When Relationships Become a Dance Battle

I grew up watching this happen. Not on YouTube, mind you. But in real life, as much as the elements of it touched my Southern American experience. Let me describe it as best I can so you can see it.

Picture a crowded street in 1970s New York City, the birthplace of hip-hop culture. Two dancers enter a circle surrounded by cheering onlookers as music thumps out of a giant boom box. One dancer throws down gravity-defying moves—pops, spins, freezes. Then he stares down his opponent as if to say, “Beat that.” The second dancer doesn’t back down. He responds with his style, upping the stakes with a smooth combination of intricate footwork and adding an impossible full-body flip at the end.

This is what we call a Dance Battle. To the outsider, it looks like pure rivalry. But beneath the intensity, something more profound is happening. The dancers learn from each other, feed off each other’s creativity, and pick up moves from one another. Over time, dance battles become less about dominating opponents and more about collaborating.

Relationships as a Dance

Dancing is an excellent metaphor for relationships.  In a dance, each partner has to stay engaged. One person leads, but the other doesn’t just follow blindly—they respond. They listen to the music, anticipate each other’s movements, and adjust in real time. It’s a fluid, ongoing process that requires trust and attentiveness.

In the same way, relationships thrive when both partners commit to staying in sync. That doesn’t mean there won’t be missteps—there will be times when we step on each other’s toes! But the beauty of the dance is that you keep moving, adjusting, and giving grace.

When Relationships Are a Dance Battle

But let’s be honest. Relationships don’t always feel like a beautiful dance. Sometimes, they feel like a dance battle. We get stuck in cycles of miscommunication, frustration, and defensiveness. We wind up pulling out our bag of tricks - freezes, word twists, and silent pauses - and then dare the other person to “beat that.” We try to“win” the argument or prove our point, and in the process, we lose sight of what really matters.

The truth is battles in relationships often stem from fear—fear of being misunderstood, hurt, or rejected. When both partners fight to protect themselves, the relationship becomes a tug-of-war. But there’s a better way.

The Divine Dance: A Lesson from the Trinity

Let me shift gears. I’ll circle back around to relationships in a moment. 

Centuries ago, early Christian theologians wrestled with a mystery at the heart of their faith: How can God be one and three? Scripture showed that God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—distinct yet fully unified in love. To explain this relationship, a theologian named John of Damascus introduced the concept of perichoresis. It’s a Greek word that means “moving around” or “making room for one another,” but it also carries the imagery of a dance.

In this divine dance, each person of the Trinity yields to and honors the other. The Father loves the Son and glorifies Him. The Son submits to the Father’s will and serves. The Spirit empowers and unites them in perfect harmony. There’s no rivalry, no competition—only a continual self-giving love.

Fast forward to the modern era. Theologians like C.S. Lewis and Jürgen Moltmann revived the dance metaphor to help us understand God and ourselves. Lewis described the Trinity as a dynamic movement of love and joy, inviting us to join. Moltmann and Miroslav Volf took it further, saying that human relationships—especially marriage—are meant to reflect this divine pattern.

But what does that look like?

Learning the Divine Dance Together

Relationships founded in God participate in the Diving Dance of the triune Godhead. There is complete unity, love, and mutual engagement in God's relationship with Himself. When couples center their relationship on God, they tap into this rhythm of self-giving love.

Here’s how this works in practice:

Mutual Yielding

Just as the Father and Son yield to one another in love, couples must learn to yield—not in weakness, but in strength. First, they yield to God. And as an act of that submission, they make room for the other person’s needs, perspectives, and emotions. It’s about saying, “I’m willing to move with God and you.”

Engagement and Responsiveness

The Holy Spirit’s role in the Trinity is to glorify Jesus while empowering and sustaining that holy connection. Staying engaged is vital in relationships. When couples disengage with God, they often disengage with each other—whether through silence, avoidance, or emotional withdrawal. The divine dance invites us to glorify Jesus by sustaining our covenant relationship with one another.

Sacrificial Love

Jesus demonstrated sacrificial love by laying down His life for us. In relationships, we reflect that love by putting each other first—not in a way that loses our identity, but in a way that honors and uplifts each other. 

The Apostle Paul described it like this:

And further, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.  For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything. 

For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word (Ephesians 5:21–26, NLT).

Grace and Recovery

Unlike the Divine Dance, human relationships are not perfect. Missteps are inevitable. However, the missteps are opportunities to release that incredible attribute of God called grace. Grace allows us to forgive, reset, and keep dancing together.

Stepping into the Dance

So, how do we apply this? How does a couple move from a dance battle into the Divine Dance? It starts with a choice—a daily decision to engage. We have to stop fighting to one-up each other and start moving with each other, trusting that God is guiding the rhythm. We begin to mirror the divine dance through fellowship with Him and others.

Our relationships become places of growth, not competition. We learn to trust the process, to respond with love, and to celebrate the beauty of moving together.

The next time you find yourself in a relational “dance battle,” pause. Ask yourself: Are you fighting to win or willing to dance? Step into the rhythm and move with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.