Anatomy of a dance failure

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This is going to be long and wordy, but I feel I can't ask for help if you don't know the full circumstances.

The setting:

Recently my NT flatmates and I decided to go to a salsa party in town. It was also a ?traffic light? party, which means that when you go in the door you get given a coloured wristband indicating whether you are taken (red) in a complicated relationship (yellow) or single (green) and is an excuse for single people to look for girlfriends/boyfriends. My flatmates had also determined that it was time I learned how to make good first impressions (not my forte) I, on the other hand, was only interested in going for the fun of doing something new. By this point in the party they had run out of red and green and had only yellow wristbands left. There was a live band playing, it was dark, the dance floor was crammed with people, and you had to shout to be heard. After about 20 minutes one of my flatmates, whom we?ll call Kelly, told me she?d found a friend of hers who had agreed to dance with me (I cannot dance salsa at all). Kelly dragged me into the middle of the crowd, tried to point out the person I was meant to dance with, said ?just ask,? and then disappeared.

The dance:

In the confusion I picked the girl I though she meant, asked her to dance, and with a cursory, ?I?m not very good? we were off with her leading. We?ll call her Sophie. She was smart, very pretty, and a good dancer; I did my best to keep up. We exchanged names, what we did, where we were from (both of us were some of the few white people there). I told Sophie she was really good at dancing and she said she spent a lot of time practising at home on her own. She asked if I came to these sorts of parties often and I said it was my first time. Sophie seemed like a nice person whom I could easily be friends with, and although I was struggling to think of things to talk about this didn't seem to bother her very much.

Aware that I was looking at the floor a lot I tried to look her in the eyes and then it all went wrong. As soon as I did, Sophie smiled, and I felt like I was about 2 centimetres away from her. I got intimidated by her beauty. I got all confused inside about whether I liked her in a romantic way or not, whether I should ask her out or not and what exactly it was that society expected me to do right now. I looked away and noticed she was wearing a yellow wristband, but it was meaningless because not a single person in the whole place was wearing red or green. All those who had got those tags had left long before I arrived. I tried again twice, same smile, same discomfort. It basically felt as if I?d been unreasonably successful at playing a game and then suddenly the rule makers had thrown the book away and expected me to improvise the rest on my own. Nobody ever talks about what you?re supposed to do at this point. I?d been bluffing my way through everything so far, unable to read her body language and just hoping that I was doing something right. Then she started dancing more by herself and less with me. It was obvious that she?d lost some kind of interest. When the music finished she said it was nice dancing with me, made her excuses and left.

The post-party analysis:

So I talked to my female NT flatmates a couple of days later, since they had been subtly watching. Turned out they were initially impressed - I?d not danced with the girl I was supposed to but had managed to successfully ask somebody else who in their opinion was not only better-looking but also interested in me. Then they said, ?You did really well but why don?t you think you?re good enough for Sophie?? I asked them why they asked and they said, ?Because that?s the impression you gave her.?

So I suppose my questions are what can I do better next time, and how can I stop myself from getting intimidated when I look someone in the eyes? I can look at my friends or colleagues in the eyes for a little while just fine, and strangers for a moment or two, but looking at Sophie made me feel like my emotional and physical boundaries were being violated. Also, how much time am I meant to spend looking them in the eyes?

Not my favorite topic, but it sounds like you are just having some trouble with eye contact. Maybe you could just tell her that and she might understand. Perhaps you really do feel that way and they were just reading you. Idk.

Well, my situation would be different, since I've been taking dance classes for years by now, so I effectively desensitized myself from the closeness of partner dancing. Plus, I learned the moves enough to get compliments, even when the girl has zero interest in me. I'd say your mistakes were in these two areas:

1) You should have learned at least the basic step before coming to a salsa party. Were you familiar with the count: 1, 2 ,3, (pause); 5, 6, 7, (pause)? All beats have the same length, and the rhythm runs in 4/4 time; that's 4 beats per measure, like in most contemporary dances. If your dance partner knows salsa well, it'll feel awkward to her with you not doing the steps correctly. Plus, as the girl, she has to follow, and by extension, do the steps incorrectly. It also puts her into a situation of having to backlead---that's leading when she's supposed to follow---and backleading is a violation of dance etiquette among most dancers, male or female. You don't have to have natural talent, but you do need to develop muscle memory for the basic step.

2) You didn't trust yourself to be good, so you acted like you thought poorly of yourself and your dancing skills. The only solution to that is to take dance lessons until you learn just enough to consider yourself good, and believe it. Ideally, you should get the basic down solid until you can do it with your eyes closed (or without looking at your feet), then learn a few extras, like the right break turn and the cross-body lead. Learn a more romantic move or two, like the angel wings; it's pretty simple, but women seem to like it. Unlike social skills, which usually come easy only to NTs, dances can be learned cognitively. Enough to make yourself look cooler than you really are. And unlike freestyle dancing that NTs do in clubs, salsa dancing has clearly defined moves that can be memorized (like a scripted social situation), and memorization is a strong point for most aspies. That, combined with clear rules governing dance etiquette; not everyone follows dance etiquette, but no one will think poorly of you for doing so.

I don't know though if naturalness as such is always enough. Some of us have basic problems with co-ordination. I certainly do. And it isn't really something that you can train yourself out of cognitively. I spent what must have been 8-9 years as a child being forced to learn to play a musical instrument (the violin), and at no time was my co-ordination good enough to ever really get any where, and I pretty quickly hit a brick wall of what I could do before everything became exponentially harder. This is the main reason why I am put off these sorts of activities - the fact that you manifestly struggle more than anyone else to do even the basics can be a huge blow to self-esteem (sport is similar) - and the effort/reward curve is far lower than those activities where I don't have a neurological condition which renders me permanently terrible at it.

Then again I don't know how many people on the spectrum have dyspraxic in the way I do - I mean to the point where you handwriting is illegible, you often nearly get run over by cars because you can't judge distance/speed, having a tendency to invade personal space simply because you have no idea about whats around you, you frequently walk into items, forget where you have left important items and so on. So perhaps others' experience is different.

They observed you. We're just reading the story from your perspective. The greatest value you could possibly get in terms of feedback is to ask your flatmates to elaborate in detail how you gave her that impression. They'll cooperate especially if they're aware of your ASD. If they have difficulty putting it into words, just keep asking questions until something clicks and they can communicate what they interpreted from their observations of you.

Agree. While I don't dance Salsa, but folk dance and old time dancing, it is really great for an Aspie. Clear rules and no improvisation that builds on NT stuff. I think it is especially good for male Aspies, as there is typically a shortage of guys that like to dance. It's also a great way to be able to make physical contact with girls without knowing how to play the courtship game. There also seems to be some Aspie girls that do this type of dancing.

As for smiling during dating, this is a good clue that the girl is neurotypical (or at least trying to appear neurotypical).