I left the first milonga I attended after—maybe, at my most conservative guess—an entire seven minutes. In those seven bewildered and embarrassed minutes, I quit tango, hated all humanity (well, that’s nothing new), and had an existential crisis. In short, the experience was harrowing. If I had had the sort of high school nightmares of ignorantly overstepping unspoken-and-yet-unspeakably-vital social conventions, they would have returned to me in all their going-to-school-naked mortification. Not, of course, that I actually attended the milonga naked; the horror was that I had been entirely polite and yet somehow managed to offend several people. So, in order to spare you the soul-searching aggravation that I went through, I will tell you this now; tango has its own etiquette. In a milonga, it’s rude to get up and ask someone to dance, “thank you” does not mean “thank you,” and unusually prolonged eye-contact is entirely legitimate. How perfectly intuitive, right?

Here’s my breakdown of the most important things to know about los códigos (the tango rules of etiquette), and my very own compilation of “What People Should Have Told Me But Didn’t So Now I’m Telling You and You Can Thank Me Later”:

TANDAS AND CORTINAS:

Just so we’re all on the same page, the music during the milonga is broken down into tandas, which are bundles of 3-4 songs organized by music style (tango, milonga, or vals) and orchestra (di Sarli, D’Arienzo, Caló, etc.) Normally, the order is 2 tango tandas and then a vals or milonga tanda (alternating vals and milonga throughout the night). Tango tandas are usually made up of 4 songs, and milonga and vals tandas only 3, but this is subject to the whim of the DJ. Each tanda is separated by a cortina, meaning “curtain.” Originating in the days when curtain drops heralded the band’s break, the cortina is a roughly thirty-second piece of non-tango music that denotes the end of one tanda and the start of the next.

You should only leave the dance floor in the middle of a tanda if you are in pain, your mother is dying, or if your partner has overstepped the rules of common decency.