This is what Tango taught me about Love, Passion, and Sex

Tango, passion, and love all come down to one thing eventually. This might sound cliché, but for me, it proved as real as a 9-inch heel standing on my foot during a tango salon.

Eventually, it hurts.

That's the essence. Love, passion, tang, and even sex: there is a hidden pain. An obscured longing, the nostalgia of something you held so close until life swept it out of your hands.

The essence of love is that it needs to hurt.

The sweetness of the abrazo, the embrace, would just be a cheap candyfloss without the bitter deep melancholia of separation.

My tango career has been a wild ride of mastering a very difficult art, embracing the most beautiful women in the world, finding the essence of love in the space between the music and the silence of two bodies moving in sync.

My first tango teacher taught me that tango is one heart on four legs. He was right. A relentless hunter's quest to conquer that deep wild women's heart raging on high heels. But also the sweet surrender. When she melts in your arms and follows your guidance because she trusts your leadership.

I had to let her go, in the end, always.

Because tango is also about freedom. The beauty of love and sex is that they can set you free. Our lonely hearts deepest wish is to become one with the object of our desire. When that brief and infinite orgasmic surrender eventually happens, it can reveal our deepest solitude.

In the tango we allow our partner to come closer than our best lovers, but at the end of the dance, we are left alone with empty hands and hearts full of dreams.

This is the story of how I found and lost my 3 biggest most passionate loves in my life and eventually cried in the arms of the mother of tango that never sleeps: Buenos Aires.

My first real love

She is called L. A menage-a-trois that lasted 7 years. I am not proud of it, but on the highest waves of the furious fire of our passion the world around us dissolved and there was no time for judgment.

Our shared passion made us wake up in a room in Paris with a view of the city of light, or make love on a hill in South Africa watching whales play in the distance. We had created our own universe with our own laws.

It was the tango that brought us together, initially. My first impression: Infinite stylish long legs coming out of a mini skirt. They swept me from the shores of my save adolescence disciplined world right into high waves of unbound sexual adventure.

I was 26 and had suppressed my sexual desires completely in order to find spiritual meaning in life. She opened the cage of the lion of my lust and whenever she entered my apartment it wouldn't take long for my wild animal to devour her. Completely.

Later, our romantic souls taught each other to play the Casanova game. I needed to conquer her first during the endless tango salons we attended. They became the foreplay. I got madly jealous when she danced with other men. It lit the branches of wood in my soul that later that night became a wildfire out of control.

So much about the passion. Where did the love come into play? Well, eventually you can't play with love.

The tango is the perfect playground for physical contact, for lust becoming art. The strict rules take care that this midnight till morning dark holes of passion, music, and whispering shoes on a dance floor doesn't become an ordinary playground for men to seduce women and to eventually get laid.

You do need to learn the dance first to even come close to the beautiful prey. It is an art form. The beauty of tango is that you actually can transcend plain raw sexuality in improvised movement. Eventually, you will be able to write a story on the dancefloor, together.

You don't stick to one woman all evening, even when you had the best dance of your life. This only happens when you are both in love and your mutual agreement is one of safety. Or your passion and desire are so strong that you don't allow any other body to enter your sacred lover's field.

Tango reflects all the phases of the journey of love, passion, and relating. It is the best mirror of life, sex, and love turning our deepest passions and fears into art.

Where did it end?

For years I managed to play the ultimate lovers game and she gave all of her body, but she couldn't give all of her heart.

The hurting part for me was when she left in the early morning after another wild night. She needed to be on time for breakfast for her family.

We had become too close. Many times she thought about leaving her husband. I never demanded she did. Many times I broke up to protect my heart to designate my true complete love for somebody I eventually could call completely mine. The sheer addiction to our bodies merging would drive us back together again until the fire of our passion had burned out completely and all that was left was the ashes of a glorious devotion.

We both burned our fingers at the dangerous fire of passion and eventually, after 7 years we let go. It felt good. I felt a lot of compassion for her husband. L. and I had played out the most classics of dramas: The passionate lovers game that will eventually end up in walking away in different directions empty-handed.

She had the perfect caring husband waiting for her at home while her body expressed its deepest darkest, sexual needs with a young hungry lover. I learned about my own sexuality, passion, and romantic sides and I never needed to surrender my heart completely. Let alone change diapers or engage in other non-romantic activities.

Passionate secret sex-driven relationships are there to express the shadow of sexuality that often has no place in the light of a committed loving, safe and caring relationship.

Tango has the ingredients for all the expressions of life, love, and secret desire. Lovers like us played out their dramatic story while on the same dance floor of life couples together for 50 years danced and held each other in the sweet embrace of an indestructible love built on all the good and bad years.

My second big love

She was the ultimate expression of beauty for me. A Platonian soul in the body of Cleopatra.

I met S. at the international tango festival of Sitges in Spain that I attended 12 years in a row. We used to dance all night and ended up on the boulevard dancing to the music from a small speaker. Drinking wine from white plastic cups waiting for the first strong morning light to wake us up from our abrazo's while the first joggers started their day. They stared at us from another world.

The beauty of S. was not only ravishing but also dramatic. And again, unreachable. A cold-hearted sphinx that warmed itself with the heat of the fire of passion.

We had passionate sex in my cozy small Amsterdam apartment for a period of 3 months and in her villa hidden away in the Cote D'Azure mountains near Nice, France. I played romantic tunes on her grand black piano first, red wine at reach, before undressing my Goddess. Eros took it over from there while Venus waved kisses at us from a distance.

They made me lose myself completely in this mysterious woman. What happened next was a 7-year platonic relationship with occasional sex that can be counted on 2 hands.

She became my protegee, her star sign is a double lion while I am just a playful fish with a lot of fire. She was my muse. The fact that she let down the fences of her castle after I had conquered her made me sick of nostalgia. I became the white night on his horse standing for her gate for eternity if needed to get her back.

Her argument for her distance was that she wanted to protect me from her craziness. I didn't mind if her insanity would drown me in the gutter. I asked her to marry me one night in the romantic medieval setting of Villefranche-sur-Mere. A scene from The Last Kingdom. She smiled at me with compassionate tenderness but the fence remained closed.

Real passion is made out of brilliant insanity and the deep desire to conquer the impossible

Add to this my young braveheart with its own craziness and tendency to fall in love with unreachable and impossible women. You should get the picture by now.

It was the tango that kept us together. She organized the famous French 'soirees'. Happy get-togethers blessed by the Mediterranean sunset. Her friends brought epic french food and wine. Concerts, performances, and poets would precede tango salons under the bright warm stars.

The fin fleur of intellectual Cote Dázur would gather together in her kitchen after the dancing. We discussed politics, life, and art under the influence of more wine. I couldn't keep my eyes from my Corsican Cleopatra. Her long black hair swept over her wasp's waist when she would fire up the discussion with her philosophical spirit. Her passion for politics and life was as untamed and dark as her eyes.

It made me fall even deeper in love with that old philosopher's soul in a body that had just walked out of a french Film Noire directed by Hugh Hefner.

She is the only woman I have ever slept with that wore a corset.

On one of these nights, I discovered the reason for her withdrawal. The first real love of her life hung himself above hundreds of photos of her and a dramatic love letter.

I guess she didn't want to make more victims. She protected herself from more loss caused by love since her first loss had been so traumatic

When you protect yourself from love, you also protect yourself from life.

But there is only so much the heart can take. Life had made her a woman of the night chasing her shadows till dawn. She hardly slept.

For years I kept my desire for her stored in my body. Through her evenings I met many friends and I fell in love with the Mediterranean lifestyle. Her proud Corsican blood made her Casa mi Casa forever.

Eventually, another woman seduced me out of her spell: Ibiza.

I drove with my fancy car through France towards Barcelona to take the ferry to the white island, but suddenly turned around and decided to visit her. After dancing the tango for hours we ended up in bed and all the stored up lust and desire came out in an orgy of lovemaking. Desire will always find a way to express itself since life is short and crazy.

The next morning I left her for the calling of a new Adventure. Ibiza.

My third love: Buenos Aires

Moving to Ibiza meant that I had to leave the tango behind in Holland. The community of dancers in Ibiza is small and after 30 years of dancing 3 times a week, visiting festivals all over Europe, and organizing my own festival for 15 years, I needed other challenges. I started a new life with yoga, hikes, and other healthy daily activities in Ibiza. My long nights in the arms of unreachable exotic night creatures were over.

I left my longest and deepest passion: The Tango.

After 7 years of a healthy and thriving new life in Ibiza, I decided to give in to the call of Buenos Aires. During my tango career in Holland, I never visited the birth ground of tango, the mother of passion.

This is curious since my complete personal and professional life orbited around that one dance. I invited a lot of famous dancers and orchestras from Argentina to my festival. They are my family and after 7 years I was in desperate need of a Rendez-Vous.

You always return to your first love.

I had stored that love and the passion for the tango deep away. I had left her suddenly, like a thief in the night. No time for long goodbyes. It is a mechanism to avoid the pain of a true goodbye because it would just hurt like hell.

But that pain never leaves. It is just spread out over a longer period of time. Eventually, it will erupt, as it did with S. I knew I would one day see her again. Would she have forgotten me, would she be angry? Would she revenge me?

I spend 2 weeks in Buenos Aires. The capital of tango never gets tired of embracing the sons and daughters that need a break from the battlefield of love or are in the midst of it.

When I walked into La Viruta, a famous tango salon, I noticed right away that tango had continued without me all those 7 years. I sat down and listened to the impressive soul-shaking music of the big orchestra. It was the sound of the Bandoneons, the cry of the pain of all that is left behind that opened the lit of the cage of my heart. Again.

One hour later my heart had melted completely. I ran to the toilets upstairs and deep waves of pain came out of my eyes as tears.

I cried for my life, for all of my losses, I cried for L. and S. I cried for the soul of the tango, and eventually, I cried for the pain of life itself. I dried my eyes and walked down again. I asked a woman to dance and when I embraced her for my first tango in Buenos Aires, I realized the tango never had left me, although I left her 7 years ago.

Tango had been there for me to turn my deepest passion with my lover on the dance floor into art. When life swept the dust of that burned-out fire out of my hands, she was there to catch me in my deepest grief over the loves I had lost in my life.

Lucien Lecarme