Dancing: A Great Tool For Couples Conflict Resolution

There’s something magical that happens when you dance – a sense of freedom and excitement that comes with getting the moves right, with rhythmically stepping your way out of your comfort zone. Of course, becoming proficient doesn’t happen overnight. But you may find that once you’ve stuck with dancing a while, it starts to have numerous positive outcomes in other areas of your life as well.

One such area is in relationships. Dancing inherently holds within it the need to listen and problem-solve. In order to be a good dancer – especially when dancing a couples-based dance like salsa – you also need to be a good communicator. You need to both clearly express what you want your partner to do and to listen and respond to expressed requests appropriately. It takes a great deal of patience, hard work, and dedication to get a sequence of movements correct and to go from two left feet to being able to dance fluidly, expressively, and freely.

You can take these same understandings of dance and apply them to your relationship. Couples who choose to learn to dance together may well find that they not only gain the skill of dancing, but that they become better able to manage general conflict through applying the techniques of clear communication, listening, patience, and perseverance that they learnt in dance class. Attending a free dance lesson for couples online could prove a good first step then for couples looking to develop attributes and gain tools to improve their relationship.

While dancing won’t help to solve all your relational difficulties, applying its principles during times of conflict could really help to smooth over many of the rough patches. And who know, maybe eventually you’ll move from struggling in dancing and in your relationship to being confident, competent, and happy in both.