HOW-2 Meet Women

by

Cartaphilus


Chapter 1

Healing



i

They robbed you of your birthright. Family and peer group ripped from you at an early age the innocent social adeptness of the young. The bullying and being "cut down to size" that passes for socialization scarred your psyche. The fearful result is that you are not just shy, but painfully shy.

There is a place for shy, introspective persons. It is not a comfortable one. These are the creative ones, the ones who develop their minds, the ones who think while others act. They are the ones taken for granted, their worth unrecognized. They are the ones who cannot get dates...



ii

Remember the time you could not think of anything to say to the woman sitting across from you in that little cafe. There was a painful lump in your throat, and you stammered when she looked your way. She smiled at you sympathetically, but still, there was no way to reach out to her, to touch her... and you lost yet another chance to make contact.

Remember that party, when you were standing off to one side by yourself, and the other people were stealing brief glances at you over their shoulders, laughing quietly, giggling, some of them. You approached several of the women, but quickly they found excuses to move away. Finally you walked out into the bitter cold night air, only then to realize that your fly was open.

Remember leaving that one dance, and ahead of you, walking home, was the woman you had danced with for hours. She met your eyes, momentarily, nearly smiled (you thought), but kept walking. You could not quite summon up the courage to approach her, to ask if you could at least accompany her to the nearest subway stop. She walked away into the night, and you never saw her again.




iii
You Can't Get There From Here, Can You?

A gaping chasm splits off the landscape of the shy and lonely from the rest of humanity. This is the great divide between losers and winners, so we are told. What radical transformation, then, would it require to reshape a shy person into an extroverted, socially adept one? Where would you find the kind savior to rescue you from the prison of your loneliness and tutor you in the social skills needed to escape from the four walls of your own head? Where can you learn to care for, to love another?

Personality change is virtually impossible under ordinary circumstances. Likewise, saviors are in ridiculously short supply (and not so easy to recognize when they are found). What shapes your fate is your own perceptions, your old ingrained habits of fear and failure. Others sense how you feel about yourself and mirror your self-image back at you. Face yourself, know thyself, and take your life into your own hands. Become a stronger person and depend no more on fortuitous happenstance, on wishing and hoping.


We are all worms.  But I do believe I am a glowworm.
-- Winston Churchill


Only the bridge of self-acceptance and understanding traverses the narrow passage to our fellow humans. We shy people must of necessity become our own rescuers, teachers and saviors. Yet, if the tools for self-transformation exist, they are difficult to use. Social skills can be learned, as a rule slowly and sometimes painfully, but loneliness is a powerful motivator.

The useful social skills are subtle elaborations of what we already know and do, but of a somewhat higher order. Obvious examples include listening, starting a conversation with a stranger, speaking for an audience (notably the not-so-lowly art of telling jokes), effective writing, and dancing. Dancing.




iv

The socially adept dance through life. Seldom do they make a false step (faux pas), and they instinctively sense the nuances of appropriate behavior. They know when to assert themselves, to "make their move", and they do so with practiced grace. Theirs are the skills of the dancer.

By implication, an antidote to the maladroitness, the maladaption, the clumsiness of the shy is simply learning to dance. Dance is poetry, it is economy of motion, it is the greatest return for the least effort. It is a doorway to escaping the confinement of your ego-bound self, of becoming part of a transcendent organism, a group. It is flight for the earthbound.

Dance presence represents a mind set, an attitude, a bearing that communicates confidence and sense of direction on the dance floor. It means intuiting where the other dancers in your radius of action are, your position and motion relative to them, and anticipating how your movements will interact with them. Presence, life presence is the same, generalized to Real Life.

Couples dance unfolds the mysteries of touch, of subtlety, and balance. Holding a dance partner glides you past the "sweaty palm" nervousness of actually touching a woman, and swinging your partner imparts the feeling of give and take, of balance and flow.

The simple line dances are easily learned, and mastery of couple dances, folk and square, even ballroom, follows with practice. The sense of accomplishment at getting through an easy couple dance for the first time, a "Danish Masquerade" or "Road To The Isles", makes it all worthwhile, and the sheer fun of it is an extra bonus.

Most areas of the country have folk, contra, and square dance groups. Listings of times and places may be found in local newspapers, or you can enquire in the rec.folk-dancing Usenet newsgroup on the Net. The dansegypsy page gives many links to folk dance groups across the country.

How to tell the dancer from the dance?






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