The Art of Watching for Pleasure

Last night, my sister-in-law and I curled up on the couch and turned on Dancing With the Stars. We do this often — my journalism career of an era gone by even allowed us to watch the show and interview its contestants in person once upon a season — and it’s become a ritual between us, an orbit of shared joy. There’s something both nostalgic and deeply present about it: the sequins, the spotlights, the polite drama of the judges’ table. I’ve been involved in dance my entire life, but this is different. This isn’t about technique or form, critique or artistry. This is about pleasure.

And that, I’m realizing, has become a radical act.

Because so much of life right now — especially digital life — feels like a constant feed of distress. The world seems intent on serving up heartbreak in real time: political collapse, environmental grief, tragedy in endless rotation. Even in rest, we are overstimulated. Even in joy, we are interrupted. The doom scroll has become a kind of background hum, a low-grade anxiety that sits beneath everything.

And yet last night, watching strangers glide across a ballroom floor, my nervous system exhaled. I could feel it — that small, nearly forgotten sense of surrender that comes when you let joy be simple.

There’s something sacred about watching television with someone you so deeply care about, too. Not half-watching between texts or while folding laundry, but truly watching together — leaning in, laughing, reacting, pausing to say Did you see that? In a culture that prizes productivity and self-optimization, shared television becomes its own form of intimacy, a collective exhale.

My sister-in-law and I don’t overthink it. We pick our favorites, comment on costumes, debate the judges. Sometimes we’re quiet, other times we clap or cringe or cheer. It’s rhythmic in its own way, like participating in a small, familiar dance ourselves.

And the pleasure of it — the pure pleasure — is something I’m learning to protect. Because we are taught, especially as women, to justify everything we enjoy. To explain how it’s useful, meaningful, educational. We even try to intellectualize our rest: “I’m watching this because it’s critically acclaimed,” or, “It’s a social commentary on fame.”

But Dancing With the Stars requires no such justification. It is unabashedly earnest. People come to dance. To sparkle. To try. It’s showmanship, not cynicism. And maybe that’s exactly why I find it so soothing.

As someone who spent years in the dance world, I used to think pleasure had to be earned — that it only came after discipline, after excellence. Dance, for me, was once the site of perfectionism, of striving. But now, watching from the other side of the screen, I see something else. The joy of movement. The beauty of effort. The shared vulnerability of trying something new under lights so bright they erase hesitation.

The show is a reminder that joy doesn’t always have to be profound to be profound. Sometimes it’s just... joy.

There was one number last night — a contemporary — that caught me off guard. The rhythm was captivating, the couple radiant, the audience erupting in applause before the music even ended. I found myself tearing up. I wasn’t analyzing or comparing or contextualizing. I was simply watching.

When was the last time you let yourself do that? Watch something with your whole self — not as a critic, not as a consumer, but as a witness to delight?

I think part of adulthood’s quiet ache is forgetting how to enjoy things without layering them in irony or productivity. We’ve learned to metabolize content for purpose: inspiration, education, escape. But the unfiltered pleasure of enjoyment — that’s something rarer now.

We are inundated with meaningful television, the kind that wins Emmys and asks us to confront our complicity. And don’t get me wrong — I love a prestige series as much as anyone. But sometimes, what the soul needs is not interrogation but softness. Not moral clarity, but collective warmth.

Watching something like Dancing With the Stars isn’t frivolous. It’s medicinal.

It’s the antidote to the endless churn of information.

It’s the reminder that there’s still beauty in trying, still awe in performance, still comfort in shared awe.

There’s also something intimate about watching women dance on television. To see their bodies celebrated — strong, graceful, unapologetic — feels like a reclamation. It’s easy to forget that joy, too, can be feminist. To delight in women’s movement, women’s laughter, women’s exuberance, is its own act of resistance.

And when I watch with another woman — my sister-in-law, my friend — that resistance becomes communal. For two hours, we are simply girls together, free from critique, free from expectation, basking in beauty made for no other purpose than to be enjoyed.

We talk about the world often — its chaos, its cruelty — and I think that’s why this ritual matters so much. It’s a reprieve. A reminder that amid the noise, we can still find rhythm. That life, no matter how loud it becomes, still contains these quiet, glittering corners of pleasure.

There’s a tendency to dismiss pleasure as indulgent, unserious. But pleasure is serious. It’s what keeps us human.

The world doesn’t just wound us through pain — it wounds us by convincing us that joy must always be earned. That enjoyment must always be defended.

But sitting on that couch last night, watching sequins flash under studio lights, I thought: what if we stopped apologizing for what feels good? What if we let small joys — the kind that don’t demand anything from us — be enough?

After the episode ended, the two of us lingered. It struck me then that this — the softness of it all — is what makes life feel livable. Not the big milestones or grand ambitions, but the ordinary rituals of shared joy.

I think about all the people right now sitting in their own living rooms, watching the same show, maybe laughing at the same misstep or smiling at the same lift. There’s a collective heartbeat in that. A reminder that joy, like grief, binds us to each other.

The world can feel unspeakably cruel. But joy — real, uncalculated joy — is proof that we haven’t surrendered to it.

And so we keep watching. Not because we’re escaping, but because we’re remembering. Because somewhere between the choreography and the costume changes, the laughter and the commentary, we remember that beauty still exists in motion, and that not everything needs to mean something to matter.

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When Healing Ends