Getting a Dog Saved Our Relationship

July 4th, 2015 was when we adopted Zeus.

Our cute little baby Labrador Retriever. He was everything we could have asked for and more. Albeit the timing of us adopting him was not quite fitting as my partner and I recently started dating, we were still young ourselves-getting to know each other, in COLLEGE and add to the mix a puppy! It was quite a wild ride.

Zeus was a typical puppy. He had given us grief over the things he has destroyed and he has given us extreme happiness. He has chewed through a LOT of our college friends expensive designer shoes, a DSLR camera, a gazillion iPhone cables, laptop charger, furniture, you name it! There was quite a lot of saving up that me and my partner had to do to make sure all of our friends were adequately compensated. I remember my first ever salary out of college went to my friend to reimburse him for his DSLR. That’s how much Zeus made us spend.

Zeus: “Destroyed the cronchy stick and saved mommy”

Photocredit : iStockphoto

Well, college got over and me and my partner decided that it would be best to have Zeus go with him to his home in Jaipur, India as I couldn’t take him back with me to Dubai. He had a house, a ton of space for Zeus and another dog, a German Shepherd — Leo at home to give him company.

May 31st, 2016 I had to say goodbye to my baby not sure when I would see him again.

InJaipur it took both Leo & Zeus, a long time to get acquainted with each other. Zeus had a strong personality, he was still in the extremely naughty phase and nobody could handle it but my partner. He was also worried that he only had a couple of months to stay with him to make Zeus comfortable before he too had to leave to the US. Things were pretty stressful, but he tried his best to make everyone comfortable with Zeus before he left from there.

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Zeus is getting acquainted with Leo Photocredit : iStockphoto

While he was in the US, constant phone calls regarding Zeus’s behavior would arrive from my partner’s mother. Either he would eat something he was not supposed too or run out of the house or do one of the many things which their well-mannered German Shepherd would not. There was a time in Jaipur, where my partner’s father had sent Zeus away to their village in Haryana because they couldn’t control his naughtiness. He was sent without warning & my husband only came to know about this when he visited back home and didn’t find him there.

“I’m kicking your dog out of this house, if you don’t find a place for him”, said my partner’s father after his mother complained to him that she had fallen down while on one of their morning walks when Zeus yanked the leash. Thankfully, my partner’s eldest sister and her husband were currently there so she was able to scout and look out for places which were economical, had good facilities and could take care of Zeus for a couple of months till we had the funds to bring him over to America.

So it was decided. Zeus would no longer stay in the house and now was enrolled in a long term boarding facility where every month we had to send them a fee to care for him. Meanwhile, life went on. I was working in Dubai, trying to build my career and my partner was in the US doing the same. We both communicated on the phone a lot and whenever Zeus came up, I would go silent fighting back tears because I would miss him so much at that moment.

The feeling of not being able to do anything about the situation you are in just hits you so differently.

I made a promise to myself once, that I would never keep Zeus apart from us again. No matter what. No matter if we had no money or no place big enough for us, we would be happy as long as we were together. We would never be apart again.

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I moved to the US in August 2017 and while we both agreed that we would have a goal of getting Zeus to the US as soon as possible, it took us almost a year from the time to save up for his travel.

There was not a day that went by that my partner and I would not miss him. When you live in New York City next to a huge park like Prospect Park in Brooklyn, you get used to seeing dogs all the time having their best lives with their dog parents. It made us miss him immensely but there was nothing that we could do at the moment, except save and wait.

The hope of seeing us united once again kept us going.

We would get photo updates on how Zeus was doing, sometimes we used to break down but other times it made us work harder to save up so that we could see him here sooner. We both had a responsibility to take care of him, knowing he is an animal and needs to be cared for. We wanted to give him the best life possible, so we both made goals to achieve so that we could get him to the states as soon as possible.

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My partner broke the news to his family that he had a girlfriend and I was the one he was going to marry. When you are the first one in your generation to go against the tradition of arranged marriages, that fight would not be a small one. There were days when I used to think, “If I leave America & go back to Dubai, when will I see Zeus again?”. At this point it was almost 2 years since I last saw him in college, and I was desperate to see him.

I kept holding on to the thought that, “Our relationship with each other will be better once Zeus is here. He will make everything better for us. I should just hold on till he gets here.”

22nd September 2018: Zeus arrived in America!

Zeus’s First Day In Prospect Park, Brooklyn Photocredit : iStockphoto

While some of that was true, mostly it was not.

We finally got Zeus to America, life was great for a while. We were busy showering him with a lot of love, cuddles and missed birthday celebrations. We prepared him for the winter, bought him a snow jacket and everything! But turns out he didn’t need it at all. We were happier now, that Zeus was here. Our dream came true. We were all together finally.

Photocredit : iStockphoto

Once my partner and I were settling into our lives, the topic regarding marriage came up. We both knew that there was nobody else at this point, we knew we were each others partner’s for life. But still, after 3 years of back and forth with his family, there was no answer from his side.

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Everyday was a struggle. Constant fights, the drama between the father and my partner was never ending. All the relationships in the family were broken, everyone’s mood while talking to one another was sad. Some times were worse than the others, where there was no hope in seeing a happy future together. Even writing about it for this article makes me feel dread of the things that we had to go through.

How could two people who love each other be the reason for so much pain?

When you are in that anguished state, your survival mode kicks in. You go into flight or fight mode. There were times I wanted to just walk away. To go back to my safe haven, in Dubai. Where MY family was. The only one that stopped me was Zeus. THE ONLY ONE.

Every time that I packed my bags, Zeus used to come and sit next to me. Crying my eyes out, he used to just watch me pack. Even he knew something was going on, but as a dog how much could he really express? Sometimes I used to stop mid-way and just hold him close. I used to say, “I’m sorry Zeus, I can’t be with you. I wished it was different. I wish I didn’t have to break my promise to you. That I would never leave you again. But I can’t. I really can’t stay here, be a part of something which would never happen the right way.”

Zeus came and sat next to me in bed one day while I was crying. Photocredit : iStockphoto

And he would just lick my crying face. Try to console me in ways that he knew. I like to think it was his way of telling me, “Don’t leave me, mommy. Stay & we’ll figure it out together.”

Sometimes seeing me and Zeus together would make my partner come and stop me from leaving. He would tell me, “Things will be okay, this is just the hard part. We knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Stay and we can work it out.”

He was the glue that bound us together. The glue that made me stay. That made me look back on the happy times that we had together and hold on to this relationship. If at this point in time, we had any goals together at all it was that come what may, we weren’t going to separate him from the people he loved. Not again.

May 15th 2020 Zeus’s 5th birthday in Prospect Park .Photocredit : iStockphoto

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Zeus has been with us since almost the beginning of our relationship, through the bad times and the good. Life is great now, but every once in a while I go back to think that, if it wasn’t for Zeus, would we even be together?

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November 25th 2020: How could we get married without Zeus?