He Hated Dancing.
Here's What Changed.

Under one of my ads, somebody who bought the program left this:

"My husband hated (I mean HATED) dancing before we bought this but now he spins me around, dips me, and shows me off like a pro."

The capital letters are in the original. Whoever wrote that wanted it on the record that he hadn't been on the fence.

If you're the man in the first half of that sentence, that's the half I want to talk about, because it's where almost everybody in my files started.

Nobody In My Comments Started Out Convinced

I went looking through my own records for that shape: hated it, had two left feet, was skeptical, then the turn. Thirty-nine of them came up in one pass. Comments under my ads, emails, notes people write when they send the program to somebody as a gift.

The same person, a few lines earlier in the same reply:

"my husband and I bought all 3 programs, we were reeeeaaalllyyy hesitant at first for the same reasons you are."

For the same reasons you are. Whoever wrote that was talking to a stranger in a comment thread and assumed they were both standing in the same spot.

None of these people describe being persuaded. They describe buying it anyway and getting surprised, which is a different order of operations, and it's the better one for you: it doesn't ask you to feel anything different today.

Confidence Shows Up After The First Try, Not Before It

Your instinct might be to wait until some of the resistance drains off and then start. That's the part I'd push on.

In Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers explains that the only way to get rid of the fear of doing a specific thing is to go do that thing. Feeling capable is an output of having done it, not a requirement for beginning. Her own example is the first class she ever taught: three days of a churning stomach beforehand, eight hours of material prepared for a one-hour session, none of it helping. By the sixth session she was looking forward to standing in front of the room.

She makes one more point that carries into a living room. Everybody on unfamiliar ground feels that resistance, so having it tells you nothing about whether you're suited to the thing.

Hate and nerves are different words, and I'm not going to tell you which one you've got. Either one points you toward the same plan: don't start. And not starting is the one thing that keeps the feeling exactly where it is.

That's the reason Date Nights Dancing is built the way it is: easy swing moves taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you working the same moves together from the first video on. No studio. No dance experience required.

Three Things Flipped The Men Who Hated It

Three things come up over and over in the replies. All three are situations, not arguments.

1. The Living Room Has No Audience

Another reply, from somebody who bought it:

"This program is amazing!!! I was skeptical when I bought it. But my wife and I have had so much fun in our living room, I can't wait to take her out and show her off. I LOVE DANCING, never been comfortable in public"

Two facts in one person at the same time: loving it, and never having been comfortable being seen doing it. Only one of those two ever gets said at a wedding.

If you've told somebody you hate dancing and then swayed with her by the stove while the pasta water came up, you already know the difference between hating the dancing and hating the audience.

In that reply, being watched is the entire objection, named outright. Behind your own front door there are no spectators, and that subtraction happens before you've done a thing about the dancing itself.

2. He Got Something Working Before He Got Good

"We are 60 years old and have no rhythm and never thought we could look like we are dancing - we still have no rhythm, but people think we know how to dance and we are having fun!!"

They still don't have rhythm. They got the rest anyway.

In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath explain that people declare a goal and leave the whole middle of it blank, and that breaking a long run into intermediate finish lines gives you a burst of pride and a jolt of energy at each one you cross. One move you can get through without stopping is a finish line you can cross this week. Getting good is not one.

If the rhythm question is the one you're stuck on, I answered that one on its own page: learning to dance when you have no rhythm.

3. The Payoff Came From Her, Not From The Dancing

Back to the first reply: he "spins me around, dips me, and shows me off like a pro." And from the second: "I can't wait to take her out and show her off."

Whatever these men got out of it, they got it from the person standing across from them, and they got it well before either of them was any good. No argument you could have made to them in advance delivers that, which is why none of them needed one.

Nobody in these replies names a technique they're proud of. They name what happened in the room, and then they went and typed it in public under an ad from somebody they'd never met.

Start Before You Decide You Like It

The smallest honest version of this takes one song.

• Pick something the two of you already like. Three or four minutes is plenty.
• Kitchen or living room, whatever floor you've got, lights however they already are.
• Hold your hand out to her, palm up. If you want a line for it, you might say something like "come here" and leave your hand where it is.
• Sway. Turn her under your arm once if you can work out how. If you want the hold and where the feet go, how to slow dance with your wife walks through it.
• If it goes badly, it went badly in front of a dish rack.

You don't have to announce anything beforehand, and you don't have to say you enjoyed it afterward. Do it, let it be over, and do it again in a few days.

If what's holding you up is whether any of this is real, that's a fair thing to want settled, and I answered it straight: is Show Her Off a scam.

If trying something new together is its own obstacle in your house, confidence when you try new things together is the piece for that.

What I'd Tell A Friend Who Still Doesn't Want To

You don't owe anybody enthusiasm up front. Being against this is a fair read on a thing you've mostly met in rooms where you were the one being looked at, in shoes you didn't pick, with a song nobody consulted you about.

What the replies say is that being against it didn't turn out to be disqualifying. Somebody bought it for them, or they bought it themselves half-expecting to regret the money, and then something worked sooner than they thought it would, and the person across from them reacted, and that was the argument.

You're reading a page about a thing you don't like because she likes it. That's most of what this takes: doing something on her account before you're sold on it.

If you'd rather come at this from another direction first, the rest of the ideas and inspiration library is there.

So start hostile. Start on your own floor with the door shut and one song you didn't have to think about. The Date Nights Dancing program picks it up from there and takes the two of you from zero together, so that when a song comes on in your kitchen, you put your hand out and she takes it.