What if my dog does not love me?

I was once posed a probing question: What should we do if our dogs do not love us enough? This query immediately took me back to a conversation I shared with my late husband, Uttam.

I remember looking at Nishi and Cheeru, soundly sleeping, and asking Uttam, “What do you think love is? How would you describe it?”. Uttam confessed, “I don’t know what it is, but it seems to hurt just a little bit, in a nice way”. This seemingly odd description is understandable, as anyone who tries to define or describe love seems to fail gloriously. Poets and authors dedicate lifetimes to this endeavour, and movies repeatedly attempt to capture it, yet no two people appear to agree on its nature. Some describe it as a warm sensation. Others claim you simply know it when you experience it, but admit it cannot be defined. Intriguingly, one friend said that she grinds her teeth when she looks at her dog, she loves so dearly and thus describes love as “dental pain”.

The Experiential Nature of IT

The actual definition of love is irrelevant. However, one crucial element emerges from these discussions: love is fundamentally a feeling or sensation one feels. Crucially, it is not a transaction; it is not something we receive from another. Instead, it is something we feel for another, when we are in their presence or thinking of them.

Love is not a transaction. It is a feeling!

Experiential love, not performative love

Cultural influences seem to be steering us towards an idea of love that is entirely performative. The tales we tell are of ‘grand gestures of love’ – giving up ones life to save that of loved ones, expensive gifts and grand proposals, adventures and expeditions undertaken for loved ones, impressive achievements in dedication of that which we love, so on and so forth. This perhaps then leads us in the direction of expecting such performances from those we love, in order for us to believe we are loved. But in all of these hero-stories, we seem to sideline the experiential aspect of love. Love is not just what we receive and love does not have to be self sacrificial. Love is felt within us, or rather evoked within us by those we claim to love. It does not have to be given or received. Uttam, Nishi and Cheeru are all gone. There is no one to give love to or receive love from and yet I feel it stronger than ever before. This is what inspires me to talk about love as experiential, while doing away with the performative aspects of it. If you feel the desire to experience love this way, while shedding the performative expectations of love, then read on. 

Reframing the Question: A Call to Look Inward

Let’s return to the topic of love for our dogs. If we approach love with this emphasis on the experiential aspect, rather than the performative act, what does it truly mean to say, ‘my dog does not love me’?. It means we are not feeling those sensations—we are not feeling IT—in the presence of our dog.

This is a profound realisation, because this problem is not fixed by trying to change the dog or the dog’s behaviour/performance in any way. This situation requires us to look inward. Oh boy! We are now in dangerous territory, aren’t we. Should you be brave enough to continue reading, I congratulate you on your fortitude. Let’s keep going, shall we?

So, what should we do about not feeling loved by our dogs? We must start by reframing the question. We recognise that the issue is not that we are not feeling loved by the other, but that we are not feeling those sensations within ourselves. We are not feeling IT! Framed this way, the next step becomes evident: we ask ourselves, why are we not feeling IT?.

If we are not feeling love, we should be asking ourselves why we are not feeling it.

I cannot answer this for you, but I can share my own journey. There have been times I have not felt IT, and upon closer examination, the reasons have typically been:

1. The trust the dog is exhibiting towards me feels inadequate to me. 
2. I am overwhelmed with caregiving responsibilities and I have no brain-space for love.
3. I am dysregulated and all I feel is anxiety or anger. I can’t slow down enough to feel warm love.
4. The ever-pervasive childhood trauma of not knowing how to receive and recognise love.

Admitting these deepest hurts requires a kind of soul searching that is exhausting, painful, and scary. I must admit that achieving this level of acceptance about these injuries was only possible because of the grief I was forced to endure. This was not a choice I made consciously. However, having done the work, I can now call out the reasons for not feeling IT. I feel no shame or fear when I identify the reasons, which enables me to take action.

Love as a choice

It has been my experience that feeling love is a choice we make deliberately. We do not have to wait for others to give it to us or behave/perform in a certain way; we do not have to earn it, nor can we demand it. At best, we can choose to feel it and then acknowledge when we do. Indeed, there are some real challenges one may need to overcome to be able to choose love. 

We can choose to feel love and don’t have to lament not having someone give it to us.

Here are some practical things I do to overcome my challenges.

The Challenge of Trust

Trust requires a slightly different approach. If dogs do not receive the safety I offer, I find it hard to feel love. I need to feel trusted. But reframing helps again. For instance, a dog named Dude found it very difficult to receive safety in the form I offered it. I realised that was his baggage, not mine; it was not a commentary on me, so I had to stop personalising it. I began to look for something I could offer that he could receive.

I need to dedicate sometime to tell the story of how I gradually won his trust. But just to give an example, at one point I saw that he had started to enjoy watching me interact happily with other dogs of his family. That is all he could receive from me. I noticed him prancing about happily around me and the rest of the dogs, enjoying our interaction. He was definitely feeling something, just that it was not what I expected or wanted. Once I accepted his feelings for what they were, I felt IT. I felt IT again when I acknowledged what he had to overcome to slowly close the gap between us. It’s interesting to me that I also feel IT when I think of the patience I have had with him. It is not about transactions. Love is about interconnectedness and it can be felt towards oneself too, in the context of who we are in their presence. Love is intriguing, isn’t it?

Oxytocin & training

Of course, we could define love simply as the phenomenon that involves generation of oxytocin. That would be technically correct, albeit an unhelpful and incomplete. There indeed is evidence to show that we generate oxytocin when we look at our dogs or touch them (Nagasawa et al. 2009, MacLean and Hare, 2015) and that is perhaps what we describe as warmth or dental pain, depending on our subjective experience of it. If we were to use this parlance, then I suppose, feeling unloved by our dog means we are not generating oxytocin when we come in contact with them or think of them. But this way of defining it not only loses all the nuance contained in the above discussion, it also feels like something totally out of our control. Generation of chemicals in the body does not seem like a voluntary action. It does not really feel like a choice we make, and yet it is.

Love can’t be trained or demanded. It has to be felt within.

Another unhelpful perspective is to consider this a failing on the dog’s part to demonstrate specific behaviour that signals love to us. This is performative love. If this display is missing, we may conclude that the dog is not feeling love towards us, but that is purely speculative and is a lament that leaves us feeling helpless and unloved. We might try to address this by ‘training’ the dog on the behaviours we’d like to see. But, data suggests there’s no guarantee that we will feel IT, as a result of that performance (Marshall-Pescini et al. 2019, Powell et.al. 2019, Nagasawa et.al. 2015).

Life lessons from dogs

Ultimately, things like happiness, joy, and love continue to befuddle and elude our generation. If there is anything I learnt when I hit rock bottom that widowhood sent me to, it is that joy and love need to be consciously and deliberately sought. I vehemently choose IT each day that I feel strong enough to choose it. On days I don’t feel that strong, I focus on self-care, so I arrive at a point where I can generate the joy and love I would like to feel within me. There are my feelings and I have the freedom to do what it takes to make me feel what I want to feel. This realisation is empowering.

When we discuss ‘love,’ we are dealing with relationships, not just a dog. These feelings within us are agnostic of ‘the other’. They are part of our own resilience and our interconnectedness. By honestly examining our relationship with our dogs and repairing what is broken, we learn about ourselves, show up better for the humans around us, and eventually, show up better for ourselves. This is why people who embrace The BHARCS Way claim that they have got much more from it than just learning about dogs, it is about life itself. Dogs then only become a means to and end, the end being the strengthening of all our bonds, both with the world around us and ourselves. 

References

• MacLean, E.L. and Hare, B., 2015. Dogs hijack the human bonding pathway. Science, 348(6232), pp.280-281.
• Marshall-Pescini, S., Schaebs, F.S., Gaugg, A., Meinert, A., Deschner, T. and Range, F., 2019. The role of oxytocin in the dog–owner relationship. Animals, 9(10), p.792.
• Nagasawa, M., Mogi, K. and Kikusui, T., 2009. Attachment between humans and dogs. Japanese Psychological Research, 51(3), pp.209-221.
• Nagasawa, M., Mitsui, S., En, S., Ohtani, N., Ohta, M., Sakuma, Y., Onaka, T., Mogi, K. and Kikusui, T., 2015. Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of human-dog bonds. Science, 348(6232), pp.333-336.
• Powell, L., Edwards, K.M., Bauman, A., Guastella, A.J., Drayton, B., Stamatakis, E. and McGreevy, P., 2019. Canine endogenous oxytocin responses to dog-walking and affiliative human–dog interactions. Animals, 9(2), p.51.