Submission and Ballroom Dancing

I have dabbled in ballroom dancing. I have even performed on stage for various dance conferences. Then one day I discovered why I enjoy ballroom dancing as much and how it relates to who I am. I am a submissive from the core of my being. Sure in my everyday life I have to take care of things and for that I have to be assertive, competent, delegate tasks, and manage people. However, none of that takes away from my submissive nature.

In ballroom dancing, the woman follows and the man's lead. It is an extremely easy concept for me to understand being a submissive. There is an amount of trust, connection, and chemistry that has to be there for an effective partnership. I remember the moment ballroom dancing became clear to me was when I accepted that on the dance floor the man is in charge. I began to flow and glide from that point onwards.

However, afterward when I learned to do tricks and lifts, I realized something very critical. Even though I follow the man, even though he is lifting me or throwing me around, I am actually carrying my own weight, positioning myself strategically, instead of being a dead lump of meat for him to carry. I noticed that same issue came up in Dancing with the Stars, where Mark Ballas told Chelsey Kane this season that she is doing her moves but during the lifts she is not carrying her own weight and it is getting heavy for Mark to carry her, although she is one of the skinniest, most fit person I have seen.

Submission, for me, works very similarly to ballroom dancing. I trust my partner. We have a connection, a special chemistry. He leads and I follow. However, I have to carry my own weight. He cannot do everything for me even though he is in charge, guiding, leading, and controlling us. I have my own weight to lift, own steps to execute, and cannot really be a dead weight and expect him to just make me float and glide with his magic wand. And what a magic wand that is. :).

Apart from the above realization, the following has been by far the most relevant realization today, which I read in a book about the Law of Attraction. "It is never possible for another person to behave sufficiently, or consistently enough, to keep you in balance. That is your job. If you can accept, when you do not feel good, that it is no one else's responsibility to bring you back to feeling good, you will discover the freedom that is essential to your maintenance of personal joy. And if you do not, you just move from unsatisfying relationship to unsatisfying relationship" (Hicks & Hicks, 2009, p. 84).

Just like in ballroom dancing, even if the man leads the woman incorrectly on the floor, the woman still has to execute the steps as correctly as she can, making him look as good as she can. This kind of selfless, egoless, display of performance appeals to me as a submissive. I don't purport one becomes a doormat, but I wonder what a relationship could look like when one is not focused on that which is not working but that which is working brilliantly. And what would it look like when someone takes the responsibility of bringing her/himself into balance on their own when the easier path would have lead to complaining and blaming the other person, no matter how justified such complaint might be. I come back to that one tenet in ballroom dancing, where I have to carry my own weight regardless of how the man leads me.  Thus in submission, I have realized that bringing myself into balance when something seems off is my responsibility and no one else's in order to have a satisfying relationship.