Pole Partners.

In the four years that I’ve been a pole dance instructor, I’ve met countless women who struggle with boyfriends, husbands, or partners who are uncomfortable with the fact that they pole dance. These partners give a variety of reasons for why they feel this way, justifying their right to be bothered, but I believe that this discomfort is really just insecurity manifest. Full stop.

A wise man (my husband) once told me that he thinks of insecurity as a feedback loop that buffets on itself to reproduce. When there are two people in a relationship and one of them feels insecure about something, the insecurity gets tossed back and forth, expounding it’s own toxic energy with each pass and growing until it feels overwhelming. One person’s insecurity makes the other person feel less secure, which manifests itself as energy zapping frustration that leaves both people feeling lonely, isolated, and misunderstood. It’s a shitty place to be in a relationship and it’s not healthy either.

He says he doesn’t like that you post pictures of yourself because then he has to explain to all his friends that you’re not a stripper? That’s awesome that he understands what that feels like! You don’t like having to explain to people that you’re not a stripper either. But you put up with it because you’ve fallen in love with an art that forces people to confront boundaries between sport, art, and a women’s ability to unapologetically own her own body in a way that society doesn’t approve of. That’s what we do to fight the good fight, i.e. pole dance as feminism, because for a lot of us, pole dance is NOT actually just ballet on a pole.

He doesn’t like that you’re spending an ever increasing amount of your time not with him, with a pole community surrounded by women and men who nourish a side of you that he can’t? You say, ‘but it just means that he misses me and loves me!’ But oftentimes, what he is really saying is that ‘You complete me’ nonsense that was so cute in the late 90s until we all started thinking about it and realized that actually he doesn’t complete you because you are a self-actualized woman all on your own. The corollary to that is ironic, because the you that he loves is made stronger and better by your other united by pole relationships.

Finally, there is one legitimate gripe. He hates how your growing love of pole dance means you can’t pass a street pole without forcing him to take pictures of you precariously balancing upside down on something that likely wasn’t meant to hold your body weight and how you then get mad at him when he didn’t get the perfect shot for the .02 seconds that you held the position you wanted taken. That’s understandable. No one wants to be an Instagram husband. So stop that shit.

But the real shit to stop, is all those justifications that you make to yourself about why this unhealthy relationship is healthy.

But he’s right in all of the other ways, you say. He loves you (well, the part of you that doesn’t pole dance), and he surprises you on your birthday and he has a job and he makes you laugh when you’re laying in bed and he does this sweet thing where he [insert sweet thing here]. Those might be the necessary things that you require from you’re relationship, but they are not on their own, the sufficient things for a relationship based on trust and mutual respect, if you feel like you have to hide the art that you create or the strength that you develop in order to make him feel ok about you.

You, like all of us, deserve to have a partner whose love for you either transcends or embraces the weird shit that you do in the name of art and the ancillary fact that you share that passion with others through social media, performance, competition, etc. In the same way, you support him too by embracing his weird passions — his ability to recite Star Trek while sleeping, his passion for writing poems that always involve his wife turning into a fish, etc.

We’re all weird on the inside. Imagine how deliciously different the world would be if we loved on that weird shit in each other, pole or otherwise, just a little bit more? ❤ ❤ ❤