Pets have been known to tip the balance in many a promising relationship. Mine did its best with a scene straight out of Hammer Horror, writes Zoe Williams
Pets have been known to tip the balance in many a promising relationship. Mine did its best with a scene straight out of Hammer HorrorTwo-thirds of people would dump a partner or forgo a second date if their dog or cat didn’t like the person, according to a poll bySingle people are dumb, unless they secretly love being single, in which case they are smart, because this is a terrible test.
But a bad pet can be a good early-warning system for how a relationship will cope with adverse conditions. On about my sixth date with my first husband, I had left my dog – a staffy crossed with a rhodesian ridgeback, who would now probably be called an XL bully, but that would be wrong – and two whippets who belonged to a friend at my mother’s and gone out shopping.
Whippets, a behaviourist told me later, are notorious cheerleaders. Unlikely to bite a person themselves, they stand on the sidelines, barking at larger, stupider dogs, to encourage an attack. This is more or less what happened: my dog bit my mother. This was not ideal, but it wouldn’t have been quite so bad if she hadn’t recently gone on blood thinners after a heart attack. So, my sixth date and I arrived at her house moments after to carnage, a proper Hammer Horror scene. Even after the shooting geyser of blood had been staunched and the wound established to be not that serious, the atmosphereI asked my future husband later whether, had it been date one, before we had bonded , he would have run for the hills.
The moral of this story is that you should always put out. No, wait, the moral is that a pet can be a useful positive filter in a relationship. Wrong again. The moral is: train your dog.
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