by Jo Piazza
There also happens to be a good amount of scientific research that couples who dance well together tend to feel more emotionally and psychologically connected. I have no idea if this is complete bullshit, but it certainly worked for my former neighbors.
Following soccer, dancing is pretty much the national pastime in Chile, and most Chilean couples perform an elaborate dance at their own weddings, often involving a particular style called the cueca, an intricate, multipart dance of seduction, love, and attracting your soulmate.
“We have to learn this dance for our wedding,” I insisted to Nick before we headed to Chile.
“I thought you wanted to dance to ‘Crazy Love’ by Van Morrison,” he said as we tried to narrow down our wedding guest list one final time.
“We’ll do both!” I replied. “The people won’t care. We have an open bar.”
Nick waggled his bushy eyebrows, snapped his fingers, and threw an arm over his head.
“Olé!”
Tall and narrow like a supermodel, Chile stretches as long as the North American coastline from Alaska to Mexico. To reach Santiago from San Francisco took two flights and an entire day of flying with a brief pit stop in the Dallas airport for barbecue. Somewhere above Mexico, Nick and I began holding hands. We hold hands a lot, something new for me. On the plane ride to South America the turbulence made me clutch his hand tighter than usual, so that I could feel his bones with my fingertips. He assured me the turbulence wouldn’t continue much longer, due to our altitude, the weather, and the topography of the region. Nick always checks a plane’s flight path and which side of the plane will have the best views throughout the flight. Prior to check-in, he will change our airplane seats many, many times to ensure optimal views and a row of seats to ourselves.
Nick loves everything about planes and flying. When we board them, he knocks on the outside of the jet for luck and then his face lights up with the frenetic energy of a child who has been given ice cream for the first time. “We’re going to fly!” he will cheer.
No matter where we are in the stratosphere, I can point out the plane window and ask, “Where are we now?” and Nick will know. I get such a kick out of it, I do it a dozen times on each flight.
“Since we’re on the left side of the plane, we’ll be able to see Aconcagua as we land,” Nick explained as we descended into Chile. I nodded to let him know he could tell me more. “It’s the highest peak in the Southern Hemisphere at almost twenty-three thousand feet.”
We were arriving in Chile, less than a month before the actual wedding, with no vows written and no idea how to dance together. And first, we had to ski.
The skiing in the small mountain village of Portillo is hands down some of the best in the world, but most Americans, outside of the national ski team, have never heard about it. Surrounded by towering, rocky peaks with skies a shade of blue you can’t even conjure on Instagram, the place is a little slice of heaven.
Nine feet of snow had dumped on the Andes mountains two days before we arrived, a gift from the gods or El Niño. We spent long days gliding down the steep valleys. Together we conquered one of the most complicated ski lifts in the entire world, the Va et Vient (French for “comes and goes”), a gonzo invention that drags four or five people up a sheer mountain face and then slingshots them backward onto black-diamond and double-black-diamond ski slopes. Some call it the “slingshot to heaven”; others refer to it with a trail of expletives.
When we reached the top of the Va et Vient, I refused to take Nick’s hand, certain I could conquer this devil lift on my own. I fell flat on my face into a pile of powder, sliding ten feet down the mountain upside down, convinced I would plummet all the way into the Laguna del Inca lake below. As I tried to regain my ski legs and my dignity, the ski instructor told the story associated with the crystal blue waters of that lake. On full-moon nights the locals believe you can hear strange cries from within the water. Legend has it that the Inca princess Kora-Illé tragically fell from a cliff during a royal mountain banquet here. Her soulmate, the warrior Illi Yunqui, was shaken with grief and believed that no earthly grave could compare to the lake. Shrouded in white linen, she was lowered into its depths. From that moment the waters became tinted the color of her eyes, and Illi Yunqui stayed to mourn her forevermore.
“I don’t want to die in that lake,” I said to Nick when he skied down to help me up. “That’s not my idea of romance.”
Nick shrugged. “Then you should probably let me help you off the ski lift.”
Let him help you, came one voice in my head. Screw that. You don’t need help. You’re a badass independent woman, came the other. The second belonged to the long-single girl who once scared off a potential mugger by brandishing a hairbrush like a handgun. I didn’t know how to be if I wasn’t the one taking care of myself. I was only just learning to include another person in all aspects of my life, just understanding what life was like when I couldn’t decide to eat Thai food every night for four days or spend an entire Saturday watching only movies that starred Hugh Grant.
Maybe I was asserting my independence to buck the idea that I needed my almost-husband to help me do anything. Maybe it was a desperate assurance that becoming someone’s wife wouldn’t turn me into a dependent. Maybe I was being an arrogant asshole. I face-planted off that lift another six times before retiring to the lodge in search of a hot toddy.
In the resort’s bar, we were swiftly informed salsa lessons would be held in the hotel gymnasium that very evening. When we arrived at the resort’s indoor basketball court, I decided this was exactly like Dirty Dancing, if you replaced Johnny and Penny with two remarkably sexy Chileans. The female instructor resembled Shakira, except with a mod Vidal Sassoon haircut. Her lacy white bra peeked out from a tight pink tank top that did nothing to conceal the jiggle of her ample breasts as she shimmied across the slick wood floor. Her counterpart was a Chilean Jason Statham, bald, stoic, and hot.
“¡Hola! ¡Bailamos!” Nick greeted the instructors. His Spanish is quite good and since we boarded the plane in San Francisco, he’d been mouthing foreign words, silently practicing what to say next. “You look like a schizophrenic,” I’d warned him, but I enjoyed watching him doing it anyway.
The entire time we were in Chile people kept complimenting him on his accent, which seems even more impressive given how incredibly apple-pie American Nick looks with his blond hair, blue eyes, and broad shoulders. When he began introducing me to people as his novia, which means “fiancée” in Spanish, everyone asked us about our plans for the wedding. When was it? How many people? What would we eat? Did we have a first dance? “That’s what we’re here to learn,” I said, eliciting nods of approval from these complete strangers.
While his Spanish is legitimately terrific, Nick only thinks he is a wonderful dancer. One of his buddies told me he used to try to dance with all the Latina girls during his past trips to Mexico and South America and at salsa nights in the Mission Street bars in San Francisco. On most of those occasions he just confused the hell out of them.
“He does strange things with his hips,” his friend Jeff told me. “And his arms. They move in funny directions. He once accidentally hit some poor girl in the nose. I think he broke it.”
I had my own dancing baggage that included two left feet and an inability to actually enjoy myself. “I need to learn how to not lead,” I whispered to Nick before the lesson began. “I’ve never been able to dance and let a man lead.”
“Well, you just can’t. It’s forbidden,” he replied with a teasing grin. Nick is more of a feminist than I am. He once pulled out dog-eared copies of my childhood Judy Blume books from boxes I’d brought from home and held them with great delight.
“I read these,” he said, thumbing through a copy of Blubber.
“No, you didn’t,” came my automatic reply, grabbing the book back from his hand to return it to the box.
“I read all the Judy Blume books,” he insisted. “They weren’t all for girls. I rea
d the ones for girls too, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was a little confusing, but I remember being sad I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.” This image of my fiancé as a towheaded little boy reading about what it was like for a girl to get her period for the first time made my heart melt like a s’more.
But in Chile he was telling me that he was going to be in charge. And I didn’t like it. “You’ll have to stop. You need to let me lead.” Easier said than done.
Salsa steps appear simple until you try to do them. You step backward. You step forward. You tap your foot. You tap your foot. When you get good, you wiggle your arms in a sexy way and move your hips like you’re doing the hula hoop, without a hula hoop.
“Uno, dos, tres,” our instructor shouted, shaking her breasts like a Vitamix. “Cuatro, cinco, seis…¿Todo bien?” She wanted us to give her a thumbs-up that we understood. I gave her the thumbs-up because I hadn’t been paying attention.
As the sultry instructors counted the steps, I stumbled and mumbled under my breath, “Goddamn, son of a bitch,” instead of “One, two, three, four, five.” As I watched the instructors move in sync, I thought about swans, those pretentious, beautiful birds that mate for life. Floating across the water they appear calm and composed, but beneath the surface they paddle circles in perfect sync with their partners. Scientists believe that the synchronous movement tells potential romantic interlopers to bugger off. The same may be true for humans. According to William Michael Brown, PhD, a psychologist and dance researcher at Queen Mary University of London and the University of East London, humans who can dance well together signal that they are highly committed to each other. I wanted our physical movements to prove our commitment in case Nick was ever tempted, like Ben Affleck, to run off with the nanny and get a tramp stamp.
Nick and I began counting together, but somehow I stepped on his foot each time we reached cuatro. Was it my left foot or my right foot that went first? I didn’t know. I was out of breath from the altitude and the exertion. “This is hard,” I pouted. Sweat dribbled down my back. “It’s harder than that chairlift!”
Nick kept swiveling his hips. “It’s not hard. Six-year-olds can do it. Latin people do this, like, every day. It’s why they’re in great shape.”
On the five count they wanted us to spin.
“¡Gire, gire, gire!” Shakira yelled.
“Ooooo, that’s a new Spanish word for me. I didn’t know that one,” Nick said. “It means ‘turn around.’ ”
Our spins were terrible. I stepped on his foot. He spun me too fast and I stumbled onto the floor.
“We’re the worst,” I cried.
“I’m good,” Nick said.
Shakira did not think we were good. Her breasts cut in and began dancing with Nick. The second he danced with someone who wasn’t me, his rhythm improved.
I huffed off into the bathroom. Shakira waited for me outside the door.
“Can I tell you a secret?” she whispered to me like we were two women in a tampon commercial. I nodded. “Let the man lead. Let him think he is in charge. If you decide to allow it, then you are the one in control.” Over the next week I would hear this again and again from Chilean women, whether we were discussing dancing, driving, or daily life. South American men may radiate machismo, and a long history of patriarchy may still permeate daily life, but it’s the women who rule the roost at home. They consistently told me that men’s fragile egos demand a sense of control, and sometimes a wife needs to let her husband think he’s the one calling the shots—even though she’s influencing his behavior and decisions in more subtle ways. I couldn’t help but be skeptical. Wasn’t I a feminist? Didn’t I believe that any form of submission took power away from women and handed it right on over to men?
To me this sounded like a way for women to delude themselves into believing they had control when they didn’t, a lie they told to make the reality of male domination more bearable.
Yet I was consistently assured by women in South America that nurturing a male ego is not a sign of weakness. These women are astute anthropologists of male behavior, and they long ago learned how to operate within the constraints of a historically patriarchal society. They chose to behave in certain ways to preserve their self-worth in a system that was often stacked against them. And maybe “submission” is the wrong word to use here. It’s more about reading cues and managing egos, regardless of gender, and there isn’t a great word for that. It’s more about control…and trust. By being sensitive to the male ego, the women I met in Chile ultimately remained in control of major decisions for their families, their finances, and their personal freedom. While the country still has a ways to go in terms of true gender equality, it’s a place with strong female role models and one of the few countries in the world to have elected a female president. Nudge, America.
That’s not to say times aren’t changing. Young Chileans are putting off marriage well into their thirties (though they often still live in their parents’ homes until they marry). Women my age are now pickier about choosing a husband, and when they do marry it’s often for love instead of the security and protection sought by their mothers. They’re more likely to work outside of the home and often become breadwinners in their families.
In the United States we don’t talk about catering to the male ego or allowing a man to think he is in charge of a relationship, because the concept of submission is a controversial one. Our Internet pundits erupted in a furor in 2013 when the American volleyball superstar Gabby Reece wrote a book about her seventeen-year marriage to professional surfer Laird Hamilton (whom she describes as an alpha male) in which she explained that being submissive in a relationship is a sign of power rather than weakness. She emphasized that behaving submissively is not the same as being submissive. “Women have the ability to set the tone….The ultimate strength…is creating that environment. I don’t think it’s a sign of weakness. I think it’s a sign of strength,” Reece said.
When the book came out, she was accused of setting women’s causes back fifty years. I’d watched those attacks play out in the media and on Twitter, and I didn’t know how to feel about them. Reece is a strong woman. Becoming a wife and a mother, the person responsible for the survival and happiness of other human beings, didn’t come naturally to her all at once. I felt the same way in finally becoming someone’s wife. What worked for Reece in being married to an alpha male was to take on some aspects of submissiveness, like being a little softer, a little more receptive. It was the first time I realized that we all have to adapt and make concessions in a marriage or long-term partnership. When Reece’s book came out, I’d been dating a nice guy, a really nice guy. You know the guy I’m talking about, the one who was almost too nice. Because I could be, because it was so easy, because I was louder and more aggressive, I became the dominant one in that relationship. I made our dinner reservations and vacation plans. I bossed him around. I was critical and a little mean. I mocked him when he gained weight and grew man boobs and I paid for things for no other reason than I liked feeling in control. In hindsight I know one of the reasons our relationship turned sour was that I wouldn’t let him do any of the things a man feels like he should do. It was a sign of utter disrespect on my part. I stripped him of every vestige of manliness, and the control I seized would have put off anyone, man or woman. In return, I eventually caught him carrying on a secret Internet affair with a stranger he’d met in a chat room (her handle was @FuzzyBunnyBaby) who boosted his ego in the ways I couldn’t.
I had thought about that failed relationship a lot since meeting Nick.
Before we left for Chile, Nick and I were walking Lady Piazza through Golden Gate Park. Nick was concerned about work, about making sure his company was successful and growing.
“I want to be able to take care of you,” he said, and I swear his chest began to puff out a little.
My entire body tightened and my response was short and clipped. “I don’t need you to take care of me. I’m fine.
I’m good. Did I ever tell you about the time I thwarted a would-be mugger with a hairbrush?” I rattled off a list of other reasons I was both fine and perfectly capable of taking care of my self.
My declaration made his chest slump, and it felt as though he’d drifted away. He grew quiet for several minutes while the dog lazily sniffed around the rose garden.
“It makes me feel good to be able to take care of you,” he finally said. “Let me try?” It wasn’t a command or a directive. It was a question, one that only I could answer.
“Can I lead this time, baby?” Nick asked me when I returned to the gymnasium to finish our salsa lesson. I relaxed my iron grip on his hand and nodded, allowing my almost-husband to pull me in the direction of his choosing and dervish me around as he liked. This time I stopped staring at my feet and looked directly into Nick’s eyes—still smiling—having a groovy time. Then, a miracle happened. This time, neither of us stepped on the other one’s feet; we glided like pros between the two basketball nets. Giving up some of my need for control, letting Nick call these shots, helped us move in sync.
“We’re good,” Nick said, looking down at me with unabashed tenderness, tipping me into a precarious dip. “Let’s celebrate with a cocktail!”
The traditional Chilean drink is the pisco sour, a combination of cloudy distilled wine, sour mix, and frothy egg whites. Chile and neighboring Peru have been at war for a hundred years over who makes the better pisco sour and which country has the authority to claim it as their own national drink. It tastes cheerful and strong and only grows more so after the first one.