One average Wednesday night, I walk up to a dance studio on 23rd and E Olive St and realize my socks don’t match. It’s not too bad, as my socks are all pretty similar, but the idea looms that I already look like an uncoordinated fool.

I blame the two-inch difference in the height of my socks on the fact that I’m already running late, and had shoveled down my mom’s stir-fry dinner in seconds flat– I guess I was distracted.

But as I cross the street and the sound of sizzling rhythms and romantic refrains surfaces, the atmosphere is getting pumped. Really it’s just a salsa class, not a pulsing, energized club somewhere in South America, but hopefully in taking this class, we’ll get to the latter someday.

The front of the studio actually looks like a coffee shop, and I had always thought that it was a cafe, as the name of the place– 17oh1– is just a weird looking version of the address. I push down on the door handle of the studio and hurry to slip off my shoes, remembering that the building was only bursting with music because class has already started.

Before the start of my salsa career, I’d been blasting the reggaeton for months, as I’d discovered that an interest in hip-hop generally carries over to this genre of mostly-in-Spanish dance music. One Spanish genre led to another, and I ended up discovering salsa music– and realizing that you could dance to the stuff. Who knew?

On the dance floor, we start off following the leader in front of a mirror that covers a whole wall. The first thing I noticed about dancing while facing a mirror is that it’s genuinely distracting to look at me for a whole hour, as all of my classmates know. Even with a number of Derek Zoolander-like moments when I caught myself staring, I locked in to the basic rhythm of moving backwards, then forwards.

All too soon however, I was presented with the duty of leading my woman partner. As the frequent ‘lead’ in a dance relationship, we men have a challenge that must be overcome. In order to be the life of the salsa party, the lead has to direct the ‘follow’ into all manner of turns, spins, weight shifts, etc.

But there is a basic imbalance between the responsibilities of men and women in salsa dancing. In order to satisfy the lead, all a novice follow has to do is go along with whatever the man does. The men really get the raw deal on this one, as we have to come up with every move for both ourselves an our partners.

The only time when we salsa-dancing men aren’t required to micro-manage our womenfolk is during a solo dance called a ‘shine’. During shines, which can begin at any point during a dance, partners separate and get a chance to prove their worth as dancers. In reality, the shine portion of any dance ends up just being massively awkward, and in no way a break from directing my woman. I usually get overwhelmed and trip over myself. I guess I started off on a wrong beat, but by the end of the class, I’d begun to get a hang of the bare basics of this ‘New York’ style salsa.

But after weeks of classes, some of which I was on time for, I had to come to terms with the knowledge that many people in the northwest don’t actually dance New York style salsa. It’s not that I wouldn’t be able to dance at all at any of the frequent salsa dances in Seattle, it’s just that in New York style you step back on beat two of the music, and forward on beat six, while in ‘LA’ and ‘Cuban’ salsa styles you dance to a different rhythm.

I don’t know if it really matters, as I generally step on my partner’s feet anyway, but I’m a little bummed that I can’t dance among the hordes of men and women looking for a more defined method of courtship.

“In the past few years, partner dancing has been on the rise,” says local salsa dancer Juliet McMains. It’s honestly impressive that people are sticking with it, as it didn’t take me very long to realize that I was not about to make it to Dancing with the Stars just by taking a few classes (that stuff you see on T.V. is actually impossible, they take dancing steroids).

One attractive aspect of salsa is that it offers a set, physical way for the different genders to go about wooing each other.

“It’s a reaction to people becoming more plugged-in, a reaction to a need for physical touch,” says McMains.

Though I was nervous about holding hands, dancing does offer a structured way of courting the opposite sex. No more awkwardly scooting closer to the other person; no Pick-up Artist skills necessary. In trying to improve my own salsa skills, I did some YouTube research and, to my relief, confirmed that in almost all of the salsa dancing videos, they skipped all the foreplay, and started out holding hands.

Though it hasn’t actually worked for me, salsa dancing is theoretically a way to instantly turn yourself into a babe magnet. I know from experience that the growing Seattle salsa community is quickly gaining more female participants than males. That means dozens of loose women, who may be looking for someone to be more than just a salsa partner.

Dancing is one of those skills, which, if you’re good at it, will automatically score points in the ‘HOT’ book of your gender of choice. Even with my novice skill level, and the fact that I still can’t really get them Salsa gigs on the dance floor yet, I have danced with college girls. Yes, there was really only one, and it was my sister, but dreams of steamy mastery of salsa can’t be that far off for any average man willing to take the plunge into not just the mild or the medium, but the spicy.