Richa

It’s preferred.

1. There are almost always more women than men. Everyone in the class would love for the numbers to even out to make it easier for everyone to have someone to practice with.
2. You’re going to swap partners anyway and too often when “couples” come to a group lesson, either someone gets jealous or they opt out of swapping partners which is detrimental to their progress as dancers.
   
   Partner dancing is way more about learning the lead/follow techniques than memorizing steps. Dancing with the same partner and only that partner actually makes it *harder* to learn proper lead and follow techniques. It’s really super important to learn how to dance with a variety of partners if you’re going to learn a partner dance.
   
   But “couples” keep coming to class and not swapping and then not learning. It’s frustrating for both the instructor and for these couples because they don’t progress as fast as the other students. And THEN, usually one of the couple is better than the other, and that person gets held back by the struggling partner, who would struggle *less* if they would just dance with other people.
3. It would be awesome if men outnumbered the women often enough that men had to be forced to learn the follow role the way that some women end up learning the lead role just because there aren’t enough leads in the class.
   
   Of course, it would be better if everyone learned both roles, because that makes them better at whatever their preferred role is, and all social dances would be better if everyone just got over their weird issues and danced with everyone, but since we’re not there yet, women are far more likely to learn both roles out of necessity and so often women are better dancers and some of us would love to see the tables get turned so that men could benefit from the necessity too.