We saved each other

Waking up in my double bed, I reached for a cuddle from my six-year-old German Shepherd, Jess. Ruffling her fur and feeling her wet nose nudge my cheek made me smile, grateful not to have woken alone. While my partner, Kevin, and I, rescued her from an animal shelter three years earlier, Jess was the one who ended up saving me, and, without her, I wouldn’t have a reason to get up each morning.

My parents always had rescue pups while I was growing up in Portugal, so it was a prerequisite that any future partner loved dogs as much as me. Luckily, when I grilled Kevin, then 26, on our first date in 2011,