Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
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Breaking news: Gen Alpha has retired slow dancing. Gen Z didn’t fight to keep it alive.
“We don’t slow dance any more,” said my Grade 8 niece, like she was stating a fact of nature. They don’t even play slow songs at her dances. She’s never slow danced with someone she likes. Not once.
Apparently, the kids are just… vibing in general proximity to one another, filming each other ironically, or acting out TikTok choreography in one-minute increments while their phones lean against a Gatorade bottle. And honestly? In the age of sped-up songs and sub-three-second attention spans, this tracks. We’ve raised a generation who can lip-sync every beat of a Doja Cat remix at 1.75x speed, but if you asked them to sway in a dark gym to a five-minute ballad? They would sooner eat drywall. Or call their therapist. Or both.
When I was a preteen, slow dancing mattered. Not because the dancing was good (it never was), but because it asked something of us the algorithm never will. It asked us to reach for one another. To pick a single human in a crowded room and silently say: “I choose awkwardness and risk with you.”
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No one my age danced close that first time. Absolutely not. We clamped our arms out like broken snowplows, nodded like newly plugged-in robots and prayed our faces wouldn’t turn purple. But we did it. We held that duality of petrified and exhilarated and we held it for three entire verses.
I still remember my first slow dance. Halloween. Grade 6. I was Goth that year (The Craft had changed all of us for the better) and I was desperate to feel both powerful and fragile, like the Steve Madden girlies in Seventeen Magazine – “light as a feather, stiff as a board.” The gym was dark in a way only a gym can be dark; the air thick with teenage angst, disco lights casting sparkles on the wall from a teacher who definitely still watched Electric Circus on the weekends. Packs of boys and girls took turns sprinting to their respective bathrooms to hide.
And then the DJ (the gym teacher) hit play on K-Ci & JoJo’s All My Life. A banger by all accounts. In that moment, I locked eyes with my crush from across the room. It felt prewritten in my star chart and a magnetic pull guided us toward the centre of the gym. Suddenly I was in it, palms sweating, arms at a safe Mennonite distance, swaying for five minutes and 31 seconds with the boy I’d been pining over since Grade 4. Avoiding eye contact at all costs, because if he saw my pupils dilate, I would’ve perished on the spot.
My second slow dance was to Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing, and it was with my first love. He asked me so sweetly if I wanted to dance that I thought my knees might buckle. In fairness, he could’ve supported the weight of my body for all four minutes and 59 seconds. He was a football player, after all. But this time, it was different. He pulled me in close and our bodies became a real-life yin and yang for the whole song. Our cheeks touched – warm with affection and yearning – and it felt like we were living out exactly what Steven Tyler was singing about.
But when the song ended, so did his need for proximity. Still, I learned what it felt like to be held close by someone you loved. And to desire that someone, some day, would want to “kiss my eyes and thank God we’re together.” Just like the song says.
If the kids aren’t slow dancing any more, where is their portal? What is their moment where risk meets longing meets possibility? Where do they learn that wanting someone doesn’t have to be loud or performative or ironic? That sometimes it’s a quiet lean-in in a gym that smells like B.O. and whatever the modern equivalent of Capri Sun is?
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I worry that an entire generation is missing the most underrated rite of passage we had: holding stillness, and someone else’s gaze, long enough to feel everything. Because before the world of edits, cuts, transitions and sped-up audio, slow dancing was our first practice at being fully present. At being witnessed. At being brave while terrified.
I hope they get that somehow. Even if it’s not in a gym where an Oh Henry! bar gets chucked at your head at the end of the night because the MuchMusic Video Dance was sponsored – and capitalism waits for no one. I hope they find their version of the sway. Their version of choosing one single person in a crowded room.
Because I don’t want their first experience with intimacy to be something optimized for views. I want it to be a moment. A real one. Some things are supposed to take five minutes and 31 seconds – not be sped up.
Kelly Young lives in Kelowna, B.C.