Is Tango Difficult to Learn?

This is probably the question I hear most often from people who want to learn to dance. For some reason, tango has earned the reputation of being “the most difficult dance.” I think that reputation is somewhat exaggerated, although there is some truth to it.
We usually think of dance as a series of body movements performed to music. When it comes to tango, that is true—but only partly. Music is the primary, the most important, the indispensable element of tango. It may be played live, or it may exist only in your mind. But it must be there.
You cannot dance tango by following a mathematical formula of its music, counting beats aloud—for example: “one, two, one-and-two-and,” assigning them values such as slow, slow, quick-quick-quick. At least not if you are dancing for your own enjoyment. Tango is an interpretation of the music.
On the one hand, this means that I can dance however I want—I am interpreting the music. There is some truth in that. Yet every interpretation has its limits, defined by the principles of tango, much like a literature teacher would point us toward a particular interpretation of In the Shadow of the Altars (Altorių šešėly), so that we would not wander too far from the essence of the work.
Tango is a profoundly mystical dance. It is full of contradictions, of different truths that, somewhere in the distance, converge into a single point, only to diverge once again. There is something both unique and deeply human about this—something that, across a vast emotional distance, feels uncannily familiar. That is because tango comes from us: from me, from you, from them. It is as we are. Only the tango that lives within us has the power, one day, to tear away our masks, leaving us exactly as we are—with our virtues, our pride, our emotions, our loneliness, and our loves.