My husband and I took an hour-long dance lesson at a local Fred Astaire Dance Studio this past week.
A beautiful, young, Russian dancer, Tatiana, taught us the steps to the foxtrot, the rumba, and the merengue. I didn’t think my husband would enjoy the lessons but he surprised me. When Tatiana told me that my husband would lead every dance, his eyes twinkled. When we coupled up to dance and I automatically started to push him around the dance floor, he would stop dancing and say, “Let me lead!”
Tatiana, probably tired of my resistance, told me that I had to suppress my urge to run the show and allow my husband to take charge. That was really hard for me. But I tried. Like learning dance steps, I realized that learning to surrender control to another person takes time and practice.
When we got home, we practiced everything we had learned. Dancing on our own, without supervision, was the most difficult part of the dance lesson. Neither one of us could remember the order of the steps to the three dances, or even the actual steps.
At first, I thought that we had just wasted an hour of our life. But I had to concede that it was an enjoyable hour. So, even if we still couldn’t dance, we did have fun together, as well as a topic to dine out on, so it wasn’t a waste of time at all.
And, best of all, since we forgot all of the dance steps, we also can forget the part about my husband leading.
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