Champion of My HeartA real-time memoir about life with a fearful border collie, by Roxanne Hawn

Psychology experts call our sense that “dog people” are nicer a “fundamental attribution error.” That doesn’t mean we’re necessarily wrong in our assumptions. It simply means that we assign and potentially over-estimate the depth of someone’s character based on seeing them with a dog.

Dog walking = good deed

For example, a couple of years ago, when I researched this piece for Reader’s Digest on how dogs make a WAY better workout partner than a person ever could, one of my sources told me that if someone feels self-conscious while out walking for exercise, the mere addition of a dog to that walk changes everything in public perception … instead of seeing a person who “needs” exercise, most of us see the dog and a person doing a good deed for that dog instead.

And, if  … say … you pass someone while walking, they are MUCH more likely to speak to you or try to engage you in some way if you have a dog along. Thanks to this attribution error, dogs make us more approachable.

Apply some exponentially increasing mathematical formula to this attribution error if said dog is a service puppy in training (like our pal Ruby). Seriously, I’ve interviewed puppy raisers over the years, and a pup in a training vest is the greatest of all gravitational pulls.

Dog + Magic = makes you invisible

Early in our agility training, I suffered horrible nerves (still do, actually) and worried about looking like a goof. Several more experienced handlers told me, “No one is looking at you anyway. They’re watching your dog.”

So, let’s see if we can sort this out.

1) People assume we’re nicer because we have dogs.

2) People are mostly looking at our dogs anyway.

Indeed, it seems like dogs make us both MORE visible and less visible at the same time. Maybe they diffuse our presence, or put a nice  fuzzy filter on us that makes us seem nicer, more successful, more attractive.

Kind Girl With Dog

Well, according to one of our new blogger / dog training friends (Dino Dogan, who is single) all this does (or should) play into bride selection … or at least the search for one.

Dino and I are doing a little blog experiment with Edie Jarolim over at Will My Dog Hate Me. It’s a good match since not long ago Edie blogged about Sex & The Single Dog Blogger (and that post’s aftermath).

Dino drafted his dog-kindness wife philosophy as an essay / guest post for Edie: Why Girls Who Own Dogs Make Better Wives.

BUT, he also recorded a “performance” of it. So, you also have the option of listening to it: Podcast: Why Girls Who Own Dogs Make Better Wives.

(Click on the podcast link, then click the link that comes up on a new page, and it should launch the audio file. It isn’t fancy, but it should work.)

Marriage Related Book Trailer

So, all this brings us to a video book trailer my writer/blogger/author friend Alisa Bowman recently released in advance of her book — Project Happily Ever After: Saving your marriage when the fairy tale falters.

The book will release right around the holidays, just in time for New Year’s resolutions. (You can pre-order it!)

Here is what you need to know about Alisa:

1) She owns a dog. A big doberman, actually, who recently had a little adventure, but that’s her story to tell.

2) She used to imagine planning her husband’s funeral.

Yep, nice girl wishing her hubby dead.

And, yet, her book chronicles how they came back from the marital abyss.

You know how I joke on our “Why Champion of My Heart?” page that:

“Ultimately, I hope to deliver a bigger story of redemption, of a literal underdog who makes good, but only time (and hard work) will tell.”

Well, Alisa has done just that. She has done the hard work. And, boy … does she have a story to tell.

So, please enjoy Alisa book trailer, macabre and provocative as it is because here is the thing. Looking past that dog and into the person is only the start of where our human relationships can take us.