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.) -- Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6 http://rule6.info/ <*> <*> <*> Help a hearing-impaired person: http://rule6.info/hearing.html
