Salsa Night

For our anniversary, I reserved a Salsa Night out for my wife and me last weekend.

Since we didn’t know how to salsa dance, I tried to reserve pre-show lessons for us. However, the lessons were all sold out.

That meant we were going into an unfamiliar dance night as total rookies.

“We can do this,” I thought. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

The music was great, and the dancers who readily joined the dance floor were impressive to watch. What about us?

My first idea was to get the rhythm down and do anything I could to get comfortable with salsa.

The beat? Four-four. But the rhythm was one-two, one-two, so while I sat in my chair, I tapped out the steps with my feet, mimicking the dancers in front of me. Once I had that, I felt like I could improvise the rest.

And since we were on a rare date night, just my wife and me, away from the kids, there was a little pressure to have a bit of extra fun and make this evening memorable.

To calm our nerves, we got up to slow dance during one of the ballads. We had done this dozens of times before. But while we were slow dancing, the rhythm changed just a bit – more of a swing – so we added some swagger to our slow dancing to feel it out. This was a good warm-up.

When we sat back down, I went back to feet-tapping the rhythm, slowly pounding out some courage to go up and truly salsa dance on the floor. Then my wife and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised.

“Let’s salsa,” I said, shrugging, as I grabbed my wife’s hand and went out to boogie.

And you know what? We had a great time. First, no one noticed us. Everyone was either watching the band or the more proficient dancers all around us.

Second, we were having so much fun that we didn’t worry about what we looked like. Sure, we tripped up a few times, and I awkwardly tried to spin my wife around like I saw those other dancers do. But we never stopped smiling and we never slowed down – even during the line dance that I couldn’t quite get perfect.

Nerves turned into laughter, and self-consciousness turned into being in the moment. We giggled as we occasionally stumbled off the beat.

Sometimes, we don’t know all we need to know to succeed—or even to have fun. That’s fine because, with a little bit of self-made comfort and practice, you can easily make the most of a situation with low stakes and high enjoyment.

On this Salsa Night, joy trumped comfort. We were there to have fun together, and step by step, we earned it.

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