Curious - what was the setting for this swing dancing event? You were just all there together, and they went to dance for a song? Were you dancing too? She, in some way, went ‘without’ you? etc.

The solution to not putting minor emergency costs on a credit card was to have some emergency money on hand, and that made it easier to pay off credit cards? Um... no? You should be getting somewhere in either case roughly the same ‘somewhere’. Sounds like mismanagement or some sort of emotional way of handling debt.