Twelve Lessons From Good Dogs About Marriage

This is not a book about how to fix a marriage. We are not counselors, and we are not pretending to be. We are one deacon and one layperson, still trying to love God well.

This is a book about dogs, and what they showed us about marriage. We watched a Beagle stop barking because no one answered, and we saw ourselves. We watched a Jindo sit at the front door of a house that was not his, and we saw ourselves. Twelve dogs led us to twelve lessons about loving someone for a long time, through everything that long time brings.

This book is for:

  • The couple who once chose each other and now pass in the hallway without looking up
  • The husband or wife holding on to a cord that feels close to breaking
  • Anyone whose marriage is already over, still trying to make sense of what happened
  • Anyone who has loved another person and been changed by it, for better or for worse

Marriage is the most important relationship most of us will ever have. It is also the most difficult, because it asks us to do the hardest things: to stay when it would be easier to leave, to speak when silence feels safer, to forgive when the wound is still open, and to trust again when trust has been broken.

The dogs in these stories did not solve any of that. Dogs cannot. But they held up a mirror we did not ask for, and the reflection was uncomfortable, and it was true.

The title comes from Ecclesiastes: a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Two strands are husband and wife, stronger together than either is alone. The third strand is God. And when we could not hold each other, we found that Someone was holding the cord.

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