Carolyn says a lot of her friends think she and Mark broke up solely because of Jojo. “I think people thought it was pretty weird,” she says. “ ‘You left him because of the dog? Who breaks up a marriage over a dog?’ But I don’t think non-dog people understand how much stuff can come up over an animal.”
Oh, yes, buckets of stuff, great heaps of it, in many different forms. Dogs tend to home in on one member of the family, to single out one person as it—Alpha God, king of the universe—so they can inadvertently cause jealousies to crop up, private insecurities and dormant feelings of competitiveness. A woman I know named Sue cannot stand the fact that her dog, a collie mix whom she feeds and walks and cleans up after and adores, will literally throw herself at her boyfriend’s feet when he walks in the door. Cannot stand it. Sue does all this work—hours a day with the dog, volumes of emotional energy expended on the dog—and if Matt is in the room, she feels like she just disappears from the dog’s radar.
Dogs, it turns out, know nothing about human sexual politics, and this is one of the sad but true realities (some might say annoyances) of living with a dog, particularly a female—some of them can be virtual whirlwinds of submission in the presence of men: they flirt, they roll over at the merest whiff of testosterone, they drive their good hardworking, feminist owners crazy in the process. Like a lot of women, Sue, a lawyer, forty-one, has spent the bulk of her adult life trying to develop and come to terms with her own strength, struggling to be independent and self-reliant and proud of her own competence. Seeing her own dog writhe in submission at her boyfriend’s feet feels enormously undermining to her, as though the dog is acting out some piece of her own self she’s spent years trying to reject. Her reaction? She gets mad at the boyfriend, territorial with the dog. The first year she and Matt were together, all their fights were about the dog, Sue trotting out laundry lists of complaints that look petty to her today (Matt was being too indulgent with the dog, or too playful; Matt was undermining her training and her authority) but that actually spoke to much deeper tensions. The secret refrain in her head: The dog loves (respects, admires, responds to) him more than she loves me.
You hear the opposite refrain among couples, too: You love that dog more than you love me. It is a fact of family life that dogs tend to be a central focal point for affection—often for more of it than the human family members. In a pioneering study of the role pets play in family systems, psychiatric nurse Ann Cain analyzed degrees and frequency of “stroking” (defined as any form of positive recognition, such as touch, reassuring smiles, or gestures) among sixty families with dogs: 44 percent of the families surveyed said their dogs got most of the strokes in the family; only 18 percent said dogs and family members got an equal number of strokes. This may not be a surprising finding—it’s easy to focus attention and affection on an animal; loving words and gestures aren’t emotionally loaded with dogs the way they are with people—but it’s not hard to see how the phenomenon can cause old tensions to bubble up. Husbands complain that wives dote on the dog, baby the dog, lavish the dog with affection; wives complain that husbands are “nicer” to the dog than they are to them or to their kids.
Dog as focal point. My parents were among the least verbally expressive people I’ve known: emotions ran deep in our household but were rarely expressed openly. No fighting, no raised voices, no big emotional displays of any kind, and this was true in their dealings both with each other and with their kids. The one exception: the dog. I can remember long, somber family dinners at my parents’ house in Cambridge, the five of us sitting in a characteristic strained silence, light from candles flickering on the table, no one saying a word—and then a periodic explosion as my father yelled at the dog for begging for scraps. He’d bellow at the dog—“Tom, go lie down!”—and the dog would slink off to the other side of the room. We’d all swallow hard and return to our silence. Times like that, you got the feeling that a leak had sprung in the dam somewhere, that whole rivers of rage ran beneath my parents’ quiet reserve, that outlets for it were painfully few and far between. The dog provided one outlet, perhaps the safest one they had.
That applied to more positive feelings as well. The strained family dinner was invariably preceded by the strained family cocktail hour, my parents sitting on the sofa in the living room with their drinks, the dog lying on the floor in eternal hope: Might someone drop a peanut on the rug? And if so, could he make a move for it? If a nut dropped—even half a nut—the dog would pounce, with such ferocity you’d think a squirrel had just darted out from under the coffee table. Watching this always made us smile, the glint of victory in his eyes when he scored the errant peanut. Toby, their second elkhound, had a particular fondness for martinis: he’d come up to me or my father, give the glass a good sniff, then step a few feet back, sneeze wildly, and come back for more. As a family, we didn’t laugh a whole lot among ourselves, but we always laughed at the dogs: they were a safe topic of conversation, a ready source of amusement, a tension reliever.
About a year after she divorced her husband, Gina, forty-seven, came home to find her two sons, then ages ten and twelve, with a stray dog they’d found on the street. Ugliest dog you’ve ever seen, Gina says, mangy and coyotelike, with matted hair and bald patches in his coat, but they took him in, named him Lucky, and he very gradually became a symbol of the family’s new life, in the aftermath of the divorce. “This dog did not know how to play,” Gina says. The boys would throw him a ball, and he’d just stand there, as if to say, Well, if you want the ball, why did you throw it away? They’d wave a chew toy in his face, and he’d back away, suspicious and confused. Within a year the kids had taught the dog to play fetch and Frisbee, they’d developed an elaborate game of tag, complete with rules that the dog understood, and they’d taught him a number of skills to execute indoors: Lucky could turn the TV on and off with the remote; he could balance a biscuit on his nose; he could smile on command, baring his teeth when they called out “Cheese!” After the divorce, Gina says, “I think we’d all sort of forgotten how to have fun, and there’s a way in which Lucky gave us a new way to play together, a focus for it: the dog in the backyard instead of the dad.” She pauses, then adds, “Also, the dog is much better at making us laugh than the dad ever was.”
It’s not uncommon to hear people—particularly women—talk about the connective effect of a dog, often to a remote or unapproachable father. “Growing up, the only person my father could relate to was the family dog,” says Nancy, a New York interior designer. “He was a completely isolated person, and none of us was close to him, but because he and I both had this bond to the dog, we had a relationship. We would take long walks in the woods and be friends, with the dog as a catalyst.” Nancy now lives with her fourth German shorthaired pointer, whose name is Tomato, and the dog remains her primary link to her father. “Even after all these years, when we speak it’s about dogs. He absolutely comes to life over dogs. It’s how he connects to society.”
Kathleen, a divorced mother, says that her six-year-old Australian shepherd, Oz, “is the bond between my son and me.” He’s their common ground: when Ian, who’s now twenty, comes home from college, Oz is the first thing they start to talk about, branching out from him to other topics. He has a soothing effect on both mother and son: “It seems easier to talk about difficult things when he’s around.” He defuses strain, makes room for affection. “Ian was raised around a lot of love,” Kathleen says, “and a lot of that was because of Oz. He just brought it out of us. He brought us out of ourselves.” Oz is enormously fond of pancakes, and when Ian is home from school, Kathleen will make a big pile of them, give Oz his own stack on a separate plate. Simple story, possibly horrifying from a dental point of view (Oz’s fondness is actually for maple syrup), but it gets at that connective effect: the mom, the son, and the pancake-eating dog in the kitchen is somehow a warmer, lighter image than the mom and the son alone. They laugh at Oz. They are coconspirators in his indulgence. He gives them a mutual source of jo
y.
People often say things to a dog—or in front of a dog—that they simply can’t say to other humans, particularly family members. Dogs can be objects of deflection, the animal you yell at, as my father did, instead of yelling at your spouse or your kids. They make wonderful objects of indirect communication, absorbing comments that one family member won’t or can’t say aloud to one another. (“Don’t listen to him, he’s just being a pig,” a woman might say to the dog, the piggish husband within earshot but not addressed directly.) And sometimes, dogs are just the available pair of ears, the inadvertent object of free association. My friend Meg recalls a weekend from her youth, when a group of her parents’ friends descended on the family home, near New Haven, Connecticut. The friends, all Yale alumni, went off to a big football game, and Meg’s father, a lonely and rather isolated man, not a Yale grad himself, apparently felt alienated from the group. As his friends all headed out for the day, he turned to the family’s black Lab and said, rather mournfully, “Well, Tucker, I guess it’s just you and me.” Meg has had that memory lodged in her head for thirty years, it so indirectly but so vividly expressed her father’s loneliness.
Dogs, of course, often make better family members than humans: they can be far less judgmental, far less moody, far more faithful in their attachments, and they don’t criticize your cooking. Anita, a forty-one-year-old librarian from Montana, has a cocker spaniel-poodle mix named Sparky. “Mom,” Anita’s daughter says, “sometimes I think that dog is your best friend.” Anita shakes her head: “Honey, some days that dog is my only friend.” The dog is Anita’s unwavering ally, the one being in her household who’s consistently and genuinely glad to see her when she comes through the door at the end of the day, who always responds to her, who’s always there. “She never complains or demands,” Anita says, “and all she wants is to love me. It’s so freeing to be with someone who makes no judgments, who thinks you’re wonderful even if you are a mess. You know those days when you just feel like you are the biggest mess? When no aspect of your life is going right and you think no one could possibly ever love you? But then there is someone who does: the dog.”
The dog, moreover, loves you in a particular way, with a kind of focus and constancy that’s rare, if not unparalleled, among even the most devoted family members. Anita describes this when she talks about the difference between loving the dog and loving her children, now ages nineteen, twenty, and twenty-three. “The largest difference,” she says, “is the way they feel about me. I know that my kids love me, and we have always had a very close and open relationship, but I also know that I love them more than they love me. I don’t say that to be whining or anything—I think they love me as much as children can love a parent—but it’s just a fact of life that mothers love their children more than they are loved in return. I don’t expect to get that love back in full measure; I expect them to pass it on to their own families. So I know that my relationship with my kids is somewhat lopsided, and it is the nature of that relationship that they will leave home and form closer bonds with others as they develop their own lives. But with Sparky, this is the home that she has come to for the rest of her life. And if our relationship is lopsided, it is lopsided in the other direction. Her whole life is lived for the purpose of spending time with her family. When I leave, she just lives for the moment when I will return. I find it so comforting to have someone love me so much.”
In a study of 122 families with dogs, Medical College of Virginia professors Sandra and Randolph Barker found that close to a third of the participants felt closer to the dog than to anyone else in the family; Sandra Barker, an associate professor of psychiatry, says she’s not surprised at the depth of the attachment (she herself has four Lhasa apsos, who sleep at her feet while she works), but she was jarred by the number who ranked the dog as emotionally closer than human family members. Her understanding: “The dog has qualities that are sadly hard to find in human relationships,” she says. “What other relationship in your life do you have where there’s total acceptance, no strings attached, no I’ll-love-you if—if you clean your room, buy me a diamond ring, take out the trash?”
A building contractor I know, owner of a big, lumbering black Lab who accompanies him on jobs every day, would find Barker’s findings a little less surprising. “You know,” he says, “I love my wife and I love my kids, but I love my dog.” He’s echoing Anita’s sentiment: the dog provides a constancy of affection that family members simply don’t; dogs are easier to feel close to.
And yet for all these same reasons—because they’re just there, so present and available and uncomplaining—dogs can also be lightning rods for trouble, as easy to act out on as they are to love. Trainers see this happen all the time: they see the youngest kid in a family—lowest on the family totem pole—who gets picked on by siblings and responds by turning around and picking on the dog; they see parents acting out disagreements over discipline with the dog, mothers who want to coddle and indulge the dog, fathers who want to beat him across the snout with a newspaper. In the dog himself they invariably see little mirrors of family style—walk into a loud, disorganized household where the TV’s blaring and the kids are running wild, and chances are you’ll find an undisciplined and unsettled dog, a four-legged reflection of familial chaos.
On occasion, trainers also see signs of deeper trouble: dogs in complicated family triangles, dogs in the dramas of dysfunction. One trainer told me about a woman who came to her because the dog was causing “marital problems.” Seems every time she and her husband started to make love, the dog would start barking and growling, tearing at the bedspread. The husband—distracted and annoyed—would get up and banish him from the room. This created a bigger scene: the dog would howl and scratch at the door, and the wife, plagued with guilt, would get up and go comfort him. The husband would get angrier, the wife would get upset with the husband, the dog would end up back in the bedroom. Then the husband and wife would go back to bed without speaking to one another. What, the wife asked the trainer, should she do? The woman seemed far more worried about the dog’s feelings of rejection than the husband’s, and far more focused on keeping the peace with the dog than within the marriage. So the trainer gave her some practical suggestions—make it clear to the dog that he’s not allowed in the bedroom; don’t give in to him when he starts howling; once he figures out that he’s not going to get his way, he’ll shut up and adapt—and she kept her real assessment to herself. Inside she was thinking: Sorry, you don’t need a dog trainer, you need a sex therapist.
Another trainer tells of a woman with an aggressive chow chow, a young female who was highly bonded to the woman but appeared to loathe every other member of the family: she growled and snapped at the woman’s husband, wouldn’t let her five-year-old son near her. The woman called in the trainer at her husband’s request—he vehemently disliked the dog, worried that she might bite their son, said they’d have to get rid of her unless his wife dealt with the problem. The trainer sided with the husband: you’ve got an aggressive dog who dislikes children and men, she said, the behavior appears to be entrenched, and the breed can be stubborn and difficult to train; you’re asking for trouble. Her advice: the woman should either put the dog down or find her another home, preferably with a single female who’s not likely to have a lot of men around. The owner dismissed both suggestions out of hand, not simply because she didn’t want to give up the dog but because, she admitted, she liked being the dog’s “favorite” and found something gratifying about the way the dog elevated her in the family hierarchy. In the trainer’s view, the dog not only gave the woman a sense of alliance she didn’t get from her husband, she’d also become part of a family triangle, pitting spouse against spouse in a subtle drama about power and value. She needed that relationship with the dog, so much that she was willing to jeopardize her child’s safety to protect it.
If dogs can help some people act out conflicts, they can help others mask them, providing ways to avoid looking at, or e
ven feeling, problems or strains in a marriage. A paper presented at an American Psychological Association convention in Toronto, described a couple who connected profoundly, but solely, over their dog: they doted on the dog, talked about the dog, shared in the dog’s care, and yet the dog also allowed them to maintain a degree of distance from one another: for example, their lovemaking was inhibited by the presence of the dog, who slept on their bed. When the dog died suddenly, so did their strategy: the distance and emptiness between the two, which they’d dealt with so successfully by focusing on the animal, rose to the foreground, and the couple separated shortly thereafter.
Dogs and human conflict: amazing how an animal can trot right in and sniff out trouble. Me, one of my central, defining struggles in relationships has always been a deep and abiding uncertainty about the question of what’s enough. Did my parents love me enough? Do others? Am I good enough? Lovable enough? Can I get enough? The focus of this question—the object—has shifted innumerable times, but it’s been with me always, a persistent free-floating anxiety about being disappointed and undernourished that keeps attaching itself to something new. For a long time it attached itself to food: in my twenties I went through an acute period of anorexia, starving myself down from 120 pounds to 100 pounds, then 95, then 83. In some respects I’d resolved the question—what’s enough?—by bypassing it altogether, determining that I needed nothing, could get by with nothing, simply did not require nourishment the way others did. It was a beautiful solution in its own twisted way—if you have no needs, they can’t go unmet—but it emaciated me in every respect, made me thin and sad and unbearably lonely, so in my early thirties I shifted the focus. I attached myself to Julian, a man who wouldn’t love me, and thereby traded in physical anorexia for a more emotional brand. I saw this at the time as a central challenge, rather than a central struggle: if I could get this cold, critical, witholding man to love me, then I’d prove beyond all measure of doubt that I was, in fact, worth loving. If I could get him to feed me, I’d be safe, the battle won. In fact, Julian fed me table scraps—a hug here, a compliment there, a periodic crumb of validation—and it took me a long time, years, to understand that that wasn’t enough, that living with him merely replicated, in exaggerated form, the household I grew up in. I started drinking heavily, another attempt to satisfy the same nameless hunger, and there was never enough of that, either. How to feed the self? How to get fed? What’s the right amount of food or drink or contact or attention? I seem to have come into the world without the right internal gauge, some central mechanism that tells me how much is too much and how much is too little, so I’ve spent the vast portion of my life vacillating between deprivation and excess, yearning and claustrophobia, black and white.
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