It's much more relaxed and comfortable to go to dance where people know you. Being greeted by friendly, welcoming faces is heartwarming. Having people there who enjoy your company and your dancing makes a big difference in the milonga experience.
Our tango communities afford us with the opportunity to build supportive, long-term relationships with like-minded connoisseurs of dance and music. I hope that you have developing and cultivating relationships like this in your own tango community. It's a blessing to have tango friends who welcome us back again and again into their space and their arms. Treasure those people, and appreciate them for the blessing of camaraderie and shared experience that they bring into your life.
It is important, however, to understand the limitations of such relationships. It is important to distinguish the convenient, context-related friendships of tango with the greater concept of friendship in real life. Our tango friends are warm and supportive and share with us an unspoken level of intimacy. Our dance connections can and will hold validity for years and years, even when we don't see people frequently, as when they live in a different city.
One might want to be mindful of certain level of dance hall distortion. Tango relationships rarely extend beyond the walls of the milonga. The segregation of real life and tango life can work in our favor in some cases, but it also has a downside.
The depth and quality of emotion that we experience on the dance floor gives the illusion of intimacy, of dedication, and abiding respect. But how deeply do those emotions run? Is the whole idea of dance connection a convenient mirage?
What would happen if you couldn't dance for some period of time? How would your tango friends react? You might not know if such separation has never occurred during your tango life. But that doesn't mean that it can't happen. Do you expect to interact with your tango friends if you are forced to step out of the tango world for a while? How long do you think that such an arrangement will last?
An Outsider's Perspective
Years ago, I found myself arguing this point with one of my non-tango friends. I had told her over dinner about my busy tango life. At the time, I was putting in a lot of tango hours each week, taking classes, going to milongas, practicing with dedicated partners, studying video, developing choreography, and working diligently on my own technique. I was dancing with hundreds of people every year, many of them people whom I had never met. I was making a lot of friends - or so I thought.
"They're not your friends," my friend said bluntly.
I was shocked. "What do you mean, they're not my friends? I see them all the time. We have a nice time together. They're good people; I know many of them quite well."
"They're not your friends," she repeated. "They act like your friends, because they get something from you," she argued. "The women get to dance with you, and the men hang out with you when they're out having fun."
"It's not like that," I explained.
"It is like that," she insisted. "You're not their friend. You're an enabler for their addiction."
"No! No! No!" I argued emphatically. "You're not part of the tango community. You don't understand how it really is."
My friend was unimpressed. We had to agree to disagree on this point.
Some years later, I scaled back my social dancing for a combination of personal and professional reasons. Guess what happened. I discovered that my friend's argument, the one that I tried to refute to her face, actually held merit.
Once I stepped back from the tango scene, most of the "friendships" that I had developed over the years evaporated overnight. The only time I saw or heard from them was when I went out to an occasional dance. A handful of people did contact me in the early days of my social tango sabbatical, but most of the time, they were calling me to go out dancing. ("Are you coming to the milonga this weekend?" "Can you come out to watch me and my partner perform?" "Will you be my partner for this workshop?") Decline one or two of those invitations, and the phone stops ringing.
I had to face an uncomfortable truth. My tango friends were all nice people, but perhaps a bit less "friendly" than I had imagined. Where did they all go when my life faced challenges?
Very few of them kept in touch to see how I was doing. They weren't around to cheer me up when I lost my job, for instance. They were blissfully unaware. I received no sympathy emails (or even texts) when I struggled with separate back, foot, and knee injuries. Everybody must have been out having fun at some milonga somewhere.
My non-tango friend was right, and I was wrong. I hate to be wrong.
Fluid Dynamics
Businessman and author Harvey Mackay once wrote: "Anyone who thinks he or she is indispensable should stick a finger in a bowl of water and notice the hole it leaves when the finger is pulled out."
The tango community has this kind of fluidity in its social dynamic. If you don't believe me, step away for a little while and watch what happens. Your friends will make new friends. Your favorite partners will hook up with new partners. (I had that happen to me once when I missed a single practica due to a bad cold.)
That comfortable place where you feel appreciated and important, the whole scene that you know and love, it will move along quite nicely without you. No one there will spend more than the length of a song intro wondering what happened to you. If you aren't immediately available for next tanda, your friends are focusing on someone else.
Separation Anxiety
You don't have to take my word for it. At some point, life will probably force you to take a sabbatical from tango. You might need to deal with a health issue, a family matter, or a business or educational demand. Whatever it is, don't expect your tango friends to flock to your side. They have dancing to do.
One day, hopefully, you'll be able to return and enjoy some dancing again. The good news is that your old friends will still recognize you. They'll remember how nice it was to dance with you, and they'll enjoy having you back. That's the silver lining of the tango world: people never forget you as long as you're in the same room.
Your friends will almost certain ask you where you've been, but they'll do it in a very tango-centric way, as though you could not possibly have been doing something else. Here's the question that annoys me the most: "Where have you been dancing?"
"I haven't been dancing anywhere, you clueless nitwit! I have been taking care of myself, providing for my family, and tending of my responsibilities. I have been accomplishing things - important things - while you were wandering around in circles with strangers who pretend to actually care about you." - Yeah, I'd love to have the balls to say that one day.
Again, you don't have to take my word for it. But you might want to acknowledge that my semi-retirement from social dancing gives me a good vantage point on this issue. From where I'm standing, the tango scene does not seem as friendly as it did when I was a regular. If you have not yet spent some time outside of the elbow-to-elbow flux of weekly milongas, you have not yet seen the whole picture.
You may find that hard to believe - I would be surprised if you didn't - but I would encourage you to consider the possibility that what I am telling you is true. That way you won't be shocked one day when most of your tango friends vanish without a trace.
¡Buena suerte amigos, y muchas gracias!
Daniel
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