The writer poses with her dog, Zoe.

When I met Zoe, an 85-pound, deaf American bulldog with different coloured eyes, I knew she was my companion. Seeing her pumpkin-shaped head in my rearview mirror as I drove with her away from the Los Angeles rescue gave me a sense of, “There you are!” as though I’d found someone I’d been searching for for years without realising it.

When my then boyfriend — let’s call him Jax — met Zoe, he had the opposite reaction. “We can’t keep her,” he said, backing away from us toward our living room wall.

Wait, what? His words didn’t compute. Where I saw my sweet, furry friend, Jax saw a monster.

Through difficult conversations, I learned that Jax’s time in a community gripped by generational violence and dog fights led him to associate certain breeds with trauma. It didn’t matter that Zoe stayed calm around him.

Jax said he would try to make it work with Zoe, but couldn’t seem to stay in the house for more than one night with her in it. Within a week, it was clear that Zoe would never be welcome.

Jax owned the home, and I’d only recently moved in, so all I felt I could do was make sure Zoe had a safe place where she was welcome. I sobbed, driving her back to the rescue, and hyperventilated after. “If she ends up with no place to go, call me,” I’d pleaded with the rescue manager. “I would come back for her. I’d figure it out.”

Maybe there was a loving home waiting for her around the corner, I told myself. That thought did little for my heartache, but it kept me from falling apart completely.

Jax and I attempted to carry on, but our experience with Zoe seemed to shed light on our differences that now felt like incompatibilities. He needed things to stay spotless and orderly. I needed my own space to be creative, without stressing over any mess I might make. He enjoyed discotheques and nightlife. I prefer sunrise hikes and turning in early. When he told me he wasn’t yet ready to share my attention, even........

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