Friday 27 July 2018

Is it worth it?

There's a dance on tonight. The evening will start with a lesson in Bachata, and I love Bachata. The lesson is being taught by someone for whom I have a great deal of respect. All the proceeds of the evening will go to a worthy cause. I would be in the company of friends and...

I probably won't go.

If I go, it's a show of strength. A Bachata lesson means close contact with the ladies present, and one of those females (I can't use "lady" in her case) is someone with whom close contact feels like being smeared with faeces.

We were friends at one time. That was my first mistake. I told her that my sister was dying. That was mistake number two. There was an assumption that I would be in a vulnerable state, and my feelings could be manipulated. There was an assumption that, with my fiancée on the other side of the world, I'd be open to physical intimacy with another woman. That was HER first mistake, but one which would lead her to make a series of others.

I gave her the benefit of the doubt, and tried to fix things. This was more than a mistake - it was a fatal error. What this did was to make me appear weak, and give some legitimacy to her behaviour. Manipulation became coercion. The incessant compliments became accusations of fundamental character flaws. Drunken, abusive phone calls were made.

The point where it all came to a head was when, as I was trying one last time to make things right, I was accused of being controlling, manipulative and a narcissist. Recognising classic Freudian projection when I see it, and adding up the number of friends I'd lost in the time I'd known her, due to her manipulations and machinations, I knew that I had to pull the plug on this "friendship".

If you've dealt with a narcissist before, it won't surprise you to hear that, sensing trouble, she pulled the plug first.

The anger I feel about all of this - and, believe me, I've left out a lot - is largely directed at myself. I should never have become friends with her in the first place but, as that did happen, I should have pulled the plug sooner. I didn't do any of that and, as a result, my continued involvement with the dance scene is under threat.

The assertion that I was a great dancer, and would get better, was replaced by accusations that I was so bad that I was hurting her during lessons. In those lessons, she'd "instruct", stubbornly holding her limbs in the wrong positions so that she could tell me I was doing everything wrong and make further accusations of mistreatment. On the dance floor, she guided men to a space next to me and whoever I was dancing with, so that she could turn each turn, spin and flourish into a collision with me or my dance partner.

Off the dance floor, she had manipulated the people who ran the class into practically worshipping her and the entourage she had built by that time. From there, she targetted the few remaining friends I had, convincing them that I was a despicable human being.

In the end, I turned my back on Modern Jive. I wanted to learn Salsa but, knowing that she frequented the nearest class, I decided that one further from home might be a less hostile environment. I was there for over a year before she decided that it would become her regular class too - accusing me, in that first class, of hurting her again.

I thought that informing the people who ran the club of what had happened, and was continuing to happen, might change things. It didn't. Instead, it fell on deaf ears. I later heard that rumours were being spread, where I was the one at fault. As I've heard from many men within the scene, once the women start spreading rumours about you, those rumours are accepted as true, and you're essentially powerless.

A few members of the committee of that club, I discovered later, were actively involved in perpetuating the rumours. I left, due to the atmosphere becoming decidedly uncomfortable.

As an aside, the question about the smaller number of men in the dance community is often asked. Even as I started to learn Salsa, some of the ladies in the beginners' class were asked if they'd learn to lead - some of them did but, to my knowledge, none of them continued for very long. Still, I hear that "women just pick this stuff up more quickly than men."

Oh, you mean those women who have often learned to dance in some form from an early age? Those women? Do you mean the women who get to dance with leads of various abilities, while men are pretty much stuck with what they know at any given time? Isn't that the nature of a partner dance, where one leads and one follows? You mean the women who, from the start, are told that any mistakes are the responsibility of the lead? The women who move out of the beginners' class long before they have even mastered the basics, because they believe the rubbish they're told?

"I know the ladies were all perfect, but ladies, how did the men do?" - I've heard this one too. Imagine standing there, hearing that, while a lady with whom practising the moves felt like wrestling a bull pulls apart "some of the men" because she can't take ownership of her incompetence as a dancer. More than likely, she was one of the ladies who thought that focusing on the basics was unnecessarily holding her back.

Other men have spoken to me about this. One - a dancer of many years - said that a number of the women joining dance classes now feel a sense of competitiveness against the other lady dancers that is stronger than it was before. It has always existed, apparently, but the extent to which he sees it in a number of the new dancers is, for him, an unwelcome development. He concluded that this was at the root of many of the issues that are starting to plague the scene, and that he may soon give up something he's loved for a long time because of the unpleasant atmosphere that accompanies this competitiveness.

I got sidetracked, but all of this adds to what I said about my nemesis within the dance community, and the people she has managed to co-opt into her scheme to eject me. I don't doubt that, if I were to leave, she would continue to attack, and possibly be further encouraged by her success to do so. Messages that were sent by her to someone I love left me in no doubt about any of that.

So, if I go, I'm going into an environment that is largely hostile - so many people from my former club, where the bully took root and successfully ejected me, will be there. A number of them were actively involved in helping the bully, or at least making her feel welcome enough to push forward with her plan. She'll be there too, and a Bachata class involves close contact with the ladies present.

If I don't go, it's simply an acknowledgement that I may not be able to sufficiently push down my anger.

I drive a little further for Salsa lessons now. The standard of instruction is orders of magnitude greater. I'd like to say that's not a shot fired against a club that screwed me over when I asked them for help - a club which enabled a serial bully who is now, as I have heard and seen for myself, "instructing" any man who is relatively new to the scene and doesn't meet with her vision of how she'd like the scene to be. I have to be honest with myself, and admit that I take great pleasure in being able to honestly say that I'm getting better instruction. That's my victory against the bully, and I'm taking it.

Monday 2 July 2018

Compassion through acceptance

A great Buddhist teacher said that we can feel compassion for others through understanding. Compassion for those who have wronged us, he continued, can be achieved by understanding that the other person suffers too.

I don't consider myself to have any particular wisdom, but it strikes me that the aim is acceptance, possibly without first understanding. How can we truly understand another? We're subject to our own frame of reference, and see others through the lens of our experience. We project the things we find unacceptable in ourselves onto others, and see them as failings of that person's character. We transfer feelings we had for someone in our past onto someone in our present, simply because they are in some way similar.

Our understanding of others is limited, especially when we make assumptions rather than asking the questions which might correct our initial impression. Yes, we can achieve some level of understanding through putting aside our preconceived notions of who that person may be, but there's a point where we have to accept what we don't understand.

The inability to accept what we don't understand has real consequences. It troubles me to hear the way in which people from other lands are described by our print and broadcast media, and discussed on various platforms on the internet. I see fear, hatred and anger, rather than the compassion that our Buddhist friend rightly advocates.

How fully can we understand the experience of someone from another land, another culture, with values, beliefs and attitudes which may vary greatly from our own? Our understanding is likely to be limited, so we may ask them about their experience, their way of seeing the world around them. How likely are they to be open, though, if we don't first offer acceptance? How likely are we to listen, if we don't first offer acceptance?