For me, dancing is self exploration: exploring and then inhabiting new parts of me, parts that maybe I didn't even know were there. It keeps taking me new places. This makes me look at some aspects of partner dancing differently. Take the whole idea of performance, for instance. Seeing and feeling dance as self exploration leaves me with little interest in watching anyone else dance (besides my partner), unless I'm trying to learn a particular skill or move. Nobody can explore for anyone else; you have to do your own, and somebody else's self exploration is of little use to me. So I generally don't go to exhibitions & performances, because I'd rather be dancing myself; I'm a lousy spectator. The only kind of "performance" I do is to demonstrate moves & techniques for students, or show prospective students what a particular kind of dancing can look like.
What's absolutely amazing to me about partner dancing as self exploration is that you do it with a partner. You can't explore for your partner; you're each on your own voyage of discovery. But you're traveling together, supporting and encouraging each other; my favorite dance partners make the most exquisite company for self exloration. Doing self exploration in the company of another human creates a very special kind of bond.
The more joyful the dancing - the more love spills out of it - the better it works for self exploration. Joy is the feeling of love spilling out, and it works kinda like friendly fire that burns depth into you, or burns away useless stuff so you can get to what's really there. The goal in learning to dance is to get to the point where you can forget about all the dance steps & technique you've learned, forget about yourself, forget about everything and just be there with your partner and the music and just dance, dance with joy and wild abandon. Ecstatic dancing for real.
But you'll never get there if you keep putting it off; it's not a matter of finally getting to some especially wonderful level of skill and experience where you can cut loose at last and really dance like that. You'll get there a lot faster if you dance with all the joy you got, any and every time you can. Including dancing by yourself; sometimes I don't have a partner and the music really moves me and I just have to dance. This is frowned on in some partner dance circles, but feitctaj, y'know?
Dancing is way too important to be taken seriously; taking dancing seriously takes all the fun out of it. Yes, I know, for some people dancing is very serious business, and it isn't really about fun. If that's you, well good on ya; knock yourself out. For me, dancing is play, recreation, love, a leisure time activity, and it's gotta be fun, or why do it? My favorite partners are very playful, in different ways, and irreverent playfulness, along with musicality and forthright intimacy, are qualities I treasure in my favorite dance partners. I love it when I try to lead some kind of fancy move only to discover my partner didn't do the thing I so elaborately set up but does something else entirely or just stands there looking at me with a grin. It cracks me up every time.
At the other extreme, misplaced reverence about some aspect of dancing - the lead-follow relationship, maintaining the "purity" of some style or dance form, reverent treatment of long-outmoded manners & etiquette & dress that were associated with a dance in bygone times - all that crap is an immediate killjoy. I can't get away from that kind of bogus reverence soon enough.
If you see partner dance as self exploration it'll have an effect on who you choose to dance with. As I understand the definition, "social dancing" includes a certain amount of dancing out of obligation rather than simply dancing with the people you want to dance with. Personally, I avoid dancing out of obligation, some might say to the point of being rude. But I believe that dancing out of obligation is actually much ruder than a simple "No thank you." I think dancing out of obligation is a little poisonous, and does nothing positive for either partner or the dance community or any other such abstraction.
When I dance, I want love to shine through the dancing, as friendship & warmth, as the shared enjoyment of holding each other, as desire to help one of my students, or in some other form. That can only happen if I want to dance with that partner; dancing because I'm supposed to is not dancing out of love. I do not want to dance with someone if I've danced with that person before and we discovered that we don't connect, i.e. we don't particularly enjoy dancing together. If you enjoy dancing with someone in particular, your eyes will light up when they meet across the floor: "Yes! I want to dance with you!" And eyes lighting up like that is never a one-way deal: you're both delighted to see each other, delighted that you're going to have a chance to dance together. Connection is never one-sided.
I don't believe dancing and obligation go together at all. I believe partner dancing should be completely at will, and that no one should ever feel obligated to dance, period. Dance because you want to dance, with the people you want to dance with in particular, the people you just love to dance with; don't dance out of obligation. Dancing out of obligation does not help "grow the dance community" - your partner will be able to feel it if you're dancing out of obligation and don't really want to dance with him or her. It's an awful feeling; I know from experience. You should think twice about subjecting anyone to it.
On a related note: some dancers like anonymous dancing like you get in progressive set dances, mixers, jack & jills: just dance, anyone'll do. Elvis sang "If you can't find a partner use a wooden chair..." and Fred famously danced with a coat rack & a broom. That's great if it floats your boat. But to me it feels disconnected and impersonal; it's not what I want. With me it's personal.
In most couples of relatively even dance skills, the woman will have more developed musicality, because women have to learn to dance responsively from the very beginning, and musicality is all about responsiveness, responding creatively to the music. The early stages of learning to lead involve a lot of thinking and lurching and very little responsiveness. That makes tuning into your partner's musicality a great leveler, men: as you start to see that your partners are actually quite a bit better at dancing - embodying & interpreting music - than you are, well that's a big ol' humble pie slappin' you right in the face, guys. Eat it up, and learn from your partner.
Musicality is intensely personal: it's how the music makes you want to move, you in particular: it's your own personal and ultimately private interpretation of the music. It's private, but you can share it with your partner by dancing together respectfully, and the more I dance, the more I appreciate the musicality of my favorite dance partners. Their musicality - in many cases far more sophisticated and developed than mine - challenges me to respond musically. Musicality is the best tool I know for busting up the traditional lead-follow relationship, because it is so personal: how the song makes you want to move will never be the same as how it makes your partner want to move. Really dancing together is harmonizing with your partner rather than singing in unison; fitting 2 different embodiments of the music together rather than expecting 1 partner to submit to the other.
Loving your body in motion is an advanced stage, but not of dancing; it's more a matter of emotional maturity and self-acceptance. Dancing is a wonderful opportunity to love your body in motion, but as long as you're at all concerned with what you look like or your skill at dancing it's not gonna happen. Loving your body in motion isn't self absorption because you're not focusing attention on yourself; it's more like a glow, it just comes through you. It's what you get if you dance, and keep dancing, and get over yourself.
Dancing with someone creates a very special kind of friendship. Partner dancing is physically intimate, so dance partnership has a strong physical element from the beginning. Our culture tends to define who it's OK to have a physical relationship with pretty narrowly; partner dancing blows that narrow definition out of the water. Thus you find couples who, still feeling bound by the narrow definition, will only dance with each other, or perhaps with a very small list of very carefully vetted partners, and there's nothing wrong with that. It just denies this other possibility, this different kind of physical relationship that partner dancing makes possible: being physically intimate with people who are not your lover.
Physical intimacy adds both depth and breadth to a partnership because it has a certain level of undeniable truth to it. People can present a certain persona to the world, and work very hard at creating a certain image, appearing a certain way, but when you hold someone in your arms, a lot of that smoke & mirrors business dissipates. Not all of it, but quite a lot.
For instance, if you meet someone new at a dance, dancing is typically the first thing you do together. Dancing together is a great thing to do right off the bat with someone new, because dancing is pretty much a zero-bullshit zone. When you're that close to someone, moving together in each other's arms, it's very hard to hide. Someone may be a suave character and have a glib line, or be a fancy dancer with lots of cool moves, but their partner can see through all that because no one can hide how they treat a fellow human, and that you can feel when someone's holding you in their arms. Self-absorption is glaringly obvious at such close range. A partner who's open, attentive and respectful, on the other hand, will melt their partner's heart.