When we split I hit the bottle, and spent hours boring my friends with tales of lost love...
No, not for my girlfriend, but for OUR DOG STANLEY
WHEN the break-up came, I deployed my entire arsenal of persuasive powers — from clear-headed reasoning to full-on guilt-tripping. Then I turned on a torrent of hot, salty tears; I sobbed in decibels not heard since we buried my first cat, Simon, when I was 13. But my girlfriend stood firm.
The sadness oscillated, then receded over the following months. I switched from gin to whisky after one too many maudlin evenings bewailing my loss to friends in a manner that was self-pitying, overly detailed and, to quote one mate, ‘very, very dull, Rob’.
You may think my friends lacking in empathy but the kind of devastation I was experiencing is often underrated. You see, it wasn’t my girlfriend that I missed so much but our dog Stan, who she had torn from me.
Author Milan Kundera got the adoration for man’s best friend spot on when he wrote: ‘Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent.’
He was absolutely right. And they are certainly oblivious to the jealousy and discontent a tug of love over their future can ignite at the end of a relationship.
Recent figures show that, post-split, only one in ten couples manage to agree on shared custody of their dog. That leaves a lot of bereft owners pining for their pooch... a pain I know only too well.
Stanley was seven years old when my partner and I first got him. Far from being the product of neglectful owners or a dog’s home, Stan had belonged to a cousin of my girlfriend, who was moving into a nursing home at the ripe old age of 91.
She wasn’t allowed to keep him so we jumped at the chance to own a dog who genuinely needed a new home and was already fully house-trained. We didn’t regret our decision for a second.
STAN was a beautiful Laika breed with cashmere-soft fur, supermodel legs, a nose that was more sodden than damp and a personality that constantly walked the tightrope between masculine ruggedness and superior-minded diva.
He seemed to take delight in staring at himself in our bedroom mirror, admiring the weight he quickly lost under his new regime of fewer treats and longer walks.
At the first sign of our attention waning, Stan would roll around the living room carpet on his back or gently tap our faces with his paw if he decided that more focus was necessary.
We both adored Stanley’s love of football and his clear distress when he would puncture one in the park with his claws.
The ideal drinking companion, he would sit with ease under a pub table, noisily lapping water out of a bowl.
His culinary tastes stretched to the odd mouthful of haggis as a treat and a marked enthusiasm for the mouth-watering mutton and gravy filling in a pie.
While Stanley was living the contented life of a middle-aged hound, my relationship with my girlfriend was entering its dog days.
We had, at this point, lived together for just under a year. The cracks were beginning to show as we realised we were no longer impassioned lovers, but more ‘amicable mates who just happen to share a bed’.
Increasingly hating the city, she had begun looking for jobs in her more rural home. The search, however, was fitful and vague and I assumed that the stress and expense of moving would mean our warm but hardly libidinous relationship would rumble on.
How wrong I was. While taking Stanley for a park walk together one evening, she told me she was leaving the capital and made humiliatingly little attempt to persuade me to join her. ‘Stanley should come with me of course,’ she told me a few days later, in the manner of one who has already decided the earth is flat.
‘There’s more space for him there. And anyway, I’m not going for a couple of months so you can still see him for a while after you’ve moved out.’ There was little nuance or room for compromise in her plan of action. ‘Well, it is her house after all. I’d really begun to feel like a lodger anyway,’ I thought at the time.
But to simply, meekly accept that Stan would be heading 200 miles from me, my strokes, my football games and my haggis supply? That was a different matter. I told my girlfriend — between gasps, chokes and whimpers — that I felt responsible for Stan.
That, like any absent father, I felt I had failed him somehow by not being part of his whole journey through life. The tears were for Stan. But the internal emotional churn was for myself.
That horrible evening in our living room, I hugged Stanley close to me like a child refusing to let go of a melted ice-cream. I let him lick my face so she could see the passion of the bond that she was breaking. But I knew that, practically speaking, I hadn’t a leg to stand on.
The best I could offer Stanley would be a rented flat in the city, and even that was on the highly unlikely proviso I could persuade a landlord to let a dog move in with me.
My now-ex, on the other hand, was heading to a land of meadows, hills, plentiful family members to walk Stan and substantially more disposable income with which to buy him all the footballs he desired.
All the same, in a last-ditch attempt to persuade my partner that blind love should win out over common sense, I decided to become the World’s Best Dog Walker in the two months Stan and my ex were still in the city.
Turning down commissioned work as a freelance writer, my priority each day was to give Stan the best walk of his life.
Somehow, I reasoned, his adoration for me would show on his face and my ex would be forced to admit the best way to keep Stan happy was to leave him with me.
It was doomed to failure of course as Stan, like most dogs, is simply happy with whoever is giving him a walk, whether that be myself or Kim Jong-un.
I’ve never really believed in those old country-and-western songs about dogs called Shep who sleep on their masters’ graves. So I accepted that, in Stan’s world, I was simply a less active member of his pack now.
LITTLE did he know I was about to be excommunicated entirely, after he snaffled the remains of a sausage roll from the pavement during one of our walks and promptly threw up all over the ex’s apartment on our return.
That was that. ‘What on earth did you feed him? Rob, you can’t be trusted. He’ll just eat any old crap if he stays with you.’
I was done for. And, despite my craven begging, I never saw Stanley again. My ex accelerated her move to the country and was gone within the following week.
I missed Stan like a teenager deprived of their record collection. He had become a formidable part of my identity, and it didn’t help when friends tried to console me by suggesting I could come over to play with their pets ‘any time I liked’.
Given the relatively amicable nature of our break-up, I was expecting some updates on Stan’s new life. So I was more than a little upset when she didn’t reply to any of my three requests to send photos of our firstborn in his new, presumably bucolic, environment.
I still recall Stan’s bemused reaction to a passing squirrel or the way he would, for some inexplicable reason, leave the room when he heard a certain presenter’s voice on the radio.
I wonder if he is still alive and how many footballs he’s punctured since our split.
While girlfriends have come and gone over subsequent years, I have never owned another dog. I worry I wouldn’t love him or her as much as Stan. The faithful hound I will never forget.