"My partner of 20 years has informed me that she wants our cavapoo to sleep on our bed with her, and for me to sleep on the floor beside the bed." Photo / Roberto Nickson, Unsplash
Telegraph advice columnist Rachel Johnson tackles a reader’s relationship dilemma.
My partner of 20 years (female) has informed me (male) that she wants our cavapoo to sleep on our bed with her, and for me to sleep on the floor beside the bed – effectively in the dog’s bed. We are in our 50-60s and have weekly daytime sex. We are both very fit and healthy, neither of us snore, sleepwalk, etc. However, we have both recently started wearing a night-time mouth guard to stop teeth grinding. Our dog does snore a bit.
I don’t mind the dog sleeping on the bed near our feet. However, she often starts the night by our feet and come morning she’s sharing my pillow and I’m effectively falling out of the bed. I don’t think she, the dog, is trying to push me out of the bed. In fact, our dog always prefers myself to my partner. How can I convince my partner that I should stay in our bed? – ANON
Do you want the good news first or the bad news? The good news, then. Congratulations that after two decades you still fancy each other and find time for weekly daytime sex. I could do a whole column on how rare this is, so well done, both, and for maintaining a regular health and fitness regimen as well as a sexual one – so the foundations of your relationship are pretty sound.
The bad news is that your partner is borderline abusive and instead of standing up to her you are writing to me. In fact, I think your question is so bonkersly British that I am confident The New York Times will pick up on it and do a whole, humourless, fact-checked feature all about mad dogs and Englishmen and the midday sun off the back of it. It’s also so bonkers but also British that I have taken the liberty of outsourcing it: this time not to my crack team of psychotherapists, but to the great and the good. We will come to the hot and spicy takes of the historian Lord (Andrew) Roberts, columnist Sarah Vine and property guru Kirstie Allsopp etc shortly.
My instinct here is to be indulgent to your partner’s fetish to prioritise your cavapoo over you (the English famously prefer their pets to people) but only up to a very limited point, and only as I can see how this happened. When we got Ziggy, a blonde cockapoo, she was supposed never to go upstairs. Now of course she sleeps on our bed during the day on a wildly expensive Welsh blanket I bought for her, so I know all about canine mission creep.
I can also see where your partner’s coming from. As men get older they tend to “flump” in bed (that’s what I call it anyway) and make nocturnal repeated trips to the bathroom, whereas dogs tend to stay quite still, so in terms of bedmate I can see why she prefers the dog. But it’s not healthy for your relationship, hence your letter. Your wife is using the pet as a weapon in some proxy war or power game, to see how far she controls you. In asking you to take second place to your dog she is seeing whether you accept becoming your b****’s b****.
No proud red-blooded male could agree to her proposal that you sleep on the dog’s bed on the floor beside the marital bed. Unless this is some kind of fetish your wife has, that’s out of the question. That would be the counsel of despair, it’s a Home Counties version of Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas, the song of heartbreak where the man, who is singing, imprecates and begs a woman, don’t leave me, I’ll do anything, don’t leave me, let me become – laisse-moi devenir – the shadow of your shadow, the shadow of your hand, and ends, abjectly, “l’ombre de ton chien”, the shadow of your dog. Is that where you want to be with this woman?
So my advice would be this: ask your wife whether she’d like a divorce. If the answer’s no, tell her partners always come before pooches, and an intrusive, possessive dog is coming between you and belongs downstairs in the dog bed. Dogs are pack animals and respect leaders but so do human beings – assert yourself, man!
Sarah Vine agrees this is about precedence: “Dogs are pack animals, which means they will always try to get close to the alpha. In this circumstance it’s clear that the wife is the alpha, and therefore it may be that the husband needs to assert his authority over the dog and reclaim his position as main b****,” says the author of How Not to Be a Political Wife. “The fact that she is evidently very happy with the arrangement might indicate that there are some underlying marital issues.” She adds, however: “I personally sleep with my cat on the right and the dog on the left. Neither appreciates it if any of us deviates from that. The new dog sleeps in her crate downstairs.”
Kirstie Allsopp, national treasure and Location Location Location star of 25 years, is puzzled by the whole living arrangements of your dwelling, as you would expect. “Does she mention why your dog bed has to be on the bedroom floor? Can I take it for granted that there is a spare room that you can co-opt? This is a golden opportunity to create His and Hers bedrooms,” she continues. “Some couples swear by the benefits of this and certainly having your clothes arranged your way can make getting in and out of the house much simpler and easier. Once this is established I suspect the cavapoo will go back to its correct place in the family packing order, which is third. It is incredibly bad for dogs to believe they have a more senior ranking.”
So far we have agreement from our star responders, and Andrew Roberts, Churchill’s biographer, also sees this as a power struggle, with the cavapoo being used as a pawn in some greater game of marital risk. “Why doesn’t he realise that of course the dog is trying to replace him?” Lord Roberts opines: “Pure Stockholm Syndrome.” I can’t name all the great and the good who “leant in” to this question, but a top civil servant was full of questions. “Has he never actually married her? Does the dog really prefer him? How old is dog and how long has there been this unspoken tug of love over dog? Why don’t they just upsize to an emperor bed…?”
Most of my respondents agree that you need to put both your partner and your pet in their place, and assert yourself and your own precedence in the hierarchy here. Don’t allow yourself to be pussy-whipped by your own poodle-cross, for pity’s sake. Here’s the choice you have to make: you’re either going to need a bigger bed, or bigger balls, or a different partner.
Over to you!