Rationalising the habit

As you become more serious about salsa, it necessarily starts to take a place within your weekly plans. At the beginning, it may be your weekly class, later, your weekly club night, later still, your weekends and holidays. The point is, whatever the regularity of your habit, you start making time for it and become less flexible about cancelling.

In so doing though, you never say "I can't cancel, because I'm hooked", but you make up a number of other excuses to justify to yourself and to others, why this seemingly unimportant activity, scheduled to occur on a regular basis, cannot be missed. Bear in mind that the excuse needs to be good enough to explain why you cannot simply put it off until the week after.

As the addiction progresses, the justification moves from being event focused to a full-on lifestyle justification.

1) Commitment - When you start, you make an active commitment to learning to partner dance. Before the addiction set in, you actually needed to convince yourself to get out of the house and into a new location full of new people. It's easy to cancel, but you don't, because you know that if you do, you'll probably chicken-out of turning up again. That said, I was "committed" to learning to dance long past the point that I became addicted. Unfortunately though, the "commitment" argument only works for activities undertaken only once or twice a week. Once you migrate to taking multiple classes and going to multiple club nights, you can no longer use this excuse.

2) Limited time frame - This one goes hand in hand with the previous argument. So long as you can claim that the reason you are dancing every night is because you have one chance to do so, for a limited time frame before you quit, your activity is acceptable. I indulged for a summer, testing the limits of whether I could dance for 7 nights in a row without getting sick (the answer is no). But this was fine because it was the last hurrah before I moved on to better pursuits (i.e. start a new job and start taking life a bit more seriously). Also note that with salsa, the last hurrah attempt doesn't work, it will only get you more hooked.

3) Stress relief - "I have a high pressure job and need salsa as an outlet for the stress". This one works for a while, but once you've survived your high pressure job for a year or so, people tend to assume that you've learnt to deal with the pressure and can spend less time seeking stress relief and more time socialising outside of the salsa scene. Obviously, abandoning the salsa scene is not viable, so a new excuse is a must!

4) Skill - Once you've become proficient at salsa to a degree, you can no longer claim to gentiles that you're committed to learning the broader ability of partner dancing, since you've clearly reached and passed this particular post. You thus may go through a phase where you explain away your addiction by depicting to your family, friends and colleagues that you are still pursuing the habit for the technical skill involved. This one is particularly useful when you start attending congresses, or when you learn to dance on2 - it's no longer about learning how to dance, but about honing your technique or learning from the masters. Somehow making salsa sound like a science seems to smooth the news that you won't be attending yet another high school reunion due to a non-descript salsa party somewhere.

5) Friends - "I'm not going to dance, in fact, I don't even want to dance, but it's the only way I can see this particular (group of) friend(s)" or "It's the most convenient way for me to see this many people in a short space of time" or "I'm not hooked, they are - my friends refuse to see me unless I turn up at their salsa club (of worship)". So many options revolve around friends - you can quite easily blame them and thus absolve yourself of almost all salsa-loving responsibility. Pleading with a non-salsa friend about the importance of the salsa friends is a delicate balance though - you want to emphasize how loyal a friend you are, while de-emphasising the real frequency with which you see your salsa vs. non-salsa friends. Citing one particular person is always a good bet as well. However, the excuse must be phrased in such a way that you avoid the "but you see them every week" comeback. Incidentally, friends are a highly valid excuse - why else would you explain that those who break limbs, twist ankles or are sick beyond belief still turn up, crutches and all, to salsa clubs? The point here is to find a way to express this to non-salsa friends in a way that leads them away from believing that you just looking for your latest salsa fix.

6) Guys - I have been known to feign a crush on a guy to add relevance to the friend scenario cited above. Being pathetically under a man's spell - most people can relate to that, right?

7) Family - Ultimately, the salsa community becomes your family, your support centre, your point of stability. The community provides you with the sense that you belong to something bigger. Salsa addicts know this, gentiles may well understand it. However stay away from words usually used to describe religions or sects when explaining it to them!

8) Travel - As you become further entwined with the salsa world, the tendency to go jetting off to salsa congresses becomes one you need to justify as well. People generally find it harder to comprehend why you might fly to the other corner of the earth to dance for a small fortune, when in their non-dancer opinions, you could do so in your backyard for a lot less money. Options 5 and 6 are yet again worthy excuses as meeting up with friends from remote locations in less remote common locations is a worthwhile excuse. And who needs to mention that it's a salsa congress, right? You can also refer to Option 4 - access to highly skilled teachers unavailable locally. Alternatively, having the travel bug is somewhat of an accepted modern day affliction. Remember that it's best to come back with pictures of the city you visited though for this argument to be credible!

9) Full on denial - Sometimes it's just unreasonable to tell people that you are going to yet another congress. While I do not advocate lying, the true addict may feel like they will save themselves from the loony bin for a little longer if the sheer intensity of the addiction were not disclosed to all and sundry. Trips to see faraway grandmothers, high school friends' weddings in foreign countries, flying home to see the parents all qualify. How can this be wrong? As a bonafide salsa addict, if you were doing these things, you would have probably found a way to go out dancing anyway, so the gentile probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Incidentally, my parents still do not see a difference between attending a congress and dropping into a congress party night - have tried explaining, but gave up.

10) Acceptance - Please note that I do not refer here to acceptance by the salsero of his/her addiction, but by the acceptance by the gentiles of the salsero's true nature. There comes a point in your salsa life when even so much as suggesting you are going on holiday with a group of friends is met by a sceptical gaze and an assuming comment to the tune of "is this another salsa thing?". At this point, either it isn't a salsa thing and you find that you've lost all credibility, or it is, and you end up feeling rather uncomfortable at the realisation that the gentiles seem to have accepted that you have a problem, while you yourself are still in denial.