Consider this before you date a girl who dances: She yields to her art in every way imaginable. You think you know what this means, but you won't until it gets tough. You will at first find her passion appealing, but over time you may find this passion compete with you. In more ways than one.
Simply finding time to date a girl who dances can be tricky. Her unpredictable schedule was that demanding before you came into her life, and if she's the girl you fell in love with, this part will never change. You’ll have to become more flexible with time, because a girl who dances changes directions on a dime. Classes take up mornings, rehearsals run through evenings, and performances fall on weekends, so prepare yourself to hear five infuriating little words: "I can't, I have dance." She doesn't mean you're less important, but it will feel that way. She won't blink when her life is rescheduled, postponed, and cancelled, but you should know that this will happen to you, too. She grew up with nothing going according to plan, and learned to curb her disappointment by becoming adaptable, and fluid. That flexibility will sometimes taste like flakiness, like an inability to commit. Check her changeability. Ask yourself whether or not she properly rehearses your relationship, too.
If you date a girl who dances, you’ll have to accept being in love with a girl who’s in love with the world. She’s a performing artist, a people-pleaser. She’ll play nice with colleagues, choreographers, directors, patrons, aspiring students, audience members, family, friends, enemies. You will see her work and laugh with others, accept flowers after shows, and you will wait off to the side and begin to wonder which part of her trained warmth or charm or magnetic mind was ever meant for you. There’s a ton of touching in this world, and it may look inappropriate, attention-seeking. If it’s unclear or confusing, ask her about it. She’s a people-pleaser, but wants to please you, too, probably more than anyone. She doesn’t necessarily know any better, because she’s always worked with bodies. To her, bodies didn’t come with boundaries. She thinks everyone thinks this way. It takes a special person to love her stubborn naiveté and allow, never mind applaud, all these other rich, intimate relationships a dancer has. She wears many hats and plays many roles because she was trained, above all, to be ready to be anything. Anything, everything. For everyone. Anyone.
She learned how to dance, move, and move others through her teachers' unspoken but obvious disappointment with her physical and mental limitations. For this reason, she will conceal her shortcomings. She will speak of her damage, her darkness, to no one. Not even herself. She will tell herself that she is fine, and that she’s infinite, until she believes it. A woman who convinces herself she is limitless is powerful, and perilous.
A girl who dances devotes her days to playing pretend. This sounds sweet, doesn’t it? Childlike, lovable. Fantastic. Fun. Her life’s work lies in curiosity, and creation. But if you squint a little and look closely, you’ll also see traces of delusion, deceit. Fabrication. Fiction. You see, a girl who dances has an unbelievably strong will to believe. She’ll be good at telling stories because she knows the value and beauty of illusion. Her life is rehearsal, after all, and rehearsal is the act of practicing a scripted story. A choreographed reality. A manufactured truth. The trouble is, her kind of wonderful can both build and ruin worlds. She is a creator and, when she’s not careful, a destroyer.
Storytelling is central to her industry, and how artists make a living. Aspiration, after all, is the art of striving to be what she is not. From a young age, she’s told herself little stories until she believed them herself. From a young age, she’s told herself partial truths to numb her injuries and keep dancing, keep smiling through the pain. Those little lies are not so bad because they’re in service of a higher calling, a greater picture. She knows the show must go on, you see. So she lies. For herself, and others. For art, for beauty. For love. But off stage, outside the theater, in the real world? Storytelling is a dangerous talent. It will be hard to date a girl who dances because she will be good at lying. To herself, to others, and to you.
Remember this if you try to date a girl who dances: She tells stories onstage to make people happy. That’s not only her occupation, but her passion, too. If she is good at what she does onstage, she can be good at lying offstage, too. Maybe she does it for family, and friends. She only wanted to make everyone feel loved, and understood. That people-pleasing tendency? Don’t underestimate it. It’s a deeply rooted, distorted sense of duty, but it’s a profound sympathy nonetheless. She believes, and believes in everyone. And she thinks she can save them all – if she just tells them a little story.
Softly remind her that this is not a play. Set the scene for her: It’s like waiting in line at an ice cream shop, wherein she shares dollops of sweetness with everyone. When she feeds too many stories by allowing, and even leading too many to believe they can have all that sweetness to themselves, she does far more harm than good. That balancing act, those illusions and lies leave too many broken hearts unconsidered. No matter how well-intended.
It will be difficult for her to separate good and evil. Difficult, but not impossible. Help her see how. Tell her there are healthier, more lasting ways to offer truer beauty to the world. Remind her that she cannot dance as multiple characters with conflicting storylines. Show her how storytelling can be both kind, and cruel. Teach her how to draw lines in the sand, because she may not know how. She will hesitate because she will not like having limits. Honesty may not come naturally to her because she was never rewarded for saying, “No.” Encourage clarity in her, which she also finds tricky. She struggles with the musical, intangible, sublime; fighting with her will frustrate you. She will not always speak the way you do. She neither learned to talk when or how you did. She will try to learn to communicate the way you want her to, but if you are not open to learning how she thinks, you will never know her heart.
Her heart, though misguided, is the best part about her. The production she prepares for is a cause for which she'd die, since she's a soldier under orders in a war that she enjoys. Her thoughts are complex and her dreams, intense. Her eyes glisten gleefully when she hears the tune to a dance she once knew, and those same film noir eyes cloud over when she remembers how she was replaced for that show. You must let her have her pain, because it’s part of her depth, her learning, her rehearsal. She knows what she signed up for, professionally. Ask her if she knows what she’s signing up for, romantically.
It takes a special kind of person to love the way she loves to dance. It may begin resembling the way she loves you. Challenge her and ask how it's different. Your love with her may feel like two people loving next to each other, rather than with each other. Know that she will never need you. Her first love is dance, and that love will never love her back. She won’t need you, but she’ll want you. Shame and guilt and obligation have whittled her down in the past, but she told herself a long time ago that she was infinite, remember? She tells herself she can want what others want, if it seems to help. If a girl who dances wants you for who you are, and not for what you could be or what she can do for you, that simplicity might throw her off balance.
Now I must ask you to proceed with caution. If you do choose to help, you must be gentle, and bear in mind that her industry is largely silent. Her leaders only speak to tell her what she's doing wrong. Know that she is specifically trained to internalize the deprecating things said to her by the people she most admires. Can you watch what you say, even at the end? Because she’ll play the last role you cast her in. Please make it a good one.
Hold up a mirror to her bleeding heart. Help her, if you can. Redefine partnership. Dismantle the utility of her illusions. Show her a better way to brighter days. If you empower and uplift her, you will receive an unparalleled love the likes of which you have never known and she may never know again.
If you fail to throw daylight on her darkness, she will never change her storytelling. She will never know what’s wrong with romanticizing mistakes, or compartmentalizing, or overcommitting. She will keep lying to herself. And she will always seem flighty, contradictory, indecisive, aloof. That’s just how she looks when she’s working, when she’s telling stories. She loves work more than herself because it is through work she found both herself and love. But a dancer, in the end, is still a performing artist. Her work is live but short-lived, immortalized but ephemeral. Show her how to build monuments that last, rather than castles in the sand. This will change her life.
It will be too little too late, or maybe her darkness will overwhelm you. She will have told too many stories and lied too often for you two to continue waltzing. But if you help her face the music, the wonderful things you saw in her will become a power used for good. She learned how to quick-change backstage, after all. It may take her a little while to figure out how to include you, release into you, tell you everything, and reveal her darkness. It may take a little while but she will, one day, and all at once, realize that love never required the same kind of work her craft does. With the light you have the opportunity provide, she will realize that love should never involve heavy storytelling. That love should never lie.
I hope that you can find the strength to help her in these ways. I hope for your sake, and for her’s, you’re not the first to try. I hope you are the next person she loves, after she learns this much. I hope you consider this risk, if you decide to date a girl who dances.
Let’s say you do. You will be able to trace her love in the queerest little ways. You will see a rare, youthful joy in her eyes when she looks at you. You will find she’s raided your closet for socks and sweaters to wear while prancing around the house because she likes you so much she wants to know how it feels to be a little more like you. You will witness an old-fashioned kind of glamour when you two go out and she feels like she can be anything when she’s with you. You will watch her pull her hair back into a messy topknot and don sweats to stretch at night because you calm her. You will find hairpins everywhere when you start to feel like home. You will notice when she kicks her knees and points her toes when you kiss because you make her want to dance. And you will never forget the look she gives you like she’s waiting in the wings because you give her the same backstage butterflies. If you can believe nothing else that passes her lips, believe this: She loves you more than you’ll ever understand. She might be cosmically idiotic and reckless, but her love for you is a masterpiece.
Share This Article
