I like dancing, once in a great while. How else can you become one with the Great Macrocosmic All?
“Dance like it hurts, love like you need the money, work when people are watching.”
-Scott Adams
I was fine with dancing itself.
I wasn’t going to ask someone to dance in an environment where I was not somewhat likely to be asked myself.
It’s also a miserable environment to meet people, assertions to the contrary notwithstanding: you can’t hear a damn thing over the music. Which, by the way, has been dependably AWFUL since disco pushed rock-n-roll aside in the land of high school dances.
After a few decades of sitting it out for the above reasons, the additional new reason was that I had no idea how to do it any more.
The only dancing I enjoy is delirious bumping and grinding with my friends in Wal-Marts at 3 am.
Female, no interest in dancing.
I adore music. I fill my life with music. Great music doesn’t give me the urge to get up and jiggle about - it makes me want to sit perfectly still and breathe it in, relish it, enjoy it, hear it without any distractions. Why other people hear a great song and want to get up and jump around instead of immersing themselves into the music has been one of the great puzzles in my life.
People don’t get it. They think I’m not dancing because I can’t dance and I don’t want other people judging me for it. That’s so wrong that it makes my head hurt. I don’t even dance when I’m alone, I don’t want to dance when I’m alone. There’s nothing in the beauty and pleasure I get from music that makes me want to mess it up by moving about.
No. Not at all.
I absolutely could have written every word of the above.
When I was 12, my parents converted from a sit-in-the-pew-and-listen type church to a get-up-in-the-aisles-and-dance type church.
For the next six years of my life I spent every Sunday being told, sometimes quite explicitly and at length, that I just needed to “let go” and stop being “inhibited” or worse, stop letting the devil quash my natural desire to “worship” and just dance already. Something was wrong with me for not doing it. Why wasn’t I letting myself do what I truly wanted to do.
Six God. Damned. Years. of this shit.
I just didn’t fucking want to dance. I wasn’t being inhibited. I just didn’t want to. Fuckers.
Okay, I should leave the thread for a while. Didn’t expect that to come back up the memory pole…
Coming back to the present…
I wonder if it’s possible to elaborate on what it means for it to “feel good to move.”
To me, moving doesn’t feel like anything at all. It’s just what I’m doing. There’s no concomitant feeling. There’s an awareness, of course, but there’s nothing in the awareness that invites appreciation or any other kind of aesthetic judgment.
How does this aesthetic quality attach to your own movements? Is this even a question that can be answered?
Maybe. I can say something about why it feels good, for example, to listen to good music. It’s because it sends my mind into a kind of spin–a sort of chain of pleasant surprises. “Didn’t see that coming, but it totally works, I want to hear more of this unexpected stuff that works, please.”
Having written that… come to think of it, every aesthetically positive experince I can think of having occured to me involved an element of surprise. That, it seems to me, is why I find it difficult to understand enjoying my own movements: There’s no surprise there. I know exactly what I’m going to do. It’s me doing it!
But is there some way to articulate what it is about movement that causes it to engender an aesthetically positive judgment in you? Can you perhaps compare the enjoyment with other kinds of enjoyment, saying something about what they have in common? Or something?
It’s hard, of course–kind of like describing a color to someone without eyes.
-Kris
For those of us who love to dance–at least speaking for myself, there’s no way to articulate how or why.
It’s a feeling of being alive and spilling over with vibrant life. Having so much emotion that it’s impossible to keep it within. To dance is to be able to express oneself so much more fully than it is with just words. Dancing with friends is so much more fun and enjoyable than sitting around just listening to music together–when we dance together we are also laughing and pumping endorphins and there’s such a feeling it’s totally impossible to express. It’s through use of the body that tells so much more than with words.
I dance alone, by myself, or with my friends, or at clubs or weddings or parties or whatever. There’s more to dance than just “booty dancing” in a club, you know. Dancing with a partner you don’t know (like at a swing dance or something) is impossibly fun–you’re very close with someone you don’t know very well, and suddenly you’re either having a great, crazy-fun time with them and everything is clicking and the world is full of colour and light and music and fun–or you’re being dragged through the steps with someone who Knows What’s Best For You. Or a million other variants. It’s wildly fun.
Dancing as a form of purely moving the body is only the barest scraping of the surface. I could gladly spend the rest of my life dancing. Not wanting to dance is so utterly foreign to me that until this thread I don’t think I’d ever considered such a thing.
I don’t post here often, but I thought my experience might be odd enough to hold interest for some. It’s pretty related but I apologise if it constitutes a hijack.
I’m with you, OP - I loath dancing. In high school and college, any dance-related event was painful - I’d really much rather stand around talking to my friends, but instead I’d have people periodically trying to drag me onto the dance floor for a purpose that was never really made clear to me. It always felt vaguely as though they were on some distant level embarrassed to be doing what they were doing, but could assuage these feelings by having others join them. Anyway, it’s not like I’d never tried dancing - a few times I figured I’d see what all the fuss is about, and ended up still not knowing what all the fuss was about. After I’d tried it a bit I just avoided it altogether, at which point people started seriously bugging me with constantly asking me, and worse, implying that my lack of desire to dance was a character flaw, or that I secretly did want to dance, but wasn’t because I was socially inhibited. So, in short, yeah. Add my data point to the list of people who have no inclination towards dancing whatsoever, and don’t really understand what other people see in it.
Phew. Okay, so the above paragraph is how I would have responded to this post three years ago (when I was twenty-two). I’m twenty-five now. About two and a half years ago, I went to a swing dancing class (that’s the one from around 1920-1940, Charleston, Lindy Hop, etc). It was a one hour class, once a week. Long story short, now I go to three or four hours of classes a week, as well as a couple of hours of dancing socially, and the occasional ball (there’s one coming up, in fact). I’ve also performed in routines on two occasions, although that’s less my thing. About half of my close friends are people I know from swing dancing, these days.
I post this in part as a counterpoint to the dichotomy of “some people are dancers, some people just aren’t”, but actually, I’m not sure that dichotomy is so inaccurate. If for some reason I was out clubbing with friends (though I wouldn’t be), I’d resist being dragged onto the dance floor with just as much enthusiasm as I did a few years ago - same goes for weddings, or really, any dancing-but-not-swing dancing scenario - I’m straight back to thinking “I don’t know what’s supposed to be going on here and I have no inclination to find out”. I’m probably an above-average swing dancer, given how long I’ve been doing it, but there are certain aspects of it that I suck at, notably the parts with less structure to them, and the parts that I’m good at seem to me more like just physical coordination than anything ‘deeper’. Finally, though I really do enjoy dancing socially, I must admit that sometimes I wish I had more excuses to hang around with my friends from dancing without being obliged to be dancing all the time - I agree with those who say that it’s not really a great avenue for socialising. I went to a social dance once with a sprained ankle (and therefore unable to dance) and just sat around talking to people, and it was great fun. All that being said, swing dancing brings me a lot of happiness these days, and there’d be a very obvious and depressing gap in my life if I suddenly couldn’t do it anymore for some reason. And at the same time, if I had to place myself on one side or the other of the ‘dancers versus non-dancers’ dichotomy, I’d feel kind of dishonest calling myself a dancer at heart.
Make of all that what you will… I guess one thing that could be taken away from the above ramble is that completely ‘unskilled’ dancing, as might happen at random social events or whatever, is merely a subset of all kinds of dancing, but it’s also the only kind most people ever try. My advice, though, is that if you’re someone who hates dancing and is constantly bugged by your friends to join them on the dance floor… don’t show your friends my post. It’ll just make them worse. 
Oh balls, missed the edit window.
appolonia, I didn’t notice that you mentioned couple dancing (and indeed swing dancing) in the post right above me. We’re in agreement about how different these different kinds of dancing are - it might be interesting to try to figure out what it is about someone like me, who enjoys couple dancing but not ‘booty dancing’ (heh), versus someone who likes both kinds, the other kind, or neither. Not that those are the only two kinds but still.
I’m an asocial introvert and I absolutely loathe the entire concept of dancing. However, it’s a useful tool. It’s pretty much impossible to get laid without dancing. I feel like I analyze this without feeling like a sociopath might simpler social conventions and that sorta creeps me out, but for me there really is no “there” there when it comes to dancing. It might be better than talking about highway routes though.
And, of course, if you suck at dancing you suck in bed. 
Female.
Like some of the previous posters, I’m more accustomed to providing the dance music. I do like to dance, but I suck at it for lack of experience.
I know the OP specifically asked for non-dancers, but I’m with you! To me dancing is as natural as breathing.
No. And I don’t dance.
I guess there must be. I can understand “I’m bad at it” or “I don’t like being the center of attention” or “I don’t want to dance in public.” But not moving to music, not even wanting to is just incomprehensible to me. I’m withTruCelt. When the music plays (sometimes when I just think about music playing), I’m bouncing around my living room. I’ve almost never not wanted to dance.
Male, non-dancer.
Nicely put.
So for those non- move to the music types, do you pretty much never do things like air guitar? Air drums? Head bob? Foot tap? Leg pat?
Have you ever attended a rock/pop concert of any kind? Do you just stand motionless and observe?
No air-instrument playing for me. (Another thing I personally have never understood.)
No head bobbing for me, either, as far as I know.
No leg patting.
As I said before, I do sometimes find myself tapping rhythm with my toes or fingers. It’s not pleasurable in any sense. But it is indeed a reflexive “moving to he music” of a sort. But not one I choose to engage in or enjoy engaging in, so this doesn’t seem to be of a piece with the way people experience dance.
(And the rhythm tapping may, for all I know, simply be a habit from back when I was in Band in middle school and Music Comp (and a band) in high school and college.)
I checked in earlier and thought I’d wait and see how this thread went. I am amazed there are this many non-dancers. I’m Male and 58 and dance every chance I get, I love dancing and could not be around a dance floor without getting on it.
Female. I like slow-dancing – it’s like cuddling while standing up – but I have no sense of rhythm so any other kind of dancing, I’ll leave to others.
[Look of incomprehension]
I’m getting old and crotchety, and don’t go to dance clubs anymore, but sometimes I’m somewhere else, hear the sound, and the music just moves me, so I dance. Do you dance-haters never play your favorite song at home, and dance around to it?