21 Jan
2013
21 Jan
'13
9:27 p.m.
On Mon, Jan 21, 2013, Alan Winston wrote:
Even if you did only want to dance with your friends, that is your
perfect right. You have complete freedom to decline any offer you
don't want to accept for whatever reason and then accept an offer you
do want to accept. You are not required to offer an explanation.
(If you say no to Joe and then yes to Jerry and Joe's paying
attention, he'll get the message that you didn't want to dance with
him and his feelings may be hurt, but that's actually his business,
not yours. It would possibly be a kindness to Joe and to the
community to tell Joe "you twirl me too much" or "I don't like to do
dips" if there's some simple way he could alter his behavior that
would let you enjoy dancing with him, but it's not required, and just
saying "No, thank you" means you don't have to have a conversation and
can each try to find other partners. If you only ever dance with a
small subset of the people in the hall, other people will eventually
notice and have opinions - and that's still their business, not
yours.)
Not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with this, but how do you reconcile
what you're writing here with the meme that people "should" dance with
the newbies and the sidelined dancers?
Also, what accounts for the prevalance of the meme that one "should
never" turn down an offer to dance? (I tend to fall into this camp and
I'm not really sure where I got it from.)
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