For my last partner I actually moved to a country that I didn’t like very much in the first place and of course it went all wrong, because I gave up too much for him and he wasn’t ready for this kind of commitment. The last 5 months were generally quite good. Being single is not too bad at all. Still, there were sad moments, where I missed him and where I didn’t know how I would ever find anyone like him again (well, a little bit more mature would be nice). I didn’t really want to accept the reality of things: I made a mistake in coming to England because of a guy. I made a mistake in trusting solely in love. The real world just doesn’t work like that. We’re so full of illusions when it comes to love and relationships, because we’re looking for the fluffy Hollywood love! Think about those Hollywood films: The film ends when the two finally kiss and then they live happily ever after, right? Well, no, the first kiss and the first few months are always easy and rosé and fluffy and then reality kicks in! Hollywood love leads to hollywood divorce and that’s that.

How do we make a long distance relationship work? How do we cope with an immature partner who loves us dearly, but with whom it is impossible to have children, because he’s still a kid himself? How do we make it work in the real world? Well, sometimes it just doesn’t work out! You realize that he’s too immature, that the distance is too big and that you just can’t deal with it. For me it didn’t have anything to do with love. I didn’t suddenly stop loving. I didn’t suddenly stop having fantasies about a future with him. Nothing changed where feelings were concerned. At some point I just couldn’t bear the constant fighting anymore. He made me too angry. He hurt me too much. Enough was enough! And still, after a while the anger goes away and what do you do then? You think of him and you just feel: ouch, you still love him so much and still can’t be together with him! Frustration, anger that you didn’t see it coming, well, lately the most frequent thought was, that I was stupid! So stupid to believe that everything would just work out, because we love each other.

Somehow I ended up still hoping that everything would work out! One day he would just wake up and be grown up enough to stop the bullshit. I hoped that losing me would drive him to grow up faster. In the last 5 months nothing of this sort happened. In fact my hope kept me where I was. Sure, I’m single, I’m quite happy with it and I’m not even looking for a new partner. Well, I don’t need one, because one day he will grow up, right? Only recently I realized that I wasn’t moving on. I wasn’t going to let go of him. I still wanted it to work, because I placed so much hope in him. I came to another country for that guy and now everything is supposed to be gone? No way!

The last time we spoke about it he said that he moved on. He still seems to be single, but he seems to know now that it won’t work out with the two of us. He would be too afraid that we would have the same problems again. He moved on. And I didn’t. I still sit here thinking: “Wait a minute, we love each other, why doesn’t it work?!”

Am I immature for having hope? Am I stupid for doing what my heart tells me to do? Am I silly for still wondering why it didn’t work out? No. Everyone needs hope and doing what your heart tells you to do is probably the only way to actually find happiness out there. I would even say it is normal that I didn’t move on yet, because he was important enough for me to move to a country that I didn’t really like in the first place!

Of course I am moving on. I know that it won’t work out. I know that my hope is futile. I know that he’s not ready for what I need in a relationship. I just didn’t want to let go yet! I could let go any moment now and it would be ok. I mourned enough, I suffered enough, I reasoned enough and I certainly waited long enough. It is time to let go and I know it.

• Everyone needs time to move on and you should give yourself this time. If you just throw yourself into the next relationship you will still struggle in the same way, but you won’t do it consciously. It will be unfair and cruel for yourself and for your new partner.
• Everyone needs to suffer through a loss. Your dreams were shattered, your future ripped apart, it is normal that moving on hurts! In the end: if it doesn’t hurt, then the relationship was just a waste of your energy!
• It is normal that you don’t want to let go, because this person had such an importance in your life. Letting go sometimes feels like betrayal. If you still love this person, why would you let go just because reality caught up with you? It seems wrong.
• You will know when it’s time to let go. When you suffered enough, when you had enough time to think, when it doesn’t feel like betrayal anymore, then you will know that it’s time to let go.

For me it is time. Know when it’s time for you!

My favourite tango couple are Javier Rodriguez and Geraldine Rojas. They were truly amazing together (for more videos of them together click here). For both there came the time when they had to move on.

This tango video shows Javier Rodriguez with his new partner Andrea Misse.

The following video shows Geraldine Rojas with her new partner Ezequiel Paludi.

When I was studying Media and Cultural Studies I had a favourite lecturer. He was not only a great teacher, but also a very interesting character, who originally didn’t even have A-Levels. He only took them after an apprenticeship of, well, painting walls. Now he is a philosopher and got a price for his PhD. He was a junior professor in Düsseldorf while I was studying there and he obviously liked to do unusual seminars. I couldn’t get enough of him and therefore enrolled for every course he gave while I was there. One of them was a course about the medial representation of tango argentino.

When I first saw that course in the course directory I thought I was misreading something: it was just listed as “tango”. Wait a minute what has that to do with my lecturer? How random! I was really not prepared for that, because I saw him as such an intellectual person – I wouldn’t have guessed that he dances tango! Now that really made me curious: if such an intelligent person is doing a whole university course on something so random, there must be more to it then just … some dance. In the course description he recommended a book, so I got hold of that and read about the history of tango. It still meant nothing to me. I would even say that I wouldn’t have understood what tango was all about even after the course, if I hadn’t tried it out.

If I am honest to myself then I would say that not the course, but the man made me try it out. He was more than just a lecturer to me and I turned to him when I needed advice, because he seemed like someone who would understand. He was someone who like me first did an apprenticeship and probably hated it as much as I did. He was someone at the right age to understand what I was going through, when my ex-partner was threatening to leave me if I wouldn’t have a baby with him. He always had an open door and listened – I am very grateful for that!

Without him and his advice losing my long-term partner would have been a lot harder on me, because I simply had nobody else in my environment who would have understood my dilemma. I wanted to have a baby with my ex-partner, but at the same time it had become impossible, because this threat to leave me forced me to say no. If my ex-partner was someone who would make such a threat then I couldn’t possibly have said yes, even though I would have said yes if he had asked in any other way. This lecturer whom I now consider a friend seemed to understand me better than anyone around me, because nobody in my environment was old enough to have these kind of problems. I really valued his judgement and therefore it was curious to me how he could like tango!

Dancing, body stuff, that’s like sport isn’t it? In Germany people who don’t like sports sometimes say: Sport is murder. Dancing is almost like sport, so it must be like that as well, right? And then there is this highly intelligent man, who always impressed me with being absolutely accurate and on the spot with his judgement and he likes dancing tango? I just found that really unusual! Suddenly I started to wonder whether my judgement might be wrong and just a result of absolutely stupid PE classes and teenage embarrassments. I decided to be open minded and try it out. I asked a friend to be my dancing partner and we both turned up to the uni sports tango argentino course about a week after my ex-partner and me broke up.

At first everything was very hard: even not falling over was incredibly difficult! I proved to be: untalented, not able to control my feet, I had a bad posture and absolutely no balance! It showed me that I was bad at it in so many different ways that I thought I might give up. My partner seemed to have even more difficulties and we were both struggling a lot.

As long as I can remember I was avoiding things that I couldn’t do. If I was crap at it, why bother? There were so many things I was good at so that I didn’t really need to bother about the stuff I couldn’t do. Not everyone has to be good at sports or coordination or dancing, right? There are people, who are just untalented and they will never learn it, right? WRONG! In tango you just use your body in a very different way than in normal life and everyone has to learn how to do that, even people who are good at sports. Even the walking in tango is so different, that it might seem as if you have to forget how to walk properly to be able to do the “tango walking”.

The task tango had set me was the hardest ever: I had to completely change my attitude! I had to learn to accept my body, I had to learn that my body needed to get used to the new movements and if I was just patient enough, then after a while it would magically start to work. At least it would seem like magic to me. And then there was the biggest problem: I couldn’t stop to think! Thinking and tango doesn’t go well together and even now sometimes a dancer would whisper “I can feel that you’re thinking”, when I wouldn’t consciously clear my mind. While back then my own pondering would make me unable to move, because I wouldn’t get the lead, nowadays there will be a noticeable lack of connection that any good dancer can feel. Now there I was: Someone absolutely dependent on rationality, who wanted to make a living with just … thinking, suddenly thrown into something that seemed impossible, even unnatural to her! I’ve never been so lost in my life!

I could have given up at that point. I could have just left and said “This is not my kind of thing …”! A lot of people just walk out on tango and don’t give it a chance to grow on them, because it can be just so hard to get started. In fact after a while my dancing partner did exactly that and always had more important things to do, but I just went anyway and tried to learn. After a while I bought tango shoes, which were high enough to give me trouble with my balance once again. After about half a year all these setbacks were so normal for me, that they didn’t bother me anymore. Tango taught me how to accept failures and keep trying anyway!

Why did I keep doing it though? There were two reasons: One reason why I didn’t give up was that I never give up unless it threatens my mental health! My entire life before tango has been within my comfort zone and I never tried something that I thought I couldn’t handle. I never bothered with things I thought I couldn’t do. If you don’t start doing anything that you can’t handle then you never have to give up, you just keep going because you know that you can do it! Tango was different: when I started I thought I couldn’t do it and decided to prove myself wrong! After only a short while it became a matter of self-esteem, I just needed to do this! The other reason was my lecturer: he knew I was trying to learn tango and somehow that made tango really exciting! A handsome guy who impressed me with his sharp mind from the moment he started talking in my first ever university seminar. Of course he was completely out of my reach: After all he was my lecturer! And then there was this one opportunity to be close to him without any consequences as such … of course that was exciting!

I’ve danced a lot of tangos in the last 2 years and I’m ashamed to admit that of course I can’t remember every guy I danced with and surely not every tango. That’s how the memory works though: There needs to be a lasting impression and then you will remember. A few tangos made a really amazing impression on me though: I remember exactly the first tango I ever danced with my lecturer. He asked me to dance and I was just an absolute beginner. I was prepared for total failure! So the tango began and I was standing in front of him and suddenly I realized that dancing with him meant … touching him! My heart definitely played a song of total fear! I was so paralysed it was amazing that I even took a few steps! Maybe half the tango didn’t work at all and then he said to me “Just let go!” and my heart made another jump. After that it kinda worked – well as well as things work when you are an absolute beginner! This was so memorable, because I was dancing with someone who was marking my papers and we suddenly moved from total distance to body things and first name basis! How odd is that!

The most memorable tangos for me were those that either changed the real world – like this first tango with my lecturer – or those that were absolutely amazing and had no impact on the real world whatsoever! Once I had the most amazing connected almost intimate tangos and I hadn’t seen the guy before and I’ve never seen him again! We didn’t even talk, I have no idea where he was from, whether he even spoke any language I would understand and I can still remember his embrace!

10 things tango did for me:

1. It made me move out of my comfort zone.
2. It gave me a balance of body and mind.
3. It transformed the meaning of communication.
4. It made me change my perspective.
5. It made me take up exercise.
6. It gave me more self-esteem.
7. It taught me how to deal with failure.
8. It made me more outgoing.
9. It transformed Düsseldorf into the place I consider to be my home.
10. It made me an addict

The message of today’s post is that changing your life is sometimes as easy as taking up a new hobby. Of course this has to be a special hobby: it has to be something that you think you can’t do, something that is completely outside of your comfort zone. For me it was something that changed my attitude and my perspective on life and communication and human beings completely, because it was so entirely different from everything I was used to. Taking up tango argentino might not be life changing at all if you have been doing other dances your entire life, but it might as well be if you have never done anything with your body! Similarly, if you have always done something connected to your body, maybe it’s time to do something for your mind!

Tango changed my life and you can change yours today by starting something new: It is never too late to change your perspective!

The tango videos I picked for this post are videos of my favourite couple: Javier & Geraldine. I find them amazing, because they show so much awareness, self-control and precision, while not losing sight of the feeling. Sadly they don’t dance together anymore. The real world probably caught up with them.

Heimat itself also was a word quite frowned upon due to the German history. It was seen as nationalist old concept that wasn’t expressed very often, until quite recently. It must have been in the last 20 years that the concept became fashionable again, probably due to the Berlin’ wall coming down and a lot of people moving away from the places they were born in, in East Germany. I’m sure that there are statistics and lovely cultural studies analyses about this concept around, but I really don’t think that the use of a word changes anything about the concept attached to it. Even though people might not have called it Heimat, they still belonged somewhere or got the feeling that they didn’t belong.

For me it was mostly that: I didn’t belong anywhere. In my childhood I was treated as a foreigner, because my Mum is Russian. In secondary school I felt that I was in the wrong town. Nothing was going on, there was no way to get out of town easily and teenage efforts to waste time were quite without any culture – we basically got drunk in the park and that’s all we did, because there is nothing else to do in my hometown. My efforts to find a partner were also mainly futile: it seemed that the town really made people go nuts, no decent relationship possible. Of course this is a rather one-dimensional interpretation of things, but it helped me to understand that I had to leave my home town if I wanted to be happy.

I left when I was 17 and moved to the area around Düsseldorf. First I lived in a small town with a real lawnmower culture. My school was a conservative latin school for rich kids and my course mates weren’t interested in anything but expensive things they didn’t need. It was sickening. Additionally the people there generally are very different from the people in my home town. In Chemnitz, where I grew up, people are really into your face. If they don’t like you, they will probably tell you. In the Rhine area however people are overly friendly and talk behind your back. You can’t really tell who your friends are, because everyone is just really awfully friendly even if they hate you. I really didn’t like it and so it took me a while to adjust to that.

After I finished school I moved directly to Düsseldorf, which is a beautiful city with lots of museums, nice parks, a quite cool historic section of the town (mainly the pub area), lots of students in the south, artsy cool bars all over the place and a considerably rich area on the “other side” of the Rhine. I spent a lot of time there even before I moved directly to Düsseldorf, because the town in which I lived was just boring and Düsseldorf was only half an hour away.

Still, even there I didn’t feel at home. Most of my friends didn’t live in Düsseldorf but in cities nearby – it’s a densely populated industrial area, which is sometimes called “Ruhrstadt” (Ruhr-town), because you can’t really see where one city ends and another begins. Düsseldorf is just outside Ruhrstadt to the south. People in the Ruhr-area are honest working class type people, while people from the Rhine-area are considered to be stuck up rich conservative people. These stereotypes are generally quite true and I always liked the honest Ruhr people better.

Through work I didn’t really meet many new people in Düsseldorf and it stayed like that until I started studying and dancing tango. Düsseldorf was just a random place to live. Quite nice, but I didn’t really have any roots there. Not an awful lot of friends – I mostly had more friends all over Germany – no family directly there, I could have lived anywhere else in the area. When I started studying though, I met quite a lot of people who actually lived in Düsseldorf – they were students so they mostly weren’t really from the area and if they were they usually lived with their parents somewhere in a 150km radius around Düsseldorf. Going for a coffee with people who actually live in the same city is a lot easier! Still, I was mainly quite attached to the university and most of my social life happened there on a campus in the far south of Düsseldorf. How could you call a place like that home though?

As I grew older I also realized that politically Germany was just doomed in my eyes. The country was ruled by conservative stuck up idiots, who tried to save their reputation with leaving all the problems for the government coming after them. Our pensions aren’t safe, but nobody talks about it. In contrast to England Germany didn’t have Thatcher and therefore coal mining is still subsidized. The country is really in debt as well and there hasn’t been any decent effort to reduce it since the re-unification. Education is not financed properly and the recent introduction of tuition fees at universities so far hasn’t made any change to the teaching quality, which is generally quite poor, because university lecturers are picked for research and not for teaching.

Politics just make me sick, because a single person can’t even hope to change anything. When I was a teenager I thought: 99% of humanity are stupid, therefore democracy lets the stupid people rule. There might be some truth to it, but I mainly am not interested in politics anymore, so I haven’t really given this much thought in the last few years. My vote can only make a difference if there are parties out there that realistically want to change things for the better. Our center parties, who claim to be Christian conservative or socialist both don’t differ in there politics, they make the same decisions to be elected again. It all becomes a matter of election and as a politician you mainly have to realize that realism doesn’t get you votes and election centred politics can’t make a difference. I just gave up on politics. After all politics doesn’t really change anything immediate in my life. They might decide how much unemployment money I get, but I don’t even want to go down that road, so why bother?

All that time I didn’t really feel at home. A random city, a random country where I happened to be born in. I hated my home town passionately and the place where I moved to was just any old city where you had good opportunities to spend your free time. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had lived in Berlin instead. I even still consider going to Berlin, if I ever come back to Germany! Discussions in cultural studies seminars about the concept of “Heimat” showed that I wasn’t the only one, who never felt at home anywhere. Of course you have your flat and your city and places where you go to, but it wouldn’t really make any difference if the university and the people where somewhere else. Why did I feel so lost all the time, so out of place and not really part of the place where I lived in? I was always observing, always judging, always finding things that I didn’t like.

All that time I just wanted to leave Germany for good. With one of my friends we made a lot of plans about going to England, because of more realistic politics and less stuck up conservative people and whatever we thought England was all about. I was 18 at that time and our plans didn’t really make any sense as long as I didn’t have a real occupation. A few years later when I was studying, I knew that I could try it out, go abroad for half a year and see whether England was really the place to be. There were no Erasmus partnerships with any university in England which had all my subjects so I had to organize it on my own, look through the university guides, find out about fees and stuff like that, organize letters of reference, meet deadlines for applying, make some money for the high rent prices, finish a lot of courses that I couldn’t take in England to graduate in time. It was a huge effort, but everything worked out.

By the time everything was organized I started dancing tango. I met a lot of new people, who lived and danced in Düsseldorf and after a while I also knew every tango spot in town, had memories of cycling to south Düsseldorf to dance and about sitting on the front porch of some random building in Düsseldorf after tango in the middle of the night talking to a tango friend for hours. I also fell in love with someone I met when dancing tango. He wasn’t very flexible about leaving the country just to visit me in England and everything started to get complicated. Tango had transformed Düsseldorf into something with a lot of meaning to me. Almost every street in Düsseldorf was suddenly occupied by all this meaning, all the fun memories with friends and tango and cycling to and from tango. And then I had to leave.

Just before I left I realized something. It was something important, impressive and life changing. It was something that I never had before and it was a delightful feeling when I finally understood why I was so reluctant to leave after putting myself through so much stress to get the opportunity! I had found a home! Finally after years of feeling lost and treating every place the same: namely as just some random place where some friends or family happen to live, I found a home! I didn’t pay my tuition fees for Sussex and I didn’t book the Eurostar until two weeks before I had to leave, because I wasn’t sure whether I really wanted to go after all. I knew in advance that the relationship that I was trying to establish wouldn’t survive the distance. I knew that I would be completely alone and that I might not find any friends in this strange country. I knew that there was only little tango. Two weeks before I had to leave, I said to myself: “Verena, there are things in your life that you just gotta do! Come what may!” Sometimes you just have to stand strong and not let fear paralyse you.

Do you want to know what happened when I came to England and how you can transform a seemingly random place into your new home? Read more in Part 2 tomorrow!