50 Ways to Leave Your Partner
Mastering the Art of Departure
Whether saying goodbye, or leaving your lover, it seems there’s always fifty ways to do it.
And while social dancers may not have fifty ways, we do at least have fifty chances at goodbye, as we regularly leave fifty partners in three hours.
In doing so, we become masters in the art of departure.
This is important, because as Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot writes in Exit: The Endings that Set Us Free, there is an essential link “between our developing the habit of small goodbyes and our ability to master and mark the larger farewells, a connection between the micro and the macro that somehow makes the latter smoother and more bearable because one has successfully accomplished the former. . . . Learning to name and navigate the daily leave-takings—a hug at the door, a lullaby at bedtime, a thank-you as you leave the office—helps us . . . [in] taking on the more extraordinary exits that life is sure to serve up.”
Unfortunately, Lawrence-Lightfoot notes, we have few opportunities to learn this vital art of departure, which is “particularly troublesome in a society where leave-takings are the norm.” In a nation of immigrants who have left their homes to find a better life in America, where we are likely to have many different careers in one lifetime, and the divorce rate is half of the marriage rate, learning how to exit is of the utmost importance.
Fortunately, the dance floor allows us to practice.
This was a stub which never quite found a home in Waltzing: A Manual for Dancing and Living. I’m glad to be able to publish it here on Medium.
