The forced, public, on-the-spot attempt is what broke a stall that years of good intentions never touched, and you can build the same pressure without going on a show.
"My wife is a dancer and I am not."
That's the opening line of an email a husband sent me. He wasn't asking me for anything. He wanted me to watch a video of his wife dancing, and before he got to the link he told me where the whole thing started:
"Just over a year ago we went on a Marriage Rescue Show to help heal our broken relationship."
"On this show we were given a challenge where I had to learn to dance salsa o the spot and I surprised myself and my wife Erin because I did it."
Somebody else picked the challenge. Somebody else picked the moment. His wife was right there. And he did it.
"It has changed our lives and our marriage."
Nothing had been stopping him before that. He had a wife who dances, a floor at home, and a year, and the year before that one. Being free to try was the condition he was already in, and it had produced nothing. What the show handed him was a date he couldn't move, a challenge he didn't choose, and people watching to see whether he took it.
That combination is what I'd try to reproduce if I were him, minus the show. The dancing itself is the ordinary part and you can buy it: Date Nights Dancing is easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you working the same moves from the first video. No dance experience required. What no program can hand you is what the show supplied. You build that part yourself.
An open invitation with no date attached is a standing option.
She's said she'd love it. You've said you want to. Neither of you is wrong, and nothing in that arrangement makes it happen this month rather than next spring. It's available every single evening, which works out to being scheduled for none of them.
That's not a character problem and I'm not going to treat it like one. Wanting to was never the missing piece. He wanted to before the show, too, and he had every evening of a whole year to act on it.
Take the show apart and there are two working parts in it.
The first is a date he didn't set and couldn't slide without telling somebody. The second is people who would see whether he did it, one of them his wife.
On that show they arrived together, at full strength, handed to him by somebody else. In an ordinary week, nobody hands you both at once. You assemble them, or you keep the standing option.
In Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers lists five truths about fear, and the second one is the one that applies here: "The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and do it."
She got to that from her own first year of teaching. She was assigned a subject she felt shaky on, prepared eight hours of material for a one-hour class, and walked in the first day with her heart pounding and her knees shaking. By the sixth session she was looking forward to it. The preparation didn't do that. The sixth session did.
In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath put the same idea in one sentence: "Action leads to insight more often than insight leads to action." They define the stretch plainly, too: "To stretch is to place ourselves in situations that expose us to the risk of failure."
Two authors making an argument isn't a study of marriages, and I wouldn't hand you either book as proof of anything about yours. But the husband in that email ran the experiment with none of her eight hours of preparation, and he came off that floor having surprised his wife and himself.
A niece's wedding, a reunion, a retirement party, a friend's sixtieth, a cruise you already paid for, your own anniversary, which is coming either way. You didn't choose the date, which is the whole reason it works. There's nothing to renegotiate with yourself.
Pick the next one and tell her that's the one you're aiming at. If you want help choosing which event to point at, I wrote a whole piece about the next dance floor on your calendar.
Not an announcement to everybody. One person: your brother, the friend you text about nothing, one half of the couple you have dinner with every few weeks. Tell him the date and what you plan to be able to do by then.
He'll ask.
In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe research on what the researcher Gollwitzer calls implementation intentions: a plan whose trigger is as simple as a time and a place. Setting them more than doubled the number of students who turned in an assignment on time, and cut recovery time in half for patients who had a hip or knee replaced. As the Heaths put it, "There is power in preloading a response."
So the plan isn't that the two of you will get better at this before the wedding. The plan is the song, the kitchen, after the dishes, Wednesday. It's small enough to be true, and specific enough that on Wednesday you'll know whether you did it.
That's also why the Date Nights Dancing program is built in fifteen-minute pieces rather than long sessions. A fifteen-minute lesson fits inside a real Wednesday, and neither of you has an advantage over the other on the first video.
He went on a show whose whole premise was that his marriage needed rescuing. I know nothing about that show, I have no idea whether it served anybody else who went on it, and I'm not suggesting a marriage show as a plan for anybody.
What carries over is the pressure. Being handed a challenge in front of people isn't a punishment when the thing being asked of you is something you already wanted to be able to do. He got pushed through a door he'd been circling for years, and what he found on the other side was that he could do it.
Pressure gets its bad name when it belongs to somebody else and gets applied to something you never asked for. This is you setting it, on your own behalf, for a thing your wife already said yes to.
The last thing in that email was about her:
"I want to show off my wife and her amazing dance skills. I want to share how dance has helped heal our marriage and given us a brand new way to communicate."
A brand new way to communicate is a large claim for one salsa challenge, and it's his claim rather than mine. He didn't write to tell me he'd become impressive. He wrote to make sure somebody watched his wife.
If you've been holding out for the right private evening to try this, you've already had years of evenings and none of them turned out to be the one. The waiting is the obstacle, not the schedule and not your two left feet.
You're also not behind. A man still turning this over after years of not getting to it is a man who hasn't given up on it, and that counts for more than a head start does. She's been saying yes to this the entire time.
If the hard part is believing the two of you can pull off something new together, confidence trying new things together is the one to read next. If you like the idea of using a shared difficult thing on purpose, doing the hard thing together covers the bigger version of it. Everything else lives on the ideas hub.
Pick the date first. Everything after that is easier than the date.
The Thursday reminder over 100,000 couples love: ideas and conversation starters that deepen love, laughter, and intimacy.
