Social dancing, social skills, and the game
It's a way to practice fundamentals and primitives
Some guys try partner dancing (salsa, swing, etc.) as a component of their game, and I'm one of them, but I've found the results to be mixed... whether you should do dance classes depends a lot on you. If you've got lots of tasty chicks queued up and a good pipeline of new ones, there's little reason to start dancing unless you're a guy who really likes it, or unless you're in a small town without good day game opportunities. The highest-value guys and chicks rarely or never show up at social dance venues... which tells you something important.
The reasons for dancing are many and we're the dancing species, so dancing is in line with our evolved propensities... it's hard to fight evolved propensities. Guys with good game are almost always aligned with what chicks find attractive, and guys who can't align themselves with what chicks find attractive struggle. I didn't make the rules bro, evolution did. The reverse is also true... talk to a girl who is fat or old and see how much fun dating is for her... she is not aligned with what guys are primed to desire.
A lot of guys starting in pickup, the game, and the Red Pill have bad social skills and are starting from bad places, with no queue of chicks, no pipeline, and a lifetime of video games, sugar, and pr0n habits to fight against... these guys don't have the social skills to apply cold-approach pickup and, even if they try, they find the process so daunting as to be almost impossible. For them, social dancing (and improv) are good ways to start making small, consistent forward progress... every day you can make progress or regress... you only see the tip of the spear. Almost every activity has basic skills that need to be mastered before one can be “creative” or skillful, and socializing isn’t an exception. So guys who need to learn the alphabet of socializing can find dance classes a useful supplement to what’s normally considered game.
Social dancing and improv are structured ways of meeting new people and building concrete skills without the thumbs-up / thumbs-down aspect of proposing dates and sex to new chicks. When I was younger I was sometimes nervous about sexual rejection, but now I realize that when a girl gives me a firm "no," or when I take anything apart from "yes" as "no," that is an advantage to me because I can quit feeding her attention better targeted elsewhere. Guys without a chick pipeline and without masculine identity and presence often find "no" to be devastating, a blow to their whole identity.
After college I lost some of the environmental and ecosystem practices that had led me to good solid lays, and this seems true of a lot of guys. I thought I was a player... turned out I was just in a good environment and a little bit less of a p***y than most guys, and that was sufficient to get a bunch of lays. Oh, if I knew then what I know now..........
So I tried some social dancing, and it was fine. It led to a few lays, but a lot of hours spent. It was also more fun than a lot of what my friends considered fun (video games). This girl was an ultra-long lead from that period. Good-looking 8 who had become more attractive over time, evolving from a stick-thin girl to one with the right curves (not all girls peak at 18 - 22). And she is pretty monogamous overall... I encouraged her to have some fun when she was out of town and her boyfriend was otherwise disposed... no go. A guy asked me about where monogamous-leaning chicks are, and I don't really know (churches?), but they pop up in my life now and then.
Game advice is tough because game is contingent on who a guy is, where a guy lives, and what his starting conditions are like. Guys with bad starting conditions will often find advice suitable for better-positioned guys to be unrealistic or even outright unbelievable. Guys with good starting conditions will find some advice for beginners to be unfocused, ineffective, or just plain unnecessary. Where you are affects how you receive the message and the message's relevance to you. This post targets guys at an introductory level.
If you're a guy looking at some empty nights and you're not a hard-core cold approach guy, learning social dancing is probably better than not. Social dancing is a very "safe" activity that sublimates its sexuality and gives guys a structure and a skill to practice... this is also what makes it less fluid than daygame or even nightgame. You can practice dancing and talking (a "dance" consists of a bunch of dancing, obviously, but also some hanging out by the drinks table or taking breaks).
Regulars at a social dancing event will get reputations, so it's not a good place to ask out a bunch of chicks the first night you attend. Game at dances is indirect. Most nights, social dancing will be kind of boring, and when I was doing it I didn't even see many 7s. Some, not many. But it's better than a night playing video games or watching porn, and even rudimentary dancing skills can be useful at weddings, nights out with friends, etc. Dancing can be a useful warmup for strolling the streets at night and chatting up chicks who are between bars ("gutter game").
People who get really into dancing go to other cities to attend exchanges (and ideally DNA) with people in the host cities.
So I personally haven't seen much in the way of hot chicks at social dances, or lays from social dancing... but I'm also glad I did it... doing it will put you in a more social and sexual frame of mind and spirit than many other activities. Basic dancing skills apply at parties and bars, too.
For a long time I haven't had many involuntarily empty nights and for me social dancing hasn't been a great source of direct lays, so I don't do it anymore. Chicks are impressed with my "dancing skills," which are awful compared to good dancers but great compared to most chicks, and they come from like the two years I was taking lessons. Some dancing events will also have a nerdy, loser guy wandering around with an expensive camera shooting pictures, and if you can snag some of those pics, they're better than average for online dating profiles.
Just getting out and interacting with other people is far superior to being on the Internet, playing video games, etc. Depending on where you are with gym, fitness, and diet, dancing can be superior or inferior; that's going to vary too much by the individual to generalize. Dance scenes are also somewhat close-knit, so it's easy to soil a reputation there. Guys who don't have basic masculinity and social calibration are going to struggle there, but those guys are probably going to struggle anywhere. Dance classes don't seem like an optimal use of time for guys who want to rack up lays and have the skills to do so. They seem like they can be pretty useful for guys who aren't quite there yet.
Rakish Love said, "Although the dance (or whatever) scene isn’t the best for pickup since you might have a low-sexual-market value in the eyes of veteran girls there, it adds to your SMV to regular girls on the street, which makes it a good value delivery mechanism." He's right but, with consistent and deliberate practice, dance SMV can become fine with a few months of practice. It's going to suck at the very beginning (beginner's hell) but everything sucks at the very beginning of the effort, including game, dance, learning an instrument, etc. Being really optimized for picking up chicks at the venue itself may take a long time, and I didn't properly emphasize that.
I don't now if there are social skills coaches or therapists but if there aren't there should be, particularly in this new age of phone-based social retardation. Seriously, ask to see the Apple screen time app for chicks under age 25. Many of them will check their numbers then be too ashamed to show you. They should be ashamed because they are spending their whole lives looking at other people's Instagram.
Guys who need to build their social skills need to get out into the real world and interact with real people. Improv, social dancing, volunteering, etc., are good, low-pressure ways to do this, and they have a basic structure that guys who aren’t ready to quit the training wheels find reassuring. Dancing is useful, but coaching and therapy would be good too. If you're a guy with strong social and game skills already, then your sticking points are elsewhere. This seems to the minority of guys and especially the minority of guys starting out.
I feel like this is one article I can talk about from a position of experience rather than as a learner.
Haven’t been to many different dancing scenes, and each one has its own quirks (which comes from the close-knit-ness of the people who stick around for more than a few months), but there does seem to be a lot fewer hot gals in a group (or even at a large intergroup dance event) than, say, a bar on Saturday night.
It’s certainly not efficient compared to other options if you have the social skills. But if going to a bar or party makes you feel more “in your head” and less socially free, getting into the dance scene helps—more than one might realize.
I hadn’t considered using volunteering to build up social skills, but it makes a lot of sense; you’re working together with other people towards a common goal, so it makes it easier to open conversations and make friends. I haven’t tried much of the volunteering scene yet, but it sounds like a great idea for once I’ve gotten the “travel bug” sufficiently out of my system, building up social skills to make it easier in the rowdier bar/club scenes.
It may be worth noting that there are a lot more socially uncalibrated people in these groups than more social settings. Don’t take them as examples for socializing, but do be humble and accept their feedback in their specialties (this is one area I need to improve). Resist the pull to sacrifice socializing and focus solely on the group’s purpose—you’re there to help the group AND build yourself.