long we've been together with our partner, we'll still have arguments that can cause ongoing conflicts for days, sometimes weeks. While the little dispute and difference of opinion are good, not focusing on solving them - is not so good.
While there are many ways to resolve conflict in a relationship, dancing the Argentine Tango is one that’s both highly effective and educational.
In most cases, Tango will recreate your argument, not in an exact manner, but in some sort of allegory hidden in the movement.
Take sacadas - displacement of the free leg, that for the on-looker may seem like creating the opportunity of a potential crash. However, for the insider, sacada is a visual illusion and it is actually based on time-related cooperation. Yes, we are crashing - but with Matrix-like time suspension and delay and infusion of circularity, so that when you are inside the movement - you not perceiving a collision at all.
Learn New Things about Each Other
I once read the story, which I believe was one of the short stories Paolo Coehlo, about a couple who always shared the bread roll for breakfast. She always took the bottom, believing her husband prefers the top. He always ate the top believing she prefers the bottom. After like 50 years of that, something accidentally made them discover the opposite is true. Quite touching from two perspectives. One - they were both sacrificing for 50 years deriving pleasure and happiness from the fact that the other partner is happy. They were both depriving themselves of the pleasure of eating the part they actually liked - by sticking to their assumptions and not asking. What’s the assumption? - the other person MUST like what WE like.
The relationship often comes to the end at specific moments in life - one being, children are gone and now we are stuck in an empty house and we have nothing in common. The situation of a global pandemic, that isolated us at home with our loved ones, had sped up the crazy process of discovery quite a bit. Stuck face to face many had a chance to discover that their relationship was a miss. Are they going to do anything about it? Some will, and some won’t. To leave from an unsatisfying place of being one needs determination and carriage, and also a connection with oneself.
The solution is not necessarily abandoning your partner. Elucidation can simply start by looking back for what was fascinating us about each other years ago when we first met. Mindfulness starts when we are able to connect - and that’s when the tango comes is.
Ultimate Tango students during Beginner lesson.
Being in a relationship with the same person for years might inevitably become boring over time. When we know too much about our partner to the point where we already memorize their thinking patterns and can predict their behaviors, the relationship becomes monotonous. Especially if we are unfulfilled at other parts of our life - like work, social life, relationship with other family members, being bored in a relationship is a serious problem as it often triggers one or both parties to cheat and commit infidelity.
Learning the Argentine Tango is a long-term process that requires rediscovering yourself and your partner. Besides knowing the dance movements, as a dance that is improvised, created one step at a time while the music plays, we must also learn how to connect with ourselves and our partners and how to convey and express our intentions. Then there is LISTENING and HEARING. We learn how to express what we want, but also hear what the other person whats. That itself is a game-changer. Instead of demanding, we can suggest, instead of complaining, we can request.
The entire process of learning the Argentine Tango is a great way to spice up the relationship as learning something new can be both challenging and exciting at the same time. These experiences allow us to show and see another side of our partner — a side that we never saw before.
Since the Argentine Tango has a complex structure, movements, and steps, learning it with our partner is a great way to show support and feel supported, both physically and emotionally. Knowing our partner has our back throughout the process and letting them feel that we’ll do the same is a great way to build trust and strengthen our relationship in the future.
Teamwork, Partner-work in Tango
The togetherness is what’s the most visible in a great couple. It’s not that we become one. But we are both working towards the same goal creating the perception of oneness. We can never become one, as we are two independent people.
But the constant support, never-ending compensations for each other tiny mistakes - makes the dance glorious. You made a mistake together and you feel glorious because often the mistake leads to the discovery of a new path, new way, new purpose.
Relationships are all about teamwork. No partnership will ever survive if only one person is putting in the effort, and we must work together and stay focused and happy in the long run!
The Argentine Tango can teach us a lot about teamwork. Regardless of the role we dance, being it the leader or follower, we need to exert the same amount of effort as our partner to ensure that both of us can execute the steps and movements correctly. Our partners’ dancing skills alone are never enough. One cannot dance the Tango alone. If you see a great leader but not the couple, if you see a great follower, but not a couple - it simply means more mutual work is needed. The togetherness does not come from the one-time discussion but from the continuous agreement.
Ultimate Tango students during Tango Practica
The Argentine Tango is a dance that requires mutual partnership because both partners should “give and take” when dancing. We must also learn to appreciate our partners and show our support whenever we’re dancing and if we are friends or life partners, everywhere outside the dance. Tango helps because when we know how to work as a team when dancing the Argentine Tango, it is much easier to apply the same in our relationship and stand for each other through the years.
By practicing togetherness in our relationships, we are working on preventing any possible problems. As long as the two of us are willing to put in the work, we can surpass any challenges that life throws at us.
Tango Let us Be Ourselves
A lot of people “pretend” when they’re new in a relationship. Many of us want to please our partner, especially at the beginning, so we often build a facade. But as the relationship continues to flourish, our true selves eventually show, and we become more transparent with our partner.
Our ability to open ourselves to our partners becomes faster and easier when we learn the Argentine Tango. Learning the Tango requires a lot of commitment, self-discovery, and openness. The time we spend in the process will encourage and force us to show our true selves to our partners, regardless of how new we are in the relationship.
The beauty of Tango lies in turning the mistakes into new paths. The miscalculation becomes a new discovery and sometimes a new way. It’s the attention that we give to each other and the agreement of supporting each other no matter what - that makes the tango possible.
It Takes Two To Tango
Tango invades life. Relationships and Tango are similar in more ways than one. The lessons we’ve learned during Argentine Tango apply to our relationships and vice versa. Keep in mind though, that the benefit comes only from mutual efforts. As the maxim states, “It takes two to Tango,”