Fine break up with me, but let me keep Instagramming your dog

In our Love App-tually series, Mashable shines a light into the foggy world of online dating (and, in this case, dissects how dating shapes our online selves). It is cuffing season after all.

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I love my boyfriend’s dog.

Of course, my boyfriend is great, but Happy holds a special place in my world. A 6-year-old, 45-pound pitbull with a heart of gold and a head of rocks, Happy makes every corner of my life brighter. Her toys litter my living room, her fur coats my car, her needs circumvent my own. As I write, she's hard at work tearing apart a stuffed raccoon and flinging its fluffy entrails across the Mashable office — a mess I'll have to clean up later.

She's an intrinsic part of my identity, the sidekick to my daily adventures.

It's no secret that pets give you clout IRL and online, but Happy is far more than fodder for my acquaintances and followers. She's an intrinsic part of my identity, the sidekick to my daily adventures.

Most days, I share videos of Happy sleeping on the couch or chasing down a tennis ball on my Instagram Stories. My family receives frequent Happy updates via text. On holidays, my boyfriend and I squeeze her barrel-chested body into seasonal wear (last Halloween, we went as The Peanuts Gang) and take a family photo to share with friends.

I have no reason to think my relationship with my boyfriend will turn sour, but whenever we do falter, my first thoughts are of Happy. How would I explain her sudden absence? What would I fill my days, nights, and social media "memories" with? She’s my dog, but not really.

It’s a fear I've learned plagues many of my pet-loving friends. So with a lump in my throat, I went searching for the worst-case scenario: folks whose relationships had indeed ended with pet separations. I wanted to know what it meant for them, and how it changed the version of themselves they put online.

What I discovered was at once comforting and heart-wrenching, a telling glimpse into romantic loss, unconditional love, and digital identity.

For example Ellie, who asked us not to use her last name, but was willing to talk about this problem. She took ownership of her pup Lola after a recent breakup. Although Lola was initially Ellie's boyfriend's dog, when the two parted ways, he struggled to find an apartment that would allow Lola's breed. As a result, Ellie kept Lola after the split.

"Immediately after, I would really only post about her to my Story on 'close friends' mode."

"I definitely felt like I had to be more conscious about how and when I posted about her on social media," Ellie recounts via Twitter. "Immediately after, I would really only post about her to my Story on 'close friends' mode, which I had removed him from. I didn't want it to seem like I was [being] overly showy, or trying to pour salt in the wound, because I can only imagine how tough it is for him."

Now that some time has passed, Ellie shares photos of Lola more readily, occasionally to her Insta grid. According to her, she and Lola have adapted to the ladies-only life well and are operating as "a new little family unit." Her ex still follows her on Instagram and watches a good number of her Stories, but does not like or comment on anything about Lola.

When her ex took the dog over Christmas, Ellie says it seemed "difficult" for both of them.

Image: courtesy of ellie

My burn-the-bridge sensibilities make me think straddling the line between together and not could cause more trouble than its worth, even with a beloved pet involved. If Happy was out my life, I'm not sure I could bear to see her, in-person or online.

Josh Scherer, the former owner of Pockets the cat, feels the same.

"My girlfriend and I lived together for five years and we broke up eight months ago," Josh tells me. "She had one cat, Kevin, when we started dating, but we got another cat, Pockets, about two years into our relationship. It was kind of unspoken that Kevin was hers and Pockets was mine — they even matched our personalities better."

"I still get random DMs from people asking why I haven't posted a pic of him in a while. I never have the heart to answer."

No matter how different, Kevin and Pockets soon bonded. When Josh and his ex decided to separate suddenly, the pets' shared living situation posed a problem.

"Since we'd bought nearly everything in the apartment together, all I took was the TV and told her to keep the rest. That included both cats. She offered me custody of Pockets, but I knew I couldn't (1) split him up from Kevin, and (2) drag a skittish cat with me to a random Craigslist spot with two complete strangers for roommates."

Josh's ex suggested "visitation rights," but he ultimately concluded that while he'd like to see the cat, it was too painful to see his ex-girlfriend on a regular basis.

With Pockets out of the picture, Josh's online identity changed. He'd previously posted tons of photos of the cat to Instagram and Twitter, but enacted "full ex-on-social-media protocol" after the split — deleting every photo of Pockets from his Instagram to avoid answering questions. (Due to his career, Josh has over 197,000 followers on the platform. He left some images of Pockets on Twitter.)

"It sucks, but I'll probably never see Pockets again. I still get random DMs from people asking why I haven't posted a pic of him in a while. I never have the heart to answer."

Josh is considering getting another pet, but worries no cat could ever be "as cool as Pockets."

Although impressively cordial, neither Ellie's nor Josh's experiences reassured me.

It seemed inevitable that, unless my boyfriend and I were to stay 100 percent in-love forever, one of us would eventually be looking at photos of Happy, yearning for the good old days, and sulkily snapping pics of what we ate for breakfast. More than likely, that "one of us" would be me.

I worried that when the time came, I'd need to draft a post declaring my severance from Happy — announcing to the world that we would no longer be mutt and mom. I never found anyone who had released a statement on the status of their pet relations, but plenty of people do post when a pet has died. This made me wonder if social media, the typical culprit of so many bad things, was to blame for the emotional turmoil.

Without a scrupulous record of our daily lives, would pet breakups and deaths be substantially easier? Catching up with my former co-worker Gooby Herms, I found things weren't so simple.

"I could only hope that he didn't miss me. I hate that I wasn't there in the end."

According to Gooby, he, his ex-girlfriend, and their pet rabbits Patch and Sia were a young family "pre-social media."

Now 45, Gooby recalls purchasing the bunnies for his then-S.O. as a birthday present. When the couple decided to separate, Gooby thought it was appropriate his ex keep the rabbits, but leaving them was incredibly hard.

"We [were] together for close to nine years, and had the rabbits for six of those," he recalls. "It really felt like I'd lost my children. It was terrible."

Although Gooby wanted to stay involved with Patch and Sia, the romantic dissolution was too raw and the pair didn't speak for nearly three years. (The human pair. As best I know, the rabbits never talked.) By the time Gooby and his ex became friendly again, both Patch and Sia had passed.

Patch was especially important to him.

"When my ex and I started talking again, I asked how it all went," Gooby remembers. "Patch lived to be about 10. In his last year, he couldn't move his back legs very well and had to be carried around most places. This absolutely broke my heart. I could only hope that he didn't miss me. I hate that I wasn't there in the end." (Gooby has since gotten a tattoo of Patch, shown below.)

It's a heartbreaking account, but it tells me keeping tabs on a former pet can be a good thing. If Gooby had access to bunny updates from his ex on social media, perhaps he could have reached out to say goodbye before it was too late.

Image: courtesy of gooby herms

Stuck between knowing too much and knowing too little, I worried that no one had solved this problem, and that I was doomed. Then, Mashable's Adam Rosenberg messaged me on Slack.

"Things were definitely tense between us for a while after the split, but sharing Loki was never not harmonious."

Unspeakably kind to his pets, friends, and colleagues, Adam is the sort of person to get this type of thing right.

Adopting a fluffy pup with his soon-to-be-fiancée, Adam planned to care for the spectacularly named Loki forever. So, when the pair called off their engagement, a "shared custody agreement" was made and extreme lengths were taken to accommodate everyone's love of Loki. As a result, posting about him never became a problem.

"Things were definitely tense between us for a while after the split, but sharing Loki was never not harmonious," Adam says, describing seven-and-a-half years of co-pet parenting.

"When I moved out of our shared apartment, it was to an apartment that was literally around the corner. Then when [my ex] eventually left that apartment, she ended up buying a place that was not too much further, a five-minute walk max. It didn't get more complicated than that until years later, when she relocated to [a new neighborhood.] But she also had a car by then, so she was Loki's taxi for a while."

Image: courtesy of adam rosenberg

When Loki died in 2016, Adam, his ex, and both of their new partners stayed at the dog's side until his final moments. In a farewell Facebook message to Loki, Adam wrote extensively about the love he felt for their dog, tagging his former partner in the post.

Of course, Loki's unique set-up isn't practical for all people, and it doesn't really solve the issue of digital reminders. But hearing that two people had managed to preserve their online identities and IRL feelings after a pet breakup gave me hope.

For now, he's my boy — and she'll always be my girl.

I soon found similar stories — a musician who sees her ex's cat at the recording studio, one-time college sweethearts who meet up at the dog park, a former long-distance couple still sharing photos of their fish on Facebook Messenger. Nobody has a one-size-fits-all solution for alleviating heartbreak in the modern age, but they (and their pets) are finding ways to cope.

Unconditional love, the quality we seek in our human partners and find easily in our furry friends, is no easy feat. Relationships fail, pets die, nothing lasts forever. But perhaps the digital paw-print left by the moments we share with the pets that aren't ours can be a memento of something good rather than bad and remain a part of our ever-changing online selves.

I believe my boyfriend and I will be together until Happy's life ends, and if we're very lucky, until ours do as well. But if that doesn't work out, I trust that we'll all be OK.

We don’t have to forget, hate, or block the things we once loved. We can look back on the pets and people we used to know and smile fondly. Sure, I'm still going to brace myself for the worst. But for now, he's my boy — and Happy will always be my girl.

Image: alison foreman

Read more from Love App-tually:

• When an online match wants to meet up immediately, it's OK to say no

• What the hell is Ghost Exorcism Day?

• How to revive Craigslist's Missed Connections

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