Your Relationship Radio hosted by Peter Ehrlich and Liza Fromer- YRR

By Teresa Pavlinek

I have always been an animal lover. As a kid we were never without pets; dogs, cats, turtles, birds. Even after having my heart broken time and time again from the loss of a beloved animal I would pick myself up and reconnect with yet another furry or feathered friend.

As an adult I took in a stray cat even though I was allergic. I’ve spent more money than I am willing to admit on vet bills to heal said cat after many a late night brawl. Because I believe that animals provide us with an unconditional love that adds to our mental and physical wellbeing. Bottom line, I don’t trust people who don’t like animals.

I think they’re a bit “off”. So when I started dating a man who wasn’t a “cat person” and who insisted that my cat be left out of the bedroom at night when he slept over, I found myself in a bit of a moral dilemma. Up until then things had been going quite well with this new beau.

We had a lot in common, he was funny, intelligent, employed.  But once he drew a line in the sand between him and my pet, things changed. For some reason that I’m sure will come out in therapy one day, I didn’t challenge his initial request. Being the pleaser that I am I went along with it thinking, “what’s the big deal? The cat will sleep in the other room.”

Now for any of you who have cats you’ll know that the minute you close a door to a room that you are in and they aren’t a battle ensues. Even if the cat doesn’t want to be in that room they will scratch on the door as if they are being chased by a thousand bloodhounds. As I lay there listening to my cat viciously scratching a hole right through my bedroom door I started to find the man lying in bed beside me less and less attractive. I started to feel like I’d betrayed my pet for sex. Not always a bad thing but still. Maybe it was a power struggle. Maybe I am a softy. Or maybe I was realizing that my relationship to my cat was even stronger than I’d thought.

So after a few weeks of the nighttime ritual of closing the bedroom door, hearing the scratching, quiet, panicked scratching, quiet, crazed scratching, cat sigh, silence, I started to feel uneasy. Now, nobody wants an animal staring at them while they’re having sex. Well, some people do but that’s a different show. I understand that. But for me it was about more than that. It was about control.

And I don’t do well with control - mostly because, well, I’m really controlling. Animals don’t always do what we want them to do. Especially cats. Nothing amuses me more than watching someone try to train a cat. You might as well try to get a teenage boy to stop masturbating. Not gonna happen. In relationships control is always a huge issue. Even with pets.

I think that my new man was probably marking his territory, so to speak, and with that came the exclusion of my cat. He didn’t want the cat to take up too much room in the relationship. He felt that by laying down some ground rules it would show the cat, and possibly me, who was boss.

Sadly for him, I don’t find that attractive. I wanted him to embrace my animal and then maybe together we could set some boundaries regarding the cat and its place in the bedroom. In the end I chose my cat over him. Not solely because of the “bedroom” issue, there were other problems with the relationship. So now most nights my cat is back sleeping on the bed. It may not be wild, passionate, amazing sex, but hey, it’s love.