“Patrick was super hungry for connection... His heart and my heart got along really well.” ~ Lisa Niemi Swayze, from the documentary, “I am Patrick Swayze.”
Patrick Swayze worked at choreographing a balanced life — and an equally balanced masculinity — throughout his movie career and lifelong love affair with Lisa Niemi. There’s little doubt that his ability to be vulnerable and his passion for connection contributed tremendously to his charm and sexual charisma.
In the documentary “I am Patrick Swayze,” Lisa described the time when the couple (still teenagers) danced in front of an audience for the first time:
“People who are performers know that wonderful magic that happens when you... when the lights come up on you on stage. But so much of it was what we saw in each other. There was something about him. When I looked at him, what I saw was pure gold, and I think probably he looked at me and he saw something else than what other people were seeing also.”
Swayze felt the same, telling Barbara Walters in a 1988 interview how Lisa was his “creative partner.”
“There just feels like there’s a real power between us. There feels like there’s a real chemistry, like we’re soulmates, if you believe in that kind of thing.”
Lisa and Patrick were married in 1975 when he was 23 and she was 19.
Feeling the beat
In an August 1997 interview, Eleanor Bergstein, creator, novelist and screenwriter for the movie “Dirty Dancing,” said:
‘’So much of the movie is about the inner life of dance and how it makes you feel.’‘
I was a very young boy when I first saw my mother and father dancing. It was at my eldest brother’s wedding, and it was magical. I’m pretty sure it was the Lindy, a high-energy, playful mix of bouncy fast rotations, swingouts and returns.
While my parents by no means had a perfect marriage, for them, dancing was a joyful expression of their love for each other and the partnership they had created over the more than 20 years they had been together leading up to that wedding reception.
I could see the joy and appreciation they had formed with and for each other, a rhythmic improvisational beat of embracing and releasing an individual and a partner.
Remembering my parents’ marriage, and today watching improv swing dance videos, I’ve come to understand how important that beat can be to connect two partners beyond the bedroom.
The tempo and rhythm of a song two people hear together develops a greater physical and non-verbal awareness between partners, fostering a stronger synchronization and connection — a shared, responsive movement.
Hungry eyes
In a 2017 People Magazine article, Swayze talked about this sexual power of connection when he tried to explain the physical passion that grows between the “Dirty Dancing” characters, Johnny Castle and Baby Houseman, eventually leading to them making love in Johnny’s cabin.
“It’s not about a man and a woman jumping each other’s bones, it’s about two people not being complete until they look into each other’s eyes.”
The first time Johnny and Baby make love, Johnny is feeling despair after his friend Penny almost bled out during an abortion. Baby woke her father, a doctor, to save Penny. Afterwards, her father told Johnny he assumed Johnny had gotten her pregnant because of the dancer’s status at the resort and in life.
Later, in Johnny’s cabin, Baby tries to rebuild Johnny’s pride in his character and ability to create a good life, the life he dreams will give him self-worth.
He tells her:
“I’ve never known anybody like you. You look at the world and you think you can make it better. Somebody’s lost, you find them… you aren’t scared of anything.”
And Baby responds:
“I’m scared of everything. I’m scared of what I saw. I’m scared of what I did, of who I am, and most of all I’m scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I’m with you.”
She asks him to dance, and as they pull in close, we know where this leads.
Bergstein called this scene…
“…the dead center of the movie… that moment in your life when you move one way or another. If you focus your heart and your spirit, you can hold your life in your arms and make it do anything.’‘
Men, for a myriad of reasons, focus too much of their sexual energy on the physical aspects of foreplay and intercourse.
They don’t realize how much more powerful a sexual encounter can be by showing the woman they are making love to that they understand the complete woman she is, and how much joy he gains from seeing her be that complete and unique individual — inside and outside the bedroom.
Sex therapists and marriage counselors talk about how couples should be engaged in this kind of foreplay throughout their days and weeks. Arousal doesn’t begin to build when your clothes come off.
It starts when you offer to make her something at breakfast, when you pick up her laundry without her asking. It’s reinforced when you validate her point in a conversation, bringing up something important you remember her saying six months ago. It deepens when you ease in behind her at the kitchen counter and wrap your arms around her, showing her how much you love her, without any sexual pretense.
I remember one year, alone with my father, asking for a new bike for Christmas.
He said no:
“Your mother hasn’t had a new dress in ten years,” he told me. “She sacrifices so much for you kids and this household. She deserves some new nice things.”
I wasn’t disappointed to not get my Christmas wish. I was filled with joy to realize how much my father was watching my mother sacrifice for all of us nine children, and him. I saw in his eyes how much he respected and loved her.
My parents were phenomenal dancers not because they had professional lessons, but because they connected deeply on and off the dance floor. They enjoyed each other’s company, worried over each other’s health and well-being.
And yes, they had a physical passion for each other that lasted long after I grew into an adult.
Choosing which way to move
Men have choices to make when it comes to their sexuality. They can mindlessly seek to use a woman’s body for their gratification.
Because of my father and some other special men in my life — and witnessing the broken pieces of women — I never learned to be that man.
I wonder sometimes why men are so prone to this kind of dancing, failing to connect the dots between body and spirit. I’ve come to believe that they’ve never learned to listen to the beat of the music in their own lives. All they hear are broken clips of songs they’ve never stopped to really listen to.
So when they do finally have sex, they’re neither able to hear the beat inside them, nor the rhythmic spirit emanating from the woman they are with.
Over the course of my life, I have had enough partners to know that my best dancing was with a woman I loved, who knew that I heard the rhythm of her life, and could feel me following her beat all day long.
If all you ever do is perfect your frame and balance and never feel the beat your lover holds in her inner life, you’ll never know the true power of sex.
You might as well be dancing alone.
