Puppy love: why asking my boyfriend to coparent Basil the greyhound was the most important proposal of all | Patrick Lenton

5 hours ago 3

Recently I got down on one knee and presented my boyfriend with some jewellery, and asked if he would commit to caring for a very long, cute, stinky boy.

While this is an apt description of me, I was not asking him to marry me and I was not presenting a ring – I was asking him an even more important question: would he consent to having his phone number engraved next to mine on my long stinky dog’s collar, complete with a cute little heart tag featuring our digits?

He said yes!

I’ve been thinking a lot about relationship milestones recently because they’re a delicate alchemy – rush things too soon in that early romance fever and you could end up sharing a mortgage with someone getting “really into” close-up magic and considering it “could be a whole career”. There really should be some kind of law forbidding you from making big life decisions or operating forklifts when you’re in those early lovestruck days.

When is the right time to meet parents, or move in together, or get engaged? How soon before you say “I love you” or adopt a rescue turtle together, or write your first sappy Guardian article about them? All questions that keep me awake and pacing at night. As a diehard romantic, romcom lover and persistent idiot, I’ve made the wrong call many times, so at this point I’m getting twitchy and doubting my instincts.

At first I wasn’t worried about the dog collar as a significant relationship milestone, as it was entirely utilitarian in function. I was heading to Sydney for a few weeks to stay with my family and my boyfriend was kindly looking after Basil, my very anxious rescue greyhound and love of my life. I had classic parent visions of Basil escaping in a strange place and roaming the streets lost and alone – with rescuers unable to contact me because phones famously don’t work across state lines. It just made sense to get a new collar tag and include his number in case of emergency.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised this cute dog collar moment was actually an incredibly significant gesture of commitment – and one perhaps more meaningful than something like marriage, which was invented by Hallmark to sell edible candy garters to bachelorette parties. As a single-dog dad, there’s nothing more important to me than the wellbeing of Basil – he is my prime responsibility in life, the helpless and hapless creature that I have a duty of care towards. To understand how much I take this seriously, consider the fact that I pay for private health insurance for him – and not for myself. I realised that putting Basil’s life in my boyfriend’s hands is far more commitment than moving in together and combining our linen sheet collections.

There’s a lot to love about my boyfriend (who is extremely offline, so I shall respect his privacy and refer to him by function rather than by name) – when I met him I was impressed by his Disney prince hair and the fact he wandered the world speaking scores of languages. I am delighted by his goofy sense of humour and his unabashed and encyclopaedic love of birds and the fact that he seems to have roughly 100 close personal friends, all who he somehow manages to nurture and love, like a rich 90s kid juggling an embarrassment of Tamagotchis.

But when I met him, I was mostly worried about whether or not he’d be a good stepdad for Basil. Our first date was a sunshine and coffee walk around Coburg Lake, a tight hour-long perambulation before he jumped on a plane and flew to South Africa. I’m exaggerating but it felt like he basically ignored me and spent the entire walk fawning over Basil. I was pleased, discovering he was a former greyhound owner and met and maybe even exceeded me when it came to dog obsession.

When I’d taken over custody of Basil a year earlier, he’d been suffering from an undiagnosed infection, which led to him being taken to the emergency vets multiple nights as I tried to sort it out. I’d never felt so alone in my responsibilities before and, as a result, I became even more of a hermit, quitting my hobbies, prioritising WFH jobs, getting nervous about staying out at night in case my child was sick. As a rescue dog, Basil has been let down by so many people in his life – I have to make sure that stops with me. It isn’t easy entrusting that responsibility to another person – a commitment worthy of a relationship milestone.

But I think focusing on the commitment inherent in relationship milestones is a mistake – what actually defines these life moments is the ability to trust another person.

Trust them enough to meet your family and not put their feet on your mum’s white couch, trust them enough to move in with you and not become a filth wizard, and trust them enough to marry you and not murder you while scuba diving.

That’s why I think the dog’s collar is such a massive relationship milestone – if I can trust him with my dog, the most important thing in my life, then I guess I can trust him again with my bruised and idiotic heart.