Love Me Love My Pet: The Importance of Animal Compatibility in Relationships

It’s February, a month when so many of us are focused on romantic relationships. Our thoughts turn to commitment, marriage, and strengthening our commitment bonds. Of course, commitment to a romantic partner is more than just diamonds, candy, and cards. It involves living with our partners on a day to day basis successfully in a common residence filled with our offspring (if any) and the animals we love to spoil and adore.

Yet animals can become a source of contention once two households become one, particularly when romantic partners come from different animal backgrounds and hold different animal preferences. One person might be used to big dogs, another used to cats. One person might prefer the company of parrots while the other might find fish more her/his forte.

These differing styles may not clash at first, but with time often become a source of contention as partner expectations of the running of the household clash with the reality. The person who has always lived with cats may find the noise and messy nature of her/his partner’s parrot challenging to deal with, particularly if the cat person is also accustomed to very neat and tidy living quarters. Likewise, someone used to one or more particularly social dogs finds life with her/his partner’s aloof and very quiet cat rather jarring and socially unsatisfying. For each side, her/his preferred animal companion has few flaws and creates a comfortable lifestyle, lifestyles that clash when those preferences and comfort zones differ.

I am myself in my second relationship in a row with someone who is either not an animal person at all or is a cat person and somehow expects my parrots to be quiet, tidy, and obedient. At first, he found them charming and cute, a novelty. Yet as the messes and the noise especially continue, he’s finding them irritating at best and at times downright intolerable over what I know to be minor vocalizations.

Another bird person or person raised with parrots handles these qualities with patience and love. Yes, there are some downsides to life with parrots. Yet for all the messes and sometimes earsplitting shrieks, there are more moments of tenderness, cuteness, and beauty. For me, there is something very exquisite about parrot intelligence at work. True, it can be aggravating when my birds thwart my best attempts to safeguard prized possessions from their beaks-like my $100 Chinese art folio from the Royal Ontario Museum. Yet it is also a wonder when my abused cockatiel Elendil cautiously comes to me and asks for a tentative scratch on the neck or when Mithril comes up for kisses.

Perhaps the key to our romances is finding someone who can love our prized companion animals with us and appreciate in us the positive qualities that make us fall so deeply in love with animals. For as we treat our animals, we treat each other. Here’s to finding love!


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