May 3, 2026 May 3, 2026 2026-05-03

In 2013 I wrote about the intense emotional entanglements partner dancing creates. I was two years into tango and bewildered by the emotional storms it could generate. I had a word for what was happening — “entanglement” — but not yet the experience required to understand what was actually happening. Now I do.

Let me tell you what those early tango crushes actually were, and what they taught me that I couldn’t have learned any other way.

What Was Actually Happening

The 2013 post was careful and slightly cautious — I was trying to describe something real without alarming anyone, including myself. What I called “entanglement” was the experience of being emotionally opened by physical proximity and non-verbal synchrony with someone you’d never had a conversation with. You’d dance with someone for three songs, say thank you, but feel like you’d exchanged something significant. It was confusing.

With distance, I can name it more directly: tango creates a kind of intimacy that is both artificial and quick – it happens at a speed that ordinary life doesn’t. The physical closeness, the necessity of following and leading, the requirement of mutual attention for the duration of a song — these activate the same neurological channels as genuine intimacy. You feel connected because, physiologically, you briefly are.

But the crushes that emerged from this weren’t romantic in the conventional sense. They were more like a discovery — this person and I can be in sync, which is rarer than it sounds. That discovery has a significant weight, and most of the times it can feel like more than it really is.

Does the Close/Romantic Distinction Hold Up?

The 2013 post worked hard to maintain the distinction between close and romantic, because I thought it was important and honest. A decade of dancing has complicated it.

The distinction is real, but it’s not stable. Tango does not automatically produce romantic feelings, but it creates conditions where they’re unusually likely to develop if they were going to develop at all. The physical presence accelerates things. What might have stayed a passing interest in a different context can become something more intense on the dance floor. The dance doesn’t invent the feeling — it amplifies whatever’s there.

What tango actually taught me about relationships: you can have a quality of attention with someone that doesn’t require history or shared context. And once you’ve experienced that quality of attention, you start to notice its absence in ordinary interactions.

What Teaching Changed

I started teaching tango a few years after writing that post. Teaching changed a lot of things.

When you teach, you stop being inside the experience and start observing it. You watch students have the same disorientation I had — the strange emotional weather of a dance — and you start to see the mechanics more clearly. The intensity is real. The duration is often not. Nor is the coverage – it stops the moment you get out of the milonga room.

The most useful thing I told students was this: tango creates genuine feeling in the moment. What you do with that feeling outside the milonga is your responsibility. The connection on the floor is complete in itself.

I had to learn that lesson personally before I could teach it.

What Tango Teaches About Intimacy That Nothing Else Does

Physical presence is not replaceable. This sounds obvious but its implications are radical in a world that has spent fifteen years building more sophisticated proxies for connection.

Video calls do not replicate the information you exchange with another person’s body in the same physical space. There’s a kind of data that only comes through proximity — the breath, the small muscular adjustments, the way someone responds to your weight shifting before you’ve consciously decided to shift it. Tango made me permanently skeptical of the idea that remote tools adequately substitute for being in the room.

The relationships in my life that have depth share something with a good tanda: mutual attention, willingness to follow and lead, presence that isn full an non-negotiable. Those qualities don’t require tango. But tango gave me a vocabulary for noticing when they’re present and when they’re not.

What Those Early Entanglements Turned Out to Be

Most of them were exactly what I suspected: real in the moment, but never meant to last. A few became genuine friendships that had nothing to do with dancing. One or two were more complicated. But that was all.

In every case, what the tango connection was pointing to was something true about me — what I was looking for, what I was missing, what I was capable of. The dance was the diagnostic of something happening inside, but it wasn’t the cure – the actual work had to be done elsewhere.

I’m still doing the work.