“You cannot use my dog to attract other girls,” my ex emailed from Taiwan. She could see on social media that I had been on a ski tour with a woman, and there were photos of the dog, Bhoga, bounding downhill in the broken snow of our ski tracks.

Not that I believed she had a say in how Bhoga and I spent our time. A year earlier, she had moved from Portland, Ore., to Taiwan to teach English, a mercy killing for our on-again-off-again relationship. There had never been enough trust between us. She had disturbing dreams of me tattooing strange things onto her body. What I really did to her was withhold love.

When we first got together, a snowstorm shut down the city. She skipped work and we skied through the streets. I later fell for her when she played cello in a bathrobe. But a year later, she would sometimes disappear for a whole weekend and call me for a ride home Sunday night.

My ex had brought Bhoga into our relationship as a little puppy. Eighteen months later, when she planned to leave the country, we agreed the dog would stay with me because Taiwan required a six-week quarantine for arriving dogs. It was unbearable for me to think of this sensitive pup, who trembled with fear when city buses trundled by, being confined in a concrete kennel for that long.

Bhoga was an unlikely lure for a new love. “She’s kind of homely,” my mother said when I brought her to Wyoming for a visit. Her adoption papers said German shepherd mixed with boxer, a common pet shelter euphemism for pit bull. She had a wasp waist and barrel chest with a rough brown-and-black brindled coat. The stripes made her brow appeared furrowed, and with her black muzzle and flattened ears, she could look murderous. People gave us a wide berth on walks. Even the name my ex gave her was ungainly sounding, a Sanskrit word for enjoyment, or indulgence.

Up close, though, Bhoga’s yellow eyes conveyed love. She was exceptional in ways I admired — polite, athletic and confident (except in the case of city buses). On the river, she would sit placidly on the nose of a paddleboard as we bobbed through white water.

As someone who had been bullied as a child, I loved her grit: She never started a fight but never lost one either. If she wanted something — to go outside, a scratch behind the ears — she would quietly tap her toenails on the wooden floor until you noticed.

With friends, she swerved from outstretched hands but later invited affection. Her attention felt bestowed, which was a revelation to me. I had been sent away to boarding school at age 11, and in college my first real love had dumped me hard.

Those betrayals stuck with me, and I struggled to trust relationships. This confident animal behaved as if there were no person she would rather be with, no errand she didn’t want to join. So of course I would bring her on dates, to prove to the women I was interested in, and to myself, that I was worthy and capable of love.

Bhoga and I went skiing with more than one prospective girlfriend. There was the camping trip where a woman and I awoke at dawn to an animal snuffling and pushing against the tent’s nylon walls. Terrified it was a bear, we laughed in relief when we saw it was Bhoga, having slipped out in the night and now pawing to get back in.

She and I had grown so inseparable that when my ex returned to Portland after two years, I couldn’t contemplate parting with her. By then I’d been caring for Bhoga almost her entire life, and she was more important to me than any other living being.

When my ex demanded that I return Bhoga, and then called the cops on me when I didn’t respond, I panicked and fled to my parents’ house in Wyoming. Then I got a lawyer. It was a terrible thing to do, my most selfish act ever, but also the most empowering.

The lawyer asked if I wanted to consider a shared custody agreement, but I didn’t trust that; I couldn’t imagine my ex showing up for the exchanges. So he suggested a strategy of putting a lien on the dog for fees owed for boarding Bhoga for the two years my ex was gone.

At $40 a day, it came to $27,000, an absurd amount. Some months later, my ex capitulated and proposed a settlement, but instead of paying her for the dog, I was to donate $2,500 to animal-related charities, which I happily did.

I wasn’t proud of the legal tactics, but the day I signed the papers, Bhoga and I went for a celebratory hike through the tall Wyoming summer grass. I had decided to stay, knowing that the easy access to open space better suited both of us.

It took nearly a decade for Bhoga to heal me. There were dalliances with new women and a yearlong attempt at something permanent, but for much of that time it was just her and me, curled together on the couch. Her coat smelled like suede and her paws like popcorn. Even a year into dating my now-wife Eve, she remarked with some frustration that I seemed more interested in snuggling the dog than her.

At one point, my friend Adam came to stay with me for a week amid his divorce. He was grieving, deep in introspection, and Bhoga slept on his bed every night.

“Do you know anything about your attachment style?” he asked, handing me the book he was reading.

“I think my attachment style is canine,” I joked.

“Exactly,” he said, “that’s a secure attachment.”

I had always fallen into anxious and avoidant pairings and been whiplashed by highs and lows. In Eve, I finally understood that I had found someone who preferred to laugh than to make the joke, and who took care to maintain her friendships.

Of course, Bhoga was a secure match for us both. There were countless hikes where she circled back to check on whichever of us was lagging. When Eve’s golden retriever died of cancer in 2017, walking with Bhoga was Eve’s balm. Later, Bhoga mothered our new puppy, Arlo, by licking his ears. And at our wedding three years ago, they both accompanied us down the aisle, a flower on her collar, a bow tie on his.

When we brought our baby home from the hospital, Bhoga, then 14, welcomed him with a sniff and a lick before easing herself arthritically onto her bed. Her ears stood up straight to compensate for her growing deafness, and on walks, when she came to cracks in the sidewalk, she would often leap extravagantly over them. We wondered what, exactly, she could still see. Strangers approached to pet her, drawn by her sweet sugar face and slow perseverance, and probably by the memories of the old dogs they themselves had lost.

A dozen times a day we would help her off the floor where she had fallen, grateful to be of service for all she had given us, which was essentially our family. Tears came often and unexpectedly to me, washing the dishes or folding laundry, knowing we were close to letting her go. Those old feelings of abandonment came knifing back. I didn’t want to do that to her, knowing her fear — common among dogs — of being left behind.

When we made the decision, we were lucky to have a vet come to our house and administer drugs to Bhoga through an IV while we sat with her in the sun beside the woodstove. She slipped away in our arms, perhaps the best-case scenario, but every bit as wrenching as I had imagined.

What was a comfort were the tributes that poured in from the scores of people who had known Bhoga; her self-possessed presence had touched them all. Compared to other losses I have endured, the support from friends and family in losing the dog felt unconditional. In the past, condolences over lost love always felt tinged by blame, as if I could have chosen more prudently, or behaved better.

The irony is that in suing my ex for custody of Bhoga, I couldn’t have behaved worse — at least as far as my ex was concerned. I learned that in love, selfishness can be as important as selflessness, about knowing what you need and holding onto it — even if that sometimes means hurting someone else. In keeping that dog, I was assuring my most secure relationship, one which allowed me to love myself, and, in time, others.

Frederick Reimers is a writer in Jackson, Wyo.

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