Rejection is tough to handle,
even for me, a man who has been dancing tango for nine years. Men are big
babies and I’m no exception. I’d like to offer my thoughts on
this as it is a topic of constant concern to both men and women.
Once upon a time I shared several
enjoyable tandas with a delightful woman. I noticed she’d
been sitting for too long when milonga-style music began to play. I
invited her to the floor but was rebuffed. She said she never danced milonga-style
for some reason that I can’t remember; it doesn’t matter because all I heard
was, “no.”
I haven’t danced with her since.
On another occasion she
approached me to let me know that her refusal was only to milonga-style dances,
not vals or tango. I told her politely that I understood but that was a lie. I
did not understand and for some reason I lost my desire to dance with her. I’m
not sure why this is. When I think about asking her to dance, I feel as if
there is a big cliff that I have to climb in order to make the offer and I walk
away from it.
I get rejected a lot and I’ve
developed a mechanism for dealing with it. I’m fairly certain I am not the only
man doing this. What I do helps suppress the emotional volcano that erupts
when we are snubbed by prospective partners. All our lives we learn how to
handle slights from our own gender but it is somehow different when the opposite
sex delivers the blow. It doesn’t matter if the refusal is a discreet cabeceo
or an outright verbal response, a tanguero has to take it like a man, remain
calm and be congenial.
When this happens, I simply tell
myself that there is no chemistry there and that I must avoid making the same
mistake again. I tried and, for whatever reason, she declined. I recall past
encounters when I pushed an offer for absolute clarification and remember that the outcome was never
good. Usually the woman reconsidered and subjected herself to a tanda with me but it felt like I was dancing with a corpse.
After nearly a decade of
rejections, I’ve come to accept that 'no' may mean 'no' forever even though she may not be of the same mind. When I see a woman
who has turned me down, the thought that pops into my head is “don’t ask her to
dance” instead of “maybe she's ready to dance with me now.” In my mind, she is
shrouded in a cloud of fog I call anti-desire.
The process involved in making a
dance invitation begins with an incredible phenomenon. It is a tiny spark of
desire that originates in a dimension with which we are not familiar so I can’t
say what it is. This tiny ember is quite powerful, much like the gravitational
force that keeps us close to planet Earth, or the nuclear force that binds
protons to neutrons or the reproductive ability of DNA. It may be ethereal in
nature, existing somewhere on the macroscopic level out there in the cosmos or at the molecular level as a quantum object.
Maybe it’s a spiritual thing. Whatever it is, I can say with
certainty that it is remarkable and wondrous. It is like a flower, delicate and
powerful in its ability to attract, an integral part of creation.
Rejection is a
power almost as subtle and equally supreme. It is a chemical with cosmic/quantum properties that inhibits the ignition factor responsible for the formation of a
desire to dance with someone.
A constant topic of conversations
with tangueras is about who won’t dance with them and why that is so. Men are
such a mystery to women but we are also a mystery to ourselves. Rejection is a
necessary component of the tango experience. We have to know what it feels like
to be cold to appreciate the heat. So it is with being refused, each time we
are rebuffed increases the amount of pleasure we receive when we are finally
accepted into the embrace of another dancer.
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