Wedding Slow Dance Songs
For The Guy Who Isn't The Groom

The invitation has been on the counter for a month. You're not in the wedding party. You're at table nine with people you half know, and somewhere after the plates come away the DJ is going to drop the tempo, and your wife is going to look over at you.

Nobody rehearses the guests. So here are twenty songs you're likely to hear at the three moments that put a married man on a wedding floor, each one with a note on whether a beginner can get through it and why. Pick two, put them on at home before you go, and walk in knowing what your feet are doing.

Three Moments Put You On A Wedding Floor

The reception isn't one long dance. It's three separate jobs, and they want different songs.

The dinner hour. Background music while people eat and find their tables. Nobody's watching the floor. If you take her out for a minute between courses, you might be the only couple out there, and it reads as charming rather than showy.

The open-floor slow set. After the first dance and the parent dances, the DJ runs a stretch of slow songs to get everyone up. This is the one you're probably thinking about. The floor is full, the lights are down, and staying at the bar through the whole thing is a decision too.

The renewal dance. If the wedding in question is your own vow renewal or a milestone anniversary party, there's one song where the room is looking at the two of you. That's a different order of preparation, and the song matters more.

For all three, the physical part is smaller than it looks. There's a hold, there's a side-to-side, and there's a square your feet make. That covers a slow song. I wrote the whole thing out in how to slow dance with your wife if you've never had anyone show you. Working on it together in your own kitchen is the reason Date Nights Dancing exists: easy swing dance moves taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you on the same video from the first one. No dance experience required.

If you're the groom and it's your first dance you're worried about, that's a bigger job with choreography in it, and online wedding dance lessons are where I'd send you instead.

Four Things Make A Song Easy To Dance To

Everything below is my judgment as an instructor, not a fact about the song. The four are also how you size up anything the DJ plays that isn't on this list.

1. You can find the beat inside two bars. If you have to hunt for it, you'll spend the song counting in your head instead of holding your wife.

2. The tempo sits in sway range. Slow enough that one movement fills a beat comfortably. Too slow and you're standing still. Too fast and everything you know turns into a scramble.

3. It stays at one speed. Songs that drift faster in the chorus will pull you off, and you'll feel it as your fault when it isn't.

4. Both of you know it. When you both know the song, you both hear where it's going before it gets there.

The tag on each song below is my read on all four at once. "Easy" means a man who knows one movement can get through the whole thing. "Workable" means it'll go fine if you keep your moves small and don't try to travel.

Seven Songs For The Dinner-Hour Sway

Low stakes. These are for the minute between the salad and the toasts, when nobody is looking at the floor.

1. "At Last," Etta James. Beginner fit: easy. Slow, and the beat sits right on the surface where you can find it in the first two bars. The one I'd start on.

2. "Unforgettable," Nat King Cole. Beginner fit: easy. About as slow as a song gets. You have time to think between one movement and the next, which is what you want early in the night.

3. "Make You Feel My Love," Adele. Beginner fit: easy. Piano and voice, no hurry anywhere in it, and nothing in the arrangement to throw you.

4. "Come Away With Me," Norah Jones. Beginner fit: easy. Sparse enough that the room keeps talking around you, which is the point during dinner.

5. "The Way You Look Tonight," Frank Sinatra. Beginner fit: workable. It swings brighter than the rest of this group. Stay with a side-to-side and let the song do the rest.

6. "Have I Told You Lately," Van Morrison. Beginner fit: easy. Warm, mid-tempo, and it holds one speed from front to back.

7. "Fly Me to the Moon," Frank Sinatra. Beginner fit: workable. It moves faster than it feels. Cut the size of everything in half and you'll be fine.

Eight Songs For The Open-Floor Slow Set

This is the stretch with a full floor. Every one of these is a song you already know, and that's on purpose.

1. "Can't Help Falling in Love," Elvis Presley. Beginner fit: easy. To my ear it rocks in threes rather than fours, which sounds like a complication and isn't. Sway with it and you're already right.

2. "Wonderful Tonight," Eric Clapton. Beginner fit: easy. Slow and even the whole way through, with a beat you couldn't lose if you tried.

3. "Your Song," Elton John. Beginner fit: easy. Piano-led, and the verses give you long stretches where nothing changes.

4. "All of Me," John Legend. Beginner fit: easy. It builds toward the end, so hold your one turn for the back half and it'll look intentional.

5. "Thinking Out Loud," Ed Sheeran. Beginner fit: easy. It sits in sway range from the first bar and stays there.

6. "Amazed," Lonestar. Beginner fit: easy. A wide-open country ballad, and you can hear the chorus coming, so you always know where you are in it.

7. "The Lady in Red," Chris de Burgh. Beginner fit: easy. It floats, and there's enough room in it to travel a few feet instead of standing on one tile.

8. "Truly Madly Deeply," Savage Garden. Beginner fit: easy. Mid-tempo and predictable, which is the pair of qualities you want out there.

If that group is the shape you're after, there are more of them in the best slow dance songs, and if you and your wife came up on a particular decade, try 80s and 90s slow dance songs or country slow dance songs.

Five Songs For A Vow Renewal Dance

In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath explain that transitions, milestones and pits are the occasions worth marking deliberately, because they're defining moments whether or not anyone builds something into them. A renewal is a milestone you're already marking. The song is a lot of what the room will remember about it.

These five are slower, plainer, and written from inside a long marriage rather than at the front end of one.

1. "Grow Old With Me," John Lennon. Beginner fit: easy. Plainspoken and slow, and it suits a dance where nobody is grading the footwork.

2. "Remember When," Alan Jackson. Beginner fit: easy. It's built as a look back down the years, which is the job in front of you.

3. "The Book of Love," Peter Gabriel. Beginner fit: easy. His recording is very slow and very bare. Hold her and go side to side and you've done it.

4. "Then," Brad Paisley. Beginner fit: easy. A song about loving her more now than at the start, for a room where half the people were at the original wedding.

5. "In My Life," The Beatles. Beginner fit: workable. Brighter than the rest of this group, so treat it as a sway rather than something to show off with.

If you're building the rest of the evening around that dance, there are vow renewal ideas worth borrowing, and the next dance floor on your calendar is about the weddings already sitting in your year.

Ask Her Early, Before The Floor Fills Up

The slow set is short. It's easy to wait it out deciding, and then it's over and the DJ is back on the fast songs.

When the tempo drops, take the drink out of her hand if she's holding one and set it on the table. Put your hand out, palm up, and don't say anything clever. She'll take it or she'll laugh and take it.

Walk to a spot on the edge of the floor rather than the middle. You'll be less on display, and you'll have a wall or a table to orient by.

Right hand flat on her back under her left shoulder blade, left hand holding her right hand out to your side, elbows with a bend in them. Side to side for the first verse until you both feel the beat. Add the square after that if you want it, or don't. A full song of side-to-side is a dance.

When it ends, thank her and walk her off before the next one starts. Leaving on your own terms beats getting stranded in a fast song.

Practice At Home The Week Before You Go

Pick two songs off this list, put the first one on in the kitchen, and go through it once with her. Then the second one. That's the whole preparation.

Push a chair back so there's floor. Get the rug out from under your feet. If it falls apart in the middle, start the song over. Nothing about a Tuesday in your own kitchen costs you anything.

If you want more songs for the kitchen rather than the reception, slow songs to dance to in the living room is the list for that.

If you get through both songs and she wants more of that, Date Nights Dancing is where it goes next, both of you working on the same moves at home. There are more at-home evenings like it in the date night ideas library.

You already know how to show up for her at things like this: the suit, the gift, the drive, the small talk with her cousin. Looking up which songs you can dance to is one more of those, and it's the one she'll be standing in the middle of.

Put one of them on this week and hold her for the whole song. Then when the tempo drops at that wedding, you're the one with his hand out to her while everyone else is deciding.