Looking silly – or worse – during the first dance as a married couple rates way up there on the scale of wedding stress for grooms who are terrified of anything fancier than the high school prom sway.

“It’s not Emily Post’s dance anymore,” said Crista Tharp, a wedding planner in Kokomo. “Some are doing rap, hip-hop, break dancing in little snippets. Most grooms would probably nix the dance, but they’re not given that option.”

Motivated by “Dancing With the Stars” and wacky wedding dance YouTube videos, more couples are building fancy footwork into their big-day budgets, turning up the pressure on members of the wedding party with two left feet.

Blaise Moore, owner of Creative Occasions in Fort Wayne, says she has seen more men taking dance lessons in the last two to three years.

In fact, she even showed one groom-to-be a few moves “so he wouldn’t step on the bride’s feet.”

Moore says he is a firefighter and could climb up and down a ladder, but he couldn’t dance.

“The first dance has become more prominent; more one-on-one,” she says. Moore says it used to be the bride and groom would start a dance and then the bride’s father would cut in. Now couples dance alone and the entire song together.

“There are a lot of men out there that want to put on a good presentation” because it is important to their spouse, says Tony Didier of American Style Ballroom in Fort Wayne.

What he has found, however, is those guys who come in because of their fiancée really enjoy the experience and continue dancing. He says it’s a date every week with your spouse – 45 minutes of being together.

Didier says he teaches couples how to partner and how to dance together, even if they are just swaying to a song. He believes the reason he has had such success with wedding couples is because they get to “learn something new together.”

And Didier has had practice. He and his professional dance partner, Danel Nickels, were married in August.

So did they do a special dance to wow the guests?

“No,” Didier laughs. “We just wanted to enjoy the moment together.”

He does admit they threw in some fancy dips and turns.

For Nick Oberhausen of Fort Wayne, he just got out there and danced, he says. He and his wife, Lea, were married in September.

He says the first dance was an important part of the reception but he focused more on his wife than worrying about the dance.

Grooms aren’t the only front-and-center wedding participants who may be jittery about big dances.

In 2006, at age 62, bawdy TV personality Jerry Springer brought tears to the set of “Dancing With the Stars” with an on-air kiss for his daughter Katie after a waltz he learned so he could dance at her wedding that December.

“I’ve never really danced,” Springer, now 66, said in an interview. “So the night of the wedding, it’s time for the big father-daughter dance. In the middle of it, Katie looks up at me and says, ‘Dad, nobody can see our feet.’ They were covered by her big gown. My advice to dads unsure if they can dance for their daughter’s wedding is to make sure they have a big gown. Then you can get by doing anything.”

Terri Richardson of The Journal Gazette contributed to this article.