When Pets Come Between Partners

Excerpts from the Introduction

WHEN PETS COME BETWEEN PARTNERS
is a tough topic to deal with. If you are in love with someone who has a pet that you cannot stand, or if the pet always seems to come before you, how do you manage to hang in there? For a person who has never had pets, the experience could be downright humiliating.

This is a people book that talks about how the pets in our lives affect our personal and family relationships - how we integrate them into our families, and the way they mirror our own personalities.

Even if you do not have a pet, I think you'll find this book of interest because it will help you understand some basic ideas about how we humans function psychologically.

The Pet-People Bond

While a great number of pet-people relationships may seem straightforward, they can be just as complex as human relationships.

This book also discusses some of the basic human responses to our family and our emotional environment, and explores how they affect and are affected by the animals in the family. We'll look at jealousy, grief, rage -- the full range of human emotions and reactions.

How serious can these problems be? Veterinarians and people working in animal shelters have told me that they've met large numbers of people who, at their wits' end about an important relationship, have brought their animals in to either find a new home for the pet or to euthanize it. The animals became casualties of relationships in which one party found them to be an intrusion or even an offense, rather than a newfound friend.

This book is mostly about what happens when one or each of the parties in a human relationship regards the pet as a problem, instead of finding where the problem really lies. It is also about relationships in which the pet helps to keep the parties together and make their relationship work.

What do you do when you are either allergic to or just plain hate, abhor, cannot even think about being with his/ or her cat(s), dog(s), hamster(s), horse(s), bird(s), boa(s), ferret(s), snake(s), or fish? What do you do if both of you have pets, and the pets do not get along? You cannot envision giving up your pet, and the love of your life sees no way of ever giving up her or /his pet(s). What to do?