How Swing Dancing Changed My Outlook on Relationships

So one of my boyfriend and I's favorite things to do is to go swing dancing.
It's a time to just let loose, swing each other around, and have a grand old time making up our own very interesting dance moves.
This week was interesting because I had the opportunity to go to a girls night at my parish where our FOCUS missionary was teaching a large group of girls how to swing dance. Seems odd, right? A whole bunch of girls swing dancing with no boys as dance partners. But the more Katherine talked about the importance of dance and being able to teach a man how to lead, the more I understood the immensely important lesson I was going to learn. All of us women talked about the fact that we need to look for spouses who can dance with us and more importantly lead us. They are someone who you can have loads of fun with but yet still learn new ways to follow. As women we, like many things in our relationships with men, receive so much. I mean thinking about this in regards to our own sexuality even! The men give and the women receive. This is also true in dancing. You need both people to be giving. In the case of men they need to be leaders. And you need the women to be able to receive- or be able to follow. Both the man and the woman need to be willing to serve each other in the way that they were intended to do so and be willing to work as a team in order to both reap the same benefits... in this case? Have one heck of a fun time dancing with your partner.

Miscommunication or lack of communication can be extremely tough on a couple...
Trust me.
One night, for some odd reason I was particularly peeved and had decided to not talk to my boyfriend... therefore a majority of the car ride driving over to Sundance (the place we go to swing dance) I remained silent and stubborn to any conversation. He would make a joke or two and I would chuckle a little but only to return back to my awkward silence.
Finally, we made it to the dancing place and I was excited to let my stubbornness roll off and have some fun dancing with my guy.
But see at this point my silence had been hurting him and causing him to have some pent up anger.
You can probably guess what happened.... we were a mess on the dance floor.
While we were first dancing neither of us were smiling and we were just going through the motions. I was being spun into people and off the dance floor, while he wasn't getting any warmth or support from me. I was being the worst possible follower and had caused us to studder step more than once.
I could see that it just wasn't going well for us so we stepped off to actually talk.
Then... my dear friends...we figured out our missteps.
It was a lack of communication that was bothering both of us and we weren't unified as a team. This was our problem. Normally, we are both warm and can laugh about any mistake that we make on the dance floor, and even on occasion make that mistake turn into some positive new dance move that only we use. But we were both silently angry at each other while first arriving and that led to my own lack of trust in his ability to lead (that's why I was struggling following) and his own frustration which was displayed by me being run into people. An outside factor to this was also that it was super crowded.
What we learned goes beyond dancing but cuts to the heart about our relationship. When we aren't communicating with one another, we aren't being the best possible partners for each other in that moment.

After having resolved our communication difficulties..... it helped tremendously.
Don't get me wrong! There was still the occasional run in with another couple or awkward turn. But the important thing is that we were ourselves and laughing about it when mistakes came. We were able to learn from them and dance the next step even better.

See... we still are going to make mistakes. We will never be the absolute perfect dance partners. What matters is that we move forward from our mistakes and not get bogged down to the point where we may not even want to dance at all. Because to be honest? My boyfriend is dance partner for life material. Someone that goes beyond to ensure the salvation of my soul by leading me to Christ. He leads and I follow not because it's the easiest thing to do- but because it's the right thing to do.

...When I'm with you, I know who I am and who I wanna be... -Ben Rector