Unconditional love.

It's the thing I always thought I wanted. Until I got it.

I always thought I wanted unconditional love. Then I got a cockapoo.

For the unacquainted, a cockapoo is a dog. To be more specific, or perhaps more hateful, it is a designer crossbreed; a pedigree pooch. But what is it exactly that is crossed together to create its whole? A cocker spaniel and a toy poodle? Oh that’s what the breeder will tell you, but my friends, do not be deceived.

A cockapoo is teenage angst crossed with a heart attack. A cockapoo is a nervous breakdown crossed with Groundhog Day. A cockapoo is FOMO going on a rager with introversion and making a baby called Help.

Now the dog and my daughter and I all live in Primrose Hill, where there are - and this is a fact - more cockapoos than people who could tell you what the minimum wage is or whether we even have one. Every morning, on the count of oatmilk latte, the cockapoos are released from their leads to go bounding off across the hill and crash into one another in a chorus of fur and regrets. The square mile of grass turns into a mudbath while the dogs all frantically share the emergency of being alive. Each of them is one and a half feet long and made of fur and feelings. All wearing their little Maga caps that say MAKE ADHD GREAT AGAIN.

My cockapoo, Chips, loves me so obsessively that even when we are safely tucked up at home together, slippers on, no abandonment in sight, he still sits outside the door crying if I go to the loo without him. I want to say this is because he’s a puppy, but he’s seven years old. Seven years of unconditional love from someone who weeps over not being able to get within sniffing distance of my bowel movements. Chips, mate - have some self-respect?

Sometimes, on a long night of trying to dissuade him from the size of his need for me, from massive barking attacks if I so much as take the bins outside and reappear thirty seconds later, I find myself humming that Pet Shop Boys line, I don’t know what you want but I can’t give it any more.

But here’s the thing. There is someone in my house who is in love with Chips. It’s not me, and it’s not my daughter, and it’s not one of our two female cats. It is the kitten known as Big Milk, even though Big Milk recently celebrated his first birthday with a hard stare and transformed from a smoky little dauphin into a solid, industrial tribunal of a cat. A big old cashback of a thing. A righteous charcoal portfolio of a boy. But Big Milk is still my baby.

Now Big Milk loves Chips, and always wants to play with him, or at least sit on him. Chips has zero interest in the cat beyond mild irritation and does not want to play with him back. So the dog looks into my eyes while the cat looks into his and I look into the cat’s. I love Big Milk so deeply that it actually hurts. I didn’t know - and I was several pets down by this point - that it was possible to love an animal like I love Big Milk.

It reminds me of when I contributed to a poetry magazine in York, as a young adult trying to get published for the first time. Another local contributor had written a poem that has always stayed with me, about how she had only felt this routine, blank sort of love for her older son, but then exploded with desire when she had his younger brother.

We were friends with this family so it was quite startling and amazing and worrying for me to find out that a mother could publish something like that. I was also baffled by it, though praps not by the difference in feeling for her two kids so much as by the fact that a mother felt passionate love for any of her kids at all. A wild and unruly thought in the Grim North of the early 90s. I didn’t really understand how it was possible to feel that way.

But then we got Big Milk.

Sometimes I think the dog was sent to teach me, a lifelong commitment-phobe, something about constancy. And he has. He has taught me that constancy is not what I want. Not with him, anyway. I want it with the other guy, who purrs as soon as I touch him, but is also, lest I forget, a cat, and therefore happy to murder me on a whim if times get lean.

So it’s a happy bloody Valentines from me and my love triangle. I’m trapped in a menagerie à trois.