The Fast Decline of the Slow Dance

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Jordan Armstead lives in New York City.

I am 16 years old.

I called her up to pick her brain about a topic I'd gotten curious about.

When I say like slow dance to you, what do you imagine?

I imagine like a very old-fashioned, like, I'm gonna marry this man, slow dance.

She also imagines scenes from movies and television.

Do you wanna dance?

Dance with me.

Can I have the last dance?

These scenes present the slow dance as a rite of passage, a pinnacle of connection, the perfect moment.

And Jordan can only picture them because she's never slow danced herself.

So, unfortunately, I am a slow dance virgin.

I've never been asked to dance before.

I really am exposing myself here.

When I was Jordan's age, I'd only slowdanced a few times.

Once was at summer camp with the first boy I ever kissed.

It was a whole stereotypical teen slowdance thing.

My hands on his shoulders, his hands on my waist, close together, awkwardly rocking back and forth.

And way more than the swaying itself, I remember looking around, watching everyone, my eyes darting completely outside whatever magical moment I was supposed to be having.

I can't say that I loved it, but it did make me feel like I checked off some teenage life experience box.

And Jordan's never had that opportunity.

I've been to dances.

The schools still do dances, but they don't do slow dances.

It's a lot of grinding.

It's a lot of twerking.

Put your right leg up, left leg up, sit down like you're sitting on a stairs.

Look to the right, look back at a booty and stand up, twerk, twerk, left, twerk.

There's not even trying for a slow song because it'll ruin the mood.

The entire party is fast music, rap music, you know, it's, it's, it's quick with it.

In general, Jordan doesn't mind.

I love, I love some fast music.

I love, you know, I love to whine and do all of that.

And it's not like her intel about slow dancing only comes from those schmoopy movie scenes.

My sister, she's 29 right now.

She got the slow dance experience and she said like, you know, it was like very awkward for me because like he didn't know where to put his hands.

I didn't know where to put my hands.

Sometimes he would put the hands where he wasn't supposed to put the hands, and then it ruined the entire vibe, right?

Even so, she'd like to experience a slow dance for herself.

I'm very much a romantic, I think it's wonderful to slow dance, but she's not expecting it to happen anytime soon.

My generation does not slow dance, we don't slow dance.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

To judge from the teen programming on Netflix, the Slowdance is alive and well.

But when you look a little closer, it's a tradition on life support.

In this episode, we're going to figure out what happened.

We're going to pull way back to trace the history of dancing slowly, from the waltz to the prom to the movies.

And you'll also hear nostalgia-drenched personal testimonials from slow dancers themselves.

Put it all together, and we're going to to show you how an intimate and provocative dance became traditionalized and Hollywoodized and lost its vitality and currency among young people.

Even if some of us wish it hadn't.

So today on Decodering, we're going to wrap our arms around the slow dance and bring it really close to try and understand

why is the slow dance dying?

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So if you don't dance anywhere but weddings and have no teenagers in your life, maybe talking about the death of the slow sounds a little overheated.

But I'm not the first person to notice it.

There have been articles in Billboard and Time magazine and elsewhere, and it's not just today's teens who will tell you its decline is real.

You know, as a DJ, you just want to keep everyone going ya ya crazy until the end.

Herbert Holler is a DJ and event producer.

Start to finish, you want everyone's hands and faces and sweaty armpits on full display.

And if you ask him how the slowdance is doing, he does not mince words.

It doesn't exist anymore.

Herbert does a lot of private events, weddings, and bar mitzvahs, where he rarely gets requests for slow dances.

He also does club sets.

He hosts an old school hip-hop dance party in New York and Philly that's been running for 20 years.

The set lists are usually pretty fast-paced, but one night, he thought he'd try something different.

You know, one time I had this idea for my old school dance party, I was going to bring back the slowdance.

He had this red siren light, like the kind that volunteer firefighters put on their cars in emergencies, and he thought he might be able to use it as a prop.

So, you know what?

I'm gonna bring this to the club.

I'm gonna ask the sound guys to turn off all the lights, and I'm gonna plug this sucker in.

I'm gonna be like, you know what, this light means it's time for the slow dance.

So, he did all of that, and then he dropped the needle on this slow song.

Picture John Cusack holding up a boombox.

And I remember trying it,

and

it failed miserably.

The floor completely cleared.

Slow songs will clear a crowd easily.

Rosie Q DJs largely for the queer community in New York and New Jersey.

I DJ for Stonewall.

Stonewall is a mixed bag of people that come in anywhere from 21 to, you know, I've seen people in their 60s.

I have played Careless Whisper, but then it becomes

more of a singing karaoke.

So, no matter what age now, everyone's mostly just gonna sing.

Or walk away.

There are exceptions.

When Rosie plays for a largely Latinx audience, she can spin a slower song and the crowd will happily do the bachata, a slow partner dance that started in the Dominican Republic.

And there are events like RB Nights catering to adults who still want to slow dance.

But even these exceptions can be revealing about the slow dance's state.

Jabari Johnson is the founder of a company that puts on RB only, a live event that's exactly what it sounds like.

I host a lot of the shows and I'm on stage and I'm, you know, for three hours looking at the crowd.

And he sees a lot of adults dancing together slowly, but front to back.

I almost never see people face to face, you know, with like a forehead leaning up against another forehead and gazing in each other's eyes.

Instead, couples are typically snuggled up butt to groin so that the person in the back has their arms wrapped around their partner's waist and they're both swaying sensually to the beat.

When he does see people dancing face to face, he notices.

It's just so rare that videographers and photographers try to capture that because it makes for like an incredible picture and a moment.

It's like the face-to-face slow slowdance is an adorable endangered species, and you should take a picture of it before it vanishes from the face of the earth.

And to figure out how things got so dire for the slowdance, we have to go back to when it was thriving in the wild.

But before we do that, we're going to dim the lights and slow things down with the first of a number of reminiscences about when the slowdance still reigned supreme.

My name is Julie Klausner.

In seventh grade, I went to about 50 bar bot mitzvahs, and

people would link up and they would slow dance, but it was so like, you know, stiffening your arms, Frankenstein's monster style, and then just doing like a slow touch step to soft rock hits that were popular in the early 90s.

Lady in Red

Is dancing with me.

So I was at the gym at my Hebrew school, and I remember being really excited that this guy that I had a crush on

agreed to dance with me.

If there had been like scientific tongs to hold me further away, he would have made use of them.

So we were just sort of dancing to the song lady in red

I was wearing um

this very loud button-down silky

shirt where every panel was a different pattern so we're talking about like oranges next to pinks and certainly reds.

At one point he made eye contact, and there was just an awkward pause, and he decided to say, Hey, you're wearing red, right?

And it was something I had absolutely no response to, but I appreciated it because it acknowledged that he had not completely disassociated from the experience.

In retrospect, I look back and I'm like, oh my god, what a silly thing to say.

But at the time,

I was thrilled.

I was really into

him having noticed me and also being called a lady.

Hello, that's great, right?

More dancing when we come back.

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So, when I said we were going to go back to the heyday of the slow dance, I meant like we were going to go all the way back.

If you were going to start a history of the slow dance, where would you start?

I would begin slow dancing with the waltz.

Richard Powers is a dance historian at Stanford, and the waltz is a Germanic folk dance that became extremely popular in Paris and London around 1815.

This was the first time that you saw in society a couple in an embrace facing each other.

Before the waltz, formal dancing was much more chaste.

Think of a ball in a Jane Austen adaptation.

The dancers take one another's hand, touch fingertips, twirl together, but only momentarily.

The contact is not continuous.

But it was with the waltz.

And that was shocking for many at the time.

So, okay, so the waltz, which we now think of as...

proper.

was like a sexy, provocative dance.

Let me read you a quote here.

It's from a July 1816 issue of the London Times about a ball given by the Prince Regent.

We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the waltz was introduced at the English court on Friday last.

So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think of it deserving of notice.

But now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.

In America, the waltz was deemed inappropriate for marriageable girls for the next 30 years.

And it established a recurring theme for many popular dances and slow dances in particular.

The ones that catch on are often intimate and provocative, romantic and sexy.

They are about the connection between two people, and yet they can make other people watching kind of mad.

And that's part of the allure too.

You see the same dynamic in the next dance that Richard sees as part of the slow dance's origin story.

The tango originated in the lower class dance halls of Buenos Aires and by the early 1900s had migrated to Europe.

It was also considered an unseemly dance.

A French prime minister once said of it: In my day, we only did that lying down.

But Richard says the tango was not that different from a number of other dances at the time, except for this one thing.

The difference is, tango would come to a full stop at the end of most tango steps, and there you are stopped without moving.

And we think that was the main objection to the tango.

It's the not moving, the pause, the stillness that's so scandalous and appealing.

So you can see this is heading towards slow dancing.

In fact, a kind of pared-down version of a walking dance was the dominant dance of the early 20th century.

It was called the one step.

It was simply walking with a partner in your arm, one step per beat.

Walk, walk, walk, to slow dancing.

Is that as boring as it sounds?

Nope.

Nope, because you're holding somebody in your arms.

Okay.

Legally.

Okay.

Who you want to be with.

Dancing was so arousing that from the 1910s through the 1930s, establishments called taxi dance halls flourished.

These were places where men would pay women for a close dance.

The women were called taxi girls, and they had some adjacency to sex workers.

And the practice inspired this hit song in 1930.

Come on, big boy, dance, dance, slow dance.

Fighters and save.

But these were grown men.

And in the post-war era, the slow dance would come out of the dark corners of taxi halls and shimmy its way into the spotlit high school gymnasium where horny, gawky teens would make it their own.

Before we get to that though, let's dim those lights again and hear another slow dance reminiscence.

My name is Naima Cochran.

So I remember my very first time slow dancing with a boy at a dance in middle school.

I had just transferred from a predominantly white school to a predominantly black school.

So my version of the slow dance was kind of like, and his too, hands on shoulders, hands on waist, but like a big gap in between.

And you're kind of just like

going from foot to foot.

There's no knee bend, there's no sway.

There is kind of like a teeter-totter situation.

And I remember the older kids making fun of us, right?

Like, look at these two nerds over here.

The next, like, really big slow dance moment that I remember was my freshman year.

One of my neighbors had a sweet 16, and like everybody from school was there.

And I danced with a senior who I had a massive crush on.

And that moment, like I was, I was ready.

Like I was ready for that one, right?

Like I was ready.

It was right.

I was prepared.

It was good.

It was, it was a whole moment.

And that's the version through which I was navigating.

feelings like oh this feels really nice you know you're nuzzled in so closely that your head is resting on a shoulder You know, it's that close.

And that for me, in my mind, now I liken it to like going from JV to varsity.

Like now, I'm ready to play varsity.

We'll be back out on the dance floor in a minute.

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So all the dancing we've been talking about, waltzes and one-steps and taxi dances, were done by, among others, young people, folks trying to mate and marry and have a good time.

And in the post-war era, some of those young people got a new name.

The early teens are years of upheaval and turmoil.

They're years of physical and glandular change, new and wider relationships with people, and new inner feelings in the early adolescent.

Teenager, as a term, was first popularized in the 1940s.

It crystallized the existence of this new, not quite kids', not quite adults' demographic.

And already, high school dances were a staple of this experience.

The Junior Prom Semi-Formal is the best dance of the year and is announced early.

This is from a 1946 etiquette film.

It's a 21-minute proto-PSA showing teenagers how they ought to dress, behave, converse, and yes, dance at the junior prom.

Now that they have gotten to dancing, let's hope that their troubles are over and that the evening will work out the way they have hoped.

In it, you can see two young white couples slow dancing, or rather dancing to slower music.

They're not doing what we think of as the teen slow dance today.

Neither the awkward teeter-totter nor the slinky adolescent groove.

It's more a classic partner dance.

The boy is leading, so he's holding the girl's hand, but those hands are clasped up with elbows bent at chest tight as they two step across the dance floor to the sound of a big band piano.

But just a few years later, this is not the sort of music or dancing teens would be doing if given a choice.

roll.

In the early 1950s, adolescents alienated by the child-centric baby boom, but flush on cash, started listening to what they wanted to.

A new sound created by black musicians mixing rhythm and blues and country with guitar licks and lyrics about cars and sex and other things teenagers cared about.

As rock and roll took off, white musicians started making it too, and it became the sound of a generation.

Well, I said, shake for all and roll.

I said,

Rock and roll with its syncopated rhythms and associations with black culture freaked some white adults out.

And it wasn't just the music, it was the whole rebellious attitude.

This rock and roll is the musical noise symptomatic of a decadent and irresponsible youth.

And the slow dance in the 1950s could be rebellious too.

You can see in documentary footage from this time that it's starting to look more familiar.

That leading arm is sometimes starting to drop, leaving teen couples pressed really close together in nothing but an embrace.

One that, like the waltz and the tango, could irk adults.

All those etiquette books of

the time and the prohibitions that schools and educators and teachers put on social dance, that made it even more enticing.

Julie Malnick is a professor of theater and dance studies at NYU and the author of Dancing Black, Dancing White, Rock and Roll, Race, and Youth Culture.

We couldn't get too close.

It couldn't be too slow, right?

We couldn't start, you know, hugging each other and kissing on the dance floor.

So it really, it had this aura, I think, of the forbidden.

What teenager could possibly resist?

All over the country, they were doing this.

Something we know thanks to television.

TV stations looking at the rock and roll craze started filming kids dancing, creating cheap, popular after-school programming.

There were hundreds of these televised teen dance shows around the country in local markets.

The most famous of these programs started in Philadelphia.

American Bandstand, hosted by Dick Clark, made the jump to national TV in 1957 and would run for the next 30 years, a proto-TikTok introducing kids at home to the dancing of their peers.

So, whether they were doing slow dances, group dances, faster rock and roll dances, it really didn't matter, right?

They were kind of teaching

the teenage viewers

what was hip, what was in, what was popular.

These shows created nationalized dance trends, many of which were fast, but not all of them.

See if you remember this one.

Here you see couples, boys in tweed suits and girls in knee-length plaid skirts with bobbed hair, holding one another.

Some look a little skittish and uncomfortable.

Others are close, with a chin pressed to a chest or cheek to cheek.

They're on TV, so that leading hand, the one that says this is a dance, not a hug, is still up.

But it otherwise has the hallmarks of the teen slow dance as we know it.

It can be full of intimacy and awkwardness depending on the person, the couple, the minute.

And now kids were watching other kids doing this.

A feedback loop that was further amplified by another dance craze you could watch on television.

Hottest dance sensation in the last four years, a thing called the twist.

Ladies and gentlemen, here's Chubby Checker.

Dance studies professor Julie Malnig said that dance like the twist was actually a huge departure from what had come before.

The current generation is always sort of rebelling against what happened previously.

And what's more rebellious than getting rid of what had been the bedrock of social dance to this point?

The partner.

By the time you get to 1959 and 1960, with dances like the twist and the horse and the frug and the pony and the watusi, these were all solo-oriented dances.

Think about the twist.

You can do it in someone's direction, but you aren't touching them while you do.

You don't need a partner.

You can do it by yourself.

The idea of the dance couple really becomes passe.

This eroding of the dance couple would have larger implications, but in the short term, it made slow dancing special.

Now, the slow dance was the only time teenagers would definitely touch another person's body.

And this body contact, in all its glory and awkwardness, was very compelling for adolescents.

And it was very compelling in the movies about them, too.

Our next dance is going to be a snowball.

And leading it off is last year's class president, Steve Bolander, and this year's head cheerleader, Lori Henderson.

When it comes to the slow dance, the feedback loop between kids and screens didn't end with American bandstand.

Instead, the slow dance also became a trope of fictional teen films and television.

This dramatic or comedic moment when two kids just had to touch.

Some of the first movies to make a big deal of the slow dance are from the 1970s, but they're set in the 1950s.

Movies like American Graffiti, which you've been hearing, Cooley High, Grease, and Back to the Future.

And this time gap isn't a coincidence.

These movies were made by filmmakers and intended for audiences who had grown up slow dancing and were already nostalgic about it.

And as scenes of teens slow dancing began proliferating, something was happening to the slow dance for grown-ups.

Remember what Julie Malnig said about how the twist and other dances of the 1960s started to make the dance couple feel passe?

I think there's just been this sort of inexorable move away from the idea of the couple.

Well, she thinks this is the key to understanding the decline of the slow dance, the beginning of a long trajectory away from couples dancing everywhere except highly traditional locations like weddings.

And already by the 1980s, you could see the ramifications of this.

This is all about.

It's actually a very romantic song here.

Thank you.

This is the singer Joe Jackson, best known for the song, Is She Really Going Out With Him?

Doing a Little Patter at a Show back in 1983.

The right song

to have a slow dance to.

You remember when a DJ at the end of the evening used to play a slow song, you know?

And I didn't seem to do it anymore.

But if the slow dance was already in trouble with adults, this was not yet the case for teenagers.

And to prove our point, we're gonna dim the lights again and venture back to a time when the slow dance still dominated the teen scene.

Slow dancing for me probably started in middle school.

The writer Joel Stein grew up slow dancing in the 1980s and he remembers the heart-palpitating mental and physical gymnastics of the whole ritual.

You'd be at some kind of dance, which even in the 80s felt insane.

Like you were traveling in time, like back to the future, back to the 50s.

Like we're at a what?

A dance?

And

they'd play some kind of slow song, which every album had.

You know,

there'd be slow songs played at the Roller Ring, too.

So the place would clear because it's panic time because you have to find a partner.

So maybe a girl would ask you, or maybe you would ask a girl, or maybe your friends would push you into someone and then you would both kind of go.

And you had to like put your arms around their neck or maybe even their waist and

move.

It was so awkward that you wanted to talk to kind of break the tension, maybe even make a joke.

And you would, but you can only do so much of that when you really, because your heads are just too close for a lot of that.

And then sometimes people would kiss, I mean, because your heads are so close.

There were other more embarrassing possibilities, though.

I remember being at a dance and I was wearing parachute pants, which were a popular 80s item.

And it was literally what it sounds like: it was pants made out of parachute material, which is

great for a slow descent, but not great for a quick ascent.

What Joel is saying is that while he and his parachute pants were pressed up against his partner, he got a boner.

I was mortified, but probably not as mortified as I should have been in retrospect.

I think I thought she didn't know.

And I've

later in life learned that that was stupid.

All of this was sweaty and humiliating, but it wasn't only those things.

So slow dancing was an excuse to touch, but it was also, you had to figure out how to touch someone.

It is romantic and it is sexual.

I mean,

I can remember where my hands were or where someone I was slow dancing's hands were on me and the shock of it.

The pure electricity of that was very real.

All of this is peak teen slow dance, a moment when adolescent and pop cultural understandings of this ritual aligned.

It was a heady concoction of hormones and crushes, smooth moves, misplaced hands, humiliation, status anxiety, excitement, requirement, romance, teen movies, boys-to-men slow jams, and the early early stages of teenage sexual development, including, yes, inadvertent boners.

And it's co-signed by adults who are encouraging teens to dance, but not too close.

And all of this,

this mess of stuff, is making the slow dance vital.

But something was coming for the slowdance, just as it came for all the slow dances before it.

Think back to the waltz, to the tango, and the two-step and the taxi dance.

Just about any dance we once thought of as edgy because it chipped away at the rules about touching in public, loses that edge as those rules get more permissive, and another dance comes along to step over the line.

I wonder if she could tell I'm hard right now.

By the late 1990s, that dance had arrived.

Grinding, which also comes out of black social dance, is not typically face-to-face.

It's groin to butt, but it also involves lots of body touching, physical intimacy, and arousal.

It's just not necessarily to slow music.

A popular dance among teenagers has several local high schools taking drastic steps to stop it.

When it started spreading to high schools across the country in the 2000s and 2010s, Grinding had another capability the slow dance had lost.

It could absolutely flip out school administrators.

The school has announced that aside from next spring's prom, it will no longer sponsor any dances.

Canceling dances was not the only recourse.

Try to change it up.

Maybe like one in four songs is a slow song, which, I don't know, people still tried to dance to the or grind to the slow songs, which made it even more sort of awkward.

And kids responded to those restrictions just about how you'd expect.

I don't really like grinding.

I just think it's kind of annoying how they try to tell us how we can and can't dance.

The teens I spoke with also had seen more grinding than slow dancing, but not necessarily because they do it.

Like the slow dance, grinding isn't happening on every song.

Lots of teen dancing involves doing so with a group of your friends in a circle, in a mash.

You don't have to wait to be asked.

You don't have to exclude anyone.

But what grinding did do when it became even a possibility is push the envelope and make the slow dance seem, yes, passe in comparison.

It's not a thing.

It's not, you don't even think about it, honestly.

Bess Hort is 19.

She's also my second cousin, and she's only encountered the slow dance in one place.

When I went to sleep away camp, we had socials with the boys' camp, and it would be very like mosh pit vibes.

But then at the end of the night, they would slow things down with a cold play song.

I'm sure there was like two kids who ended up doing a slow dance together, but if anything, it was more like the girls would slow dance with each other and the boys would slow dance with each other and like taunting, making fun of it and dancing with our friends.

The first time I heard the story, it seemed like another nail in the slow dance's coffin.

But as I've listened to it, I think it's a bit more layered than that.

The slow dance is in its way still here.

Kids know about it and they're playing with it.

They're being ironic about it.

They're not waiting to be asked to dance, excluding each other, fixated on heteropairings, or stressing out no one asked them.

They're swaying with their friends, having fun with something that used to be so monumental.

And the only people really ruining this change, fretting about the slow dance's irrelevance, are the people it was monumental for.

Us,

the grown-ups.

My name is James Bennett II.

Thinking back to my high school, those dances revolved around like like a lot of fast hip-hop and Baltimore club and like grinding.

That to me seemed far more insurmountable than doing like a slow dance.

Slow dancing and not having it be awkward like requires like, I think just a level of like personal comfort with yourself.

When you're 20s, when you start going to weddings all the time,

Especially if you're not going like, you know, single.

That's when I think slow dancing becomes like a kind of more integrated into, into like your dance arsenal.

It's something that I feel is a very adult thing, like quiet slow dance is like in the living room with like a like a like a partner.

You know, it's, it's tender.

I spoke with a lot of adults about slow dancing for this piece and it was really fun to talk about.

Like I highly recommend it as a topic of conversation because people have feelings about it.

They remember slow dancing vividly and they are alarmed the kids are not doing it.

Once, you know, they've been told the kids are not doing it.

This is just part of the disaster that's making children anxious.

They also have theories about what's happened.

The number one suspect, as it is with everything else, is phones and social media, which has helped make kids oversexualized and yet intimacy phobic.

That's a really intimate moment.

And maybe people in this day and age with social media and a lot of screen time, they're not, they're even less comfortable actually having to look at someone in the eye and have a conversation with them.

And music itself and the changes to it have got to matter.

We are well into an RB resurgence, but for a very long time, there simply weren't the same kind of ballads or the same kind of vulnerability that there were when I was coming up.

And then the last few years can't have helped.

I feel like

like the social connection has gotten a little more awkward and then forget it when covet happened to the adults i spoke with it all seems a shame a sentiment most succinctly summed up by another dj i talked to rome anderson aka dj stylus learning how to get close to somebody and negotiate shared space in a way that's is mutually enjoyable.

Yeah, you might want to learn how to do that.

And whatever generation you're in, you might want to learn how to do that.

That's an important part of humaning.

There's something notable about the flavor of adult concern.

It's not fuddy-dutty.

It's actually a little salacious and hard-nosed.

I'm not advocating for slow dances because they're romantic and sweet.

I'm arguing that like

kids need to like

deal with each other and deal with that anxiety and suffer through the rejection and the awkwardness of it.

We want kids to be braver, hornier, to take more risks, to let themselves be uncomfortable, to learn about their bodies and what they like by interacting with other bodies.

But as right on as this concern may be, it only goes so far.

A feature of a vibrant slow dance, not just the teen slowdance, but any of the ones people have been doing for the last 200 years is that it unsettles adults.

So we can't make the slow dance come alive just because it might have been alive for us.

We can't tell kids they ought to be rebelling by doing what we say.

We can't insist upon the slow dance any more than we could insist upon the waltz.

The face-to-face slowdance has been around for so long that it has become a deeply entrenched tradition, one that will linger in traditional places like sleepaway camp socials and weddings and proms and when DJs want people to go home at the end of the night.

But a slow dance is supposed to be more than just a tradition.

So long as it's out there in any form, maybe a TikTok influencer or bachata star or someone dancing to RB or kids romanticizing the slow dance or goofing on it will find a way to make it come alive again.

But if they do, it won't be the version I remember.

It will be a different version.

It will be their version because that's the story of dancing slowly.

It's about finding a new way to make a connection on the dance floor.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willipaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

Decodering is produced by me and Katie Shepard.

This episode was edited by Zakia Gibbons.

Derek John is Slate's executive producer of narrative podcasts.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

I'd like to thank Joel Meyer, Benjamin Frisch, and Carlos Pereja.

I'd especially like to thank all the additional people who shared their slow dancing experiences and thoughts.

Ralph Giordano, Matt Baum, Meryl Bitzruccik, Ari Feldman, Eva Kanade, Eileen Zhang, and Harper Koise.

I'd also like to shout out an article in Billboard that helped inspire this episode.

It's by Kyle Dennis and it's called The Death of the Slowdance, How the One-Time Rite of Passage Has Evolved for Gen Z.

We'll link to it on our show page and you should check it out.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

And if you're a fan of the show, I'd also love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering without any ads, and their support is crucial to our work.

So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

We'll see you next week.

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