Partnering Practice

A few years after Anna and I started skating together, I noticed, to my excitement, that our practice sessions had developed a pattern that seemed like an expanded version of what high-level pairs appear to be doing at competitions during their six-minute warm-up—the brief ice time that competitors have, three or four pairs at a time, before skating their programs pair by pair. We’d take a lap or two, maybe chatting together or skating separately, getting the feel of the ice, working a few edges. Then we’d gradually transition to skating in unison, working to match strokes, knee bend, and free-leg extensions. Over the course of the session, we’d switch between working on choreographed elements—warm-up drills, tricks, footwork, program sections—and in-between times, where we’d analyze what we did or get feedback from our coach if we were in a lesson.

Over time, those in-betweens changed, too. We’d disconnect physically a smidge later, communicate more economically, discover we’d had the same, not totally expected thought. Wait, I was just about to suggest we try that next, too! All of that made for accumulating bits of evidence, like when romantic partners finish each other’s sentences, that can function in front of others as endearing or annoying tokens of intimacy. Or, take it out of coupledom to these lines from Sister Sledge’s 1979 pop hit “We Are Family”: “Everyone can see we’re together / as we walk on by / (and) we fly just like birds of a feather / I won’t tell no lie.” Switch out “walk” for “skate,” read “family” in the big queer sense that turned the song into a Pride anthem, and that’s us. The resemblance I perceived with the fancy skaters felt like one more confirmation: Damn, we’ve become a real pair!

We had, but not because we had organically developed a connection that translates naturally onto the ice. For one thing, consider the source of comparison. Nothing just happens on the six-minute warm-up, which skaters understand as precious, planned time to use wisely and as one of many occasions for scrutiny by people whose assessments affect their skating careers. Some of that scrutiny, disturbingly, concerns heteronormativity. In On Top of Glass: My Stories as a Queer Girl in Figure Skating, ice dancer Karina Manta recounts being chastised at an airport in 2017 as the US team traveled with judges, coaches, and team coordinators to a prestigious competition in Germany. “You really need to learn to walk more like a lady,” one of them admonished, concerned that judges might be influenced if they noticed Manta walking around the competition venue that way and that insufficient hetero-standards off-ice would translate onto the ice (2021, 273–74).

While any skater might be subject to that sort of criticism, one extra dimension of bigotry aimed at partnered skating revolves around a bogus association between a skater’s sexuality and their ability to perform heteroromantic stories on ice. Because of that, the portrayal of closeness between partners apart from the competed program may usefully function to suggest a real-life heteroromantic tie or, at least, each skater’s interest in heterosexual partnering. It’s the mix-up/mash-up of real and performed affection that—besides being fodder for homohating judges—also grabs the popular imagination. Witness the enduring affection for films like The Cutting Edge (1992) in which reluctantly partnered skaters fall in love, or the 2007 comedy Blades of Glory. Centering on two men skating together as their last-ditch chance to keep competing, a pairing understood as funny and inappropriate by itself, the movie also needles at the problem created for brother-sister teams, who do not get bonus points for suggesting real-life romance, by having a villainous brother-sister duo portray the alleged affair between US president John F. Kennedy and sex-symbol movie star Marilyn Monroe.

I already knew that I was shoving a lot to the side when I grooved on televised six-minute warm-ups as evidence about Anna’s and my pairs-team togetherness. I also knew that the portrayal of intimacy in partnered skating can conceal all sorts of hostility, mistreatment, and abuse, born of many issues I’ve talked about already, including the fundamental power imbalance generated by the requirement for male/female duos and the dearth of male partners. Figure skating also lags behind other partnering movement genres like (off-the-ice) dance that now at least a little more frequently incorporate training in consensual touch.

What I didn’t understand enough yet was how precisely choreographed displays even of genuine intimacy might be. That changed, barely two weeks after I shared my exciting observation with Anna, when we worked with a coach who wanted us to initiate warm-up stroking from movement rather than, as we’d first learned to do, from a standstill. To my surprise, she then taught us a more natural-looking version of precisely that transition from informal to formal connectedness that I thought we had happened to develop. While skating together in a way that could appear relatively undirected, we were to approach a location far enough from the side walls to execute our upcoming maneuver and close enough to each other to make linking up seem like the next obvious thing to do. I would then reach for Anna’s hand and, once connected, we would gradually build synch as we rounded one corner, skated across the short axis, and did a more formal, now-we’re-presenting, crossover at the next corner—using our unlinked arms for graceful motion designed to indicate that our connection, strong but not stiff, was simultaneously powerful, precise, graceful, and fluid. Voilà, we could now take off from our former starting point with performed paired-ness, and, indeed, a more productive physical connection, generating speed and power from the get-go by turning the get-go into a choreographed process.

We also learned from another coach to position ourselves more deliberately during what I referred to above as those in-between times. Our whole practice time together, they admonished us, is pairing practice. Hold hands longer as we exit exercises. Stay next to each other always. That instruction concerned developing our connection and also affected how connected we looked. A few months later, a friend videoed me and me and Anna on our own six-minute warmup for a local skating exhibition. I saw that we could appear unconnected, regardless of how we felt, if we drifted even six feet apart.

In talking about the choreography of pair connectedness, my purpose is not to call out all such connections as simply an illusion, even though I have just shared some tricks for performing the skating-partner version of holding hands in public all the way to the rancorous split that onlookers never predicted. There’s an art to looking intimate, just like there’s an art to looking gender normative.

Instead, I want to surface how much can go into developing, displaying, and experiencing those deep connections. Ask any contestant-suitor in the Bachelor mansion who’s returned from a coveted one-on-one date. Or, easier to find, ask anyone who had great sex with someone(s) the first time and later it got even better. Building connection doesn’t require precisely a helicopter ride, a delectable picnic by a waterfall, or a lesson in an unfamiliar dance style where you demonstrate your capacity to be awkward, brave, goofy, and vulnerable in front of other people. But the basic idea is on target: time together and practicing helps in ways that terms like spark and magic can obscure.

Due to a collection of resources that would take pages to itemize—ranging from decent incomes and somewhat flexible jobs to the unearned advantages of whiteness that have helped us at every life stage—we’ve had many opportunities to pursue partner-building activities, both small and occasionally large. Take, for example, our road trip to Halifax in March 2023 where, thanks to various connections built partly through our research and writing, we got to participate, for a second time, in a pairs camp for skaters at the Saint Margaret’s Bay Skating Club. We survived harrowing winter driving and emergency car repair, stayed in the neighborhood we already liked, revisited some favorite places, and tried new ones. We trained with amazing coaches in private lessons and group classes, where accomplished young pairs generously accommodated us as we pushed beyond what we thought were our limits in crossover circles and other drills. All of the above mattered. We returned home inspired, improved, as energized as exhausted, noticeably advanced in unison, power, and pair tricks—lifts, throws, spins, and more—and, importantly, galvanized by support that we also have at home but never take for granted. Set aside even our unorthodox gender situation. Respect for adult skaters, and skaters at our level, can be hard to come by.

Plus, the trip reinforced that we were happy to be partnered, with deepening confidence that we could navigate hard situations—mobilizing, and improving on, relationship skills useful in other contexts. My gender-socialized habit of apologizing constantly: not helpful for pairs either. Nor my impulse/anxiety/panic to problem-solve before even knowing what the problem is, which a friend once identified as “oh, yeah, the mandatory abandonment issues we got from losing a parent as small children.”

Something else that comes with time: trusting each other to decide whether skating will be soul-healing or dangerous during, say, the worst days of a break-up, terrible shit happening at work, or waiting for that final call about a loved one on life support. The answer could be “no” one day but “yes” the next, “yes” for spins but not for lifts, “yes” right now, but “wait, no, stop” twenty-three minutes later. Plus, somewhat conversely, trusting the other person to sometimes know what you need before you do, and that while you both crave cheese-flavor-plus-flour comfort food on an exhausted drive home, one person’s heavenly Cheez-Its are not interchangeable with the other’s go-to Pretzel/Cheddar Combos. Those bits of intimate knowledge can be helpful and satisfying.

Simply stated, skating together takes mileage, on and off the ice. Kirsten Moore-Towers, international medalist and three-time national pairs champion of Canada with her partner Michael Marinaro, put it this way on the podcast The Runthrough: “Inherently knowing where your partner is, and knowing how to correct a misstep if something happens, and knowing how to respond to your partner’s nerves maybe if that’s necessary, . . . you literally can’t do that without time. . . . You can’t, like, pay the rush fee and get this done faster, you just have to put in the hours” (Rippon and Wagner 2024, 17:50–18:12).

Maybe that’s what I was seeing on those six-minute run-throughs: nurtured deep connections that can be fulfilling in multiple ways and superfun. Hardly always, and queering it up is no more guarantee of ethics, pleasure, or overall good politics than in any other formation designed to spread intimate connection. Chosen families, mutual-aid networks, Friendsgiving, polyamory: they can be brutal or glorious and everything in between. It’s a taste of the glorious and the pleasure in experimenting with possibilities that compound for me the desire to expand access and the urgency to disarm those who would limit it.