Alone in a crowded room

I'm so completely off balance that I desperately need to write and the words aren't coming...It isn't everyday that I learn - deep, in-your-gut-learning - something about sex. And attraction. And dancing.

Last night though, while dancing with a friend of mine, a doorway inadvertantly opened into the room where my sensual self lives. A room I honestly, even though it seems a bit sad, don't visit all that often.

The last time I felt as highly charged with burning, erotic energy was in 2000, before I began to seriously date my husband (but in fact during an encounter with him). Before that was an incident back in high school. So few vignettes of complete, mind-bending, muscle-melting passion...without the "watcher" of my rational self commenting in the background.

Certainly I've never had such a thing occur before on a crowded dance floor, let alone all because of a little eye contact.

A part of it was the dance, I suppose. When your chance comes to be the active couple in an English Country Dance, you get to do all of the fun bits. The other couples support and treat you like royalty. You are Honored Personages throughout the dance when you are A One. I danced one of these dances last night with a fun, handsome man, who is married to a lovely friend of mine. We dance together often and generally bring out the wacky and silly in each other.

Tonight though, after we did a couple of rounds of this difficult dance, and I was just getting the hang of it, my friend said, "Great - Now do it, but keep flirting."

Keep Flirting? Well...okay. and Oh. My. Goodness.

My emotional and visceral reactions to acceptable dance "flirting" (this amounts to smiling and a mini staring contest) were insistent and unexpected. Suddenly I was locked in an encounter much more intimate than any dance I had done before.

First came the playfullness - ah yes, a staring contest, simple! His eyes were there, seeking mine with every step, turn and swirl of movement. Whenever I lost, then regained eye contact, I felt a whole-body SNAP!

Finding my partner's eyes within the flurry of movement over and over again started to heighten my enjoyment of the dance. By the halfway mark of the set I was giggling, and then laughing out loud because it felt so different.

I think it would have been an unusual, but not really an impactful experience if the dance hadn't gone on. And on. And on. But in fact, there were many, many couples, and the dancing did go on.

By now, I had mastered the mechanics, and been through a few full rounds of feeling his eyes constantly seaching for mine. The effect now started to multiply with each turn of the dance. The invisible visual connection materialized - as compelling and powerful as Superman's optical laser beams.

There was no letting up of the continuous contact. A flirtatious game, and my partner was clearly winning. An overwhelming impulse to drop my eyes rushed at me. It was accompanied by uncontrollable shyness - a hormonal and adrenaline surge that I have not felt since puberty. I recognized the reaction, and was astonished by it, but simple realization did not prevent a sudden difficulty in breathing and desperate instinct to break the eye contact...Simultaneously with a stronger impulse not to.

Now began round after round of romance heroine cliche incarnate. The rush of blood to my face, then the heat and butterflies behind my navel. Breathlessness, and surges of desire each time my partner and I would flow tightly into a gypsy turn and finally touch for a two-handed spin that seemed to last hours each time we revolved, only inches apart.

The rich, yet unspoken relationship increased between us as I managed to hold eye contact for longer and longer. This allowed us to better gauge and anticipate the drifting away and uniting again of our dance steps.

Succumbing to his direction was certainly a source of erotic energy for me. Committing fully to this interractive game; Flowing, turning, spinning, dancing...holding a tight focus on my partners eyes - just because he had told me to - increased the impact of each dance movement a hundred fold. Searching for his face instantly each time passing dancers forced a break in welded lines of sight caused an immense awareness of arousal and anticipation for me.

I started to feel guilty about dancing only with my partner. There were other dancers there, and they did their parts admirably...but I literally had eyes only for my partner. I acknowledged no one else who held my hand or moved in concert with me. Even the briefest of polite, flickering glances immediately gave way to the magnetism of my partner's countenance.

The small, seemingly insignificant limitation: "Look into my eyes," was so stimulating that I began to also feel guilty about dancing such a dance, in such a way, with another woman's husband!

This idea spontaneously burst in my brain, and I went cold as I perceived that I might be so exposed in an act my superego considered a wrong doing. I broke eye contact to look for and watch my partner's wife as she danced down the line in front of me.

Sweetness, and the embodiment of Austen's Jane Bennett, she was partnered with another incredible dancer of our acquaintance. A man capable of generating the same intensity of gazes...of bringing dancing beyond the mechanical to the emotional level. Ah, well, I thought. She is probably giving and getting and dancing with the same relish as I am. It stopped MOST of the guilt. After all, perhaps she dances like that all the time...(lucky girl!)

Some guilt lingers today. It is hard to admit that last night, if I was unattached and so was my partner, I would gladly have pursued that eye contact and roaring hormone level straight to the very nearest horizontal surface. The experience was worlds beyond my previous ideas about being a "good" dancer. This was the electrical enticement of dancing.

I suddenly understood how once the emotions are there, it is hard to bottle them up. Keeping the flood inside, and the very effort of not letting it show, merely compounds it. The act of connecting energetically through dance - whether by accident or design - suddenly translated from a simple non verbal communication straight to a compulsive desire for more of the same and-by-any-means-possible!

As we finished up at the bottom of the set, we crashed shoulder to shoulder. We vented our enormous reservoir of affective energy in a fit of belly-laughing. I can never know for sure what my partner's experience was, and yet somehow I do. That level of intensity doesn't build in that way without a feedback loop to reinforce each emotional reaction in layer on top of layer.

Breaking the spell of the dance and allowing my autonomic nervous system to claw its way back to earth, my partner talked about dancing being so popular historically. It was the only possible way to feel alone, and acheive that divine intimacy with someone despite chaperones, crowds and onlookers.

I felt such a resonating comprehension of those once living, truly romantic heroines of the past. Empathy flooded through me and I knew precisely what their lives might have been like - denied an evocation, let alone a control, of these passionate emotions...with the exception of a ball here, and a party there.

While we waited to re-enter the set as lowly threes, my friend confided:

"That's what they mean by 'Alone in a Crowded Room.' For me, the ultimate experience is couple contra dancing, because the whole world spins so fast that it cannot be seen and there is nothing in your world except you and your partner."

Luckily for both of our spouses, I don't contra dance...yet.