The Next Dance Floor
On Your Calendar

Somebody wrote in with this:

"I am horrible and have my sons wedding where there is couples and line dancing. Is there any hope for me?"

You may have your own version of that sentence. A wedding you're attending, a college reunion, a cruise with a ballroom on one of the upper decks, the company gala your wife already bought a dress for. Nobody asked whether you wanted a dance floor in your year. It came bundled with the invitation.

If the wedding coming up is your own, that's a different job with a different deadline, and I'd start you on online wedding dance lessons instead. This one is for the man in the fourth row.

The plan below is sorted by how many weeks you have left, with a realistic result for each.

A Date On The Calendar Beats Good Intentions

Nobody crosses a dance floor because he meant to get around to it eventually. He crosses it because there's a date.

In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath explain that people hang fresh starts on landmark dates. Researchers tracking students found the probability of a gym visit rose 33% at the start of a new week, 14% at a new month, and 47% at a new semester. Same students, same gym, same intentions all year. The calendar was the difference.

Your invitation is one of those dates, except this one has your name on it. You're not trying to be good at dancing by June. You're trying to be ready for one specific evening in June, in a room you can picture, with people you can name.

So spend the weeks between now and then on the moves you'll use in front of those people, which is what Date Nights Dancing teaches: easy swing at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you learning the same moves together from the first video on. No studio, and no dance experience required.

Pick The One Song You Plan To Dance All The Way Through

Decide up front what a good night looks like, because if you leave it undefined it will default to "be impressive," and that isn't a target anybody hits in a few weeks.

The version I'd pick: one song, start to finish, with your wife, and you don't walk off early. That's it. Not four songs. Not the fast one the DJ plays at 10pm. One.

Slow songs are the friendliest place to put that bet, because the tempo gives you time to think and the frame does most of the talking. If you've never held a proper frame, how to slow dance is the shortest path from where you are to that one song.

Line dancing, if the reception has it, is a separate animal and a much easier one: everybody faces the same way, everybody is watching the person in front of them, and nobody is watching you. A crowd that's milling around instead of seated and facing you does the same thing, which is why a barn dance or a concert on the square is a kinder debut than a reception. I put the warm-weather ones in summer date ideas for couples.

One gift message, written to the person the gift was bought for, said this:

"I love you babe, will you help me get better at dancing so I do t embarrass you at Boots and Bling."

Boots and Bling is an event with a date on it. So is yours.

Your Plan Depends On How Many Weeks Are Left

Same plan, sized to the time you've got. Find your row.

Eight Weeks Out Or More

You have room, so use it on repetition rather than on collecting material. Two practice nights a week, the same two nights, in the living room with the rug pushed back. Two or three partner moves, plus a way into them and a way out of them, is enough material for the night itself.

Practice nights are date nights whether you meant them to be or not, so you may as well make them worth showing up for. There are plenty of other ways to spend one in the date night ideas library if you want to give the evening a second half.

Realistic result: two or three moves you can do without narrating them in your head, and a wife who has already seen you do them.

About Four Weeks Out

Stop adding. Pick two moves and spend the month on the seams between them, because the seam is where couples stall out and start apologizing to each other.

Realistic result: one song, comfortably, with a repeat or two that nobody in that room will notice.

Two Weeks Out

One move and a good frame. Practice in the shoes you're wearing to the event, not in socks.

Realistic result: you get through the song, and she never has to lead.

The Week Of

No new material. None. What you rehearse now is the walk: standing up, crossing the room, asking her, getting into the frame in front of people.

Realistic result: you ask her, you go out there, and you stay for the whole song.

Practice In The Shoes And The Room You'll Be In

In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath describe how the Nashville sit-in demonstrators trained before the lunch counters: how to dress, how to move to and from the counters in orderly shifts, how to hold steady through simulated attacks. The rehearsal worked because it resembled the real thing closely enough to be useful.

Yours is a much easier assignment and the principle carries. Three details make your living room resemble a reception:

1. The shoes. Leather on a hardwood floor behaves nothing like socks on a rug, and whichever one you practice in is the one you'll be calibrated for.
2. The space. A reception floor at 9pm is a crowd, not a ballroom, so practice in a six-foot square instead of the whole room.
3. The song. Pick something that could plausibly be played at the event, and turn it up to about the volume it'll be on the night.

Somebody who bought the program as a gift emailed me this:

"I am taking her on a dirty dancing weekend where they filmed the movie and wanted to practice some moves before we got there."

Preload The Sentence You Say When The Song Starts

The Heaths also describe what researchers call an implementation intention: a plan attached to a specific time and place rather than to willpower. Setting one more than doubled the number of students who turned in an assignment on time.

Attach yours to the event. The trigger is the first slow song after the meal. The response is that you stand up, put your hand out, and say something you've already decided on.

If you want a line to use, you might try "Come dance this one with me."

Then wait. If she's mid-conversation, tell her you'll come back for the next one, and come back for the next one. The reason to pick the words now is that at 8:45pm, with the first notes going and forty people at the tables behind you, you won't be composing anything.

The Fear Doesn't Leave Before You Walk Out There

In Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers explains that fear of a particular thing dissolves after you do that thing, never before it. The doing comes first. She uses her own first year of teaching as the example: eight hours of material prepared for a one-hour class, none of which touched the fear, and by the sixth session she was looking forward to walking in.

Jeffers also makes the point that fear on unfamiliar ground is universal. So the nerves you might feel standing up at that reception aren't a report on whether you're ready, and their presence tells you nothing about whether you belong out there.

One gift message named the events it was buying for:

"It’s Valentine’s Day and I bought it, so Alex you have to do it. Do it for Rachel, so you can dance at weddings, and for Jane, so you can dance at her parties." ...

Somebody bought that gift with the calendar already in mind.

She'll Remember That You Asked Her

In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath explain that people don't score an experience by averaging its minutes. They remember its best moment and its ending. Nobody grades a wedding reception on your technique across four hours.

Which means the night comes down to the part you control: standing up in a room full of people, putting your hand out, and walking your wife onto a floor she may not have expected you to cross. She's been to weddings with you before. This might be the one she brings up later.

You already know how to show up for her when it counts. A reception floor is a smaller version of that than it looks from the fourth row. If you want the honest version of what a few weeks of practice buys a beginner, I wrote that out in how long it takes to learn to dance. And if you'd rather spend those weeks on something that outlasts one reception, that's the reason the Date Nights Dancing program exists: the moves are still yours on the Tuesday after the wedding, and on the Tuesday after that.