A ten-foot steel pole replaced the first dance at Misha and Sam's wedding, and 300,000 people watched

Misha and Sam skipped the traditional first dance at their wedding in August and performed flips, splits and suspended poses on a ten-foot stainless steel pole instead. The video of that debut as husband and wife has passed 300,000 views. The New York Post profiled them among five couples, in a story republished on October 15, 2026, and all five say training together on a pole has strengthened their relationship.

A first dance that needed a spotter

Misha works in finance and Sam is an engineer. Both are 33, according to the Australian republication, and Sam first suggested pole classes in March, before the wedding. They paid $1,800 for the pole, which they describe, in the article's words, as less of an expense and more of an investment in their connection. The article says 150 guests watched the performance, first in stunned silence and then cheering. The couple keep their last names private.

Misha answers the sceptics who equate the pole with a nightclub in two short sentences. “It’s a lot harder than it looks. We love it.”

Sam does not need a theory of attachment to explain what the pole asks of him. “There are times I have to hold all of Misha’s weight while we’re doing a move, or she may have to position herself in a certain way to accommodate me,” he says, and then supplies the line that gave the article its headline: “It’s like a metaphor for marriage.”

A waltz asks for a slow sway and a bit of rhythm. A pole asks for a grip, a lift and a partner who will not let go at the wrong moment, which is a more demanding test of the vows than a song.

Four more couples, one shared claim

Amanda Kenberg, 32, an esthetician from Jersey City, and George Forchuk, 35, a photographer, met at a pole dancing event nearly three years ago. They train at Pole Superwoman in Manhattan. Amanda says the appeal is watching a partner in the middle of learning: “We get to see each other learn and fail,” she says, and it is “really fun to see someone you love learning about themselves in real time too.”

Travis, 43, an Army veteran and IT specialist, and Laura, 40, a nurse, have been married for 22 years. Laura started pole classes in 2022 at Pole To Pole Fitness, a studio with locations in New York City and New Jersey, to rebuild her confidence. Travis was, by his own account, uncomfortable at first. They now train together several times a week and treat the sessions like date nights. “It’s really helped us rely on one another,” he says.

In Naples, Italy, Domenico, a tattoo artist and lifelong soccer player, took up the pole to support his partner Lauryn, 31, who became an instructor nearly six years ago. He says he would now recommend it to men. In San Diego, Tara Atienza and Francis Santos have turned their living room into a home studio around a nine-foot tension pole, and Tara has nearly 200,000 followers online.

The article adds that men are spinning around their partners under the hashtag #PoleTok, and gives a figure of some 400,000 male practitioners worldwide. It does not say where that number comes from, so it is best read as an estimate of the trend rather than a measurement. Every testimony in the piece also comes from people who stayed with the activity; couples who tried it once and stopped do not appear.

The Australian version frames the story as business as much as romance. It says that about 300 to 400 dedicated pole and aerial fitness studios operate across Australia, and presents the trend as a driver of growth in commercial property, again without naming a source for the count. No studio owner or independent analyst is quoted in either version.

Attunement, according to one therapist

The only outside expert in the article is Cyndi Darnell, a relationship therapist based in New York. She says physical activities that need close contact create what she calls attunement. “When engaging in a physical activity with another person, a co-regulation of nervous systems and heartbeats can occur, creating a sense of connection and communication that transcends words and conscious thought,” she explains.

The article says there is science behind the phenomenon but cites no study for it. The nearest laboratory result comes from a 2017 study by Pavel Goldstein of the University of Colorado Boulder, published in Scientific Reports, which followed 22 long-term heterosexual couples aged 23 to 32. Each woman received a mild heat pain on her forearm for two minutes while her partner sat beside her. When he could not touch her, the couple's heart and breathing rates fell out of sync. When he held her hand, they synchronised again and her pain decreased.

“It appears that pain totally interrupts this interpersonal synchronization between couples,” Goldstein said. “Touch brings it back.” The release is candid about the limits. It is not clear whether the decreased pain causes the synchrony or the reverse, the study did not test same-sex couples, and nobody in it was dancing.

A trial that measured women, not couples

The most direct trial of pole dancing is not about couples at all. In a pilot randomized-controlled trial published in BMC Psychology on September 14, 2023, researchers at the MSB Medical School Berlin assigned 50 women to an eight-week pole programme or to a waitlist. Sessions lasted 60 minutes once a week, in two Berlin studios, between October and December 2020.

Compared with the waitlist, the pole group improved in mental wellbeing, the primary outcome and the largest effect, and in body appreciation. Global self-esteem did not differ between the groups. The dropout rate was 15.4% in the dance group and 12.5% in the waitlist group.

The authors had calculated that they needed at least 88 participants per group and could not recruit them because of pandemic restrictions, which is why they call the study a pilot. They list their own limits: no blinding, no follow-up after the eight weeks, no check on whether participants did the home videos, and no active control such as another exercise class. Without it, the trial cannot say that the pole itself mattered more than any new weekly activity. They declared no conflicts of interest.

The outcomes were each woman's own wellbeing and self-image.

Nothing in the trial asked how a partner felt, or whether a relationship improved.

A survey published in Frontiers in Psychology on January 12, 2026 points the same way, with the same caution. Of 263 Polish women aged 18 to 54, 153 practised pole dance. They scored higher on self-efficacy than the others, with a small effect size (Cohen's d of -0.41). The authors recruited through social media and snowball sampling, so women favourable to pole dancing may be over-represented, and a single cross-sectional survey cannot show which came first.

Strangers synchronise too

The idea that bodies falling into step prove closeness has a counterexample. A 2019 study in Behavioral Sciences by researchers at the University of Trento and Nanyang Technological University put 62 male-female pairs in front of film clips: 23 pairs of friends, 20 romantic couples and 19 pairs of strangers. The authors measured the synchrony of their heart rate variability.

Strangers synchronised more than friends or lovers across several emotions. “Physiological synchrony is not necessarily reflective of relationship closeness between dyadic partners,” the authors wrote, adding that the absence of a prior relationship may push people to match each other as a bid to establish affiliation. Lovers did show synchrony in the calm state, which the authors read as co-regulation. The participants were 124 university student volunteers, Italian and heterosexual, and sat watching passively without interacting, so the result says little about two people suspended from the same pole.

A dancing couple in a stadium in Singapore raised a neighbouring question earlier this month, in an engaged couple's clip from The Weeknd's concert, and the answer there was the same: moving together is bonding within narrow limits.

Shared interests, in numbers

The article closes on a Pew Research Center figure to argue that shared interests keep a marriage firm. Pew's own page dates it to a 2015 survey: 64% of married adults said having shared interests was very important to a successful marriage. A further 56% named sharing household chores, only eight points behind. A pole, it seems, ranks in the same league as a mop.

Pew asked what people consider important, not what made their marriages last, so the number supports the idea that couples value a common activity and nothing about pole dancing in particular. What the pole adds, in the couples' own telling, is a task where one partner visibly carries the other's weight and the other is seen failing and trying again. Sam described it as a metaphor. The trials behind it, so far, have only measured the women on the pole.

Sources

• Effects of pole dance on mental wellbeing and the sexual self-concept, a pilot randomized-controlled trial, Pfeiffer, Sowitzki and Schäfer, BMC Psychology, September 14, 2023
• Relationships between self-esteem, self-efficacy, and interoceptive awareness among pole dancers, Rogowska et al., Frontiers in Psychology, January 12, 2026
• Strangers, Friends, and Lovers Show Different Physiological Synchrony in Different Emotional States, Bizzego et al., Behavioral Sciences, December 22, 2019
• 8 facts about love and marriage in America, Pew Research Center, February 13, 2019