When Melanie met a man she really liked, she wanted to get to know him better, but he was really shy.
“I didn’t know how he would feel about a woman taking the lead and asking him out,” Melanie says. “So I just kept asking him to do dog activities with me and my dog.”
Not long after, Melanie’s new man plucked up the courage and asked her on a real date. They’ve been together for 28 years, and they still have dogs.
Melanie was part of a survey within our citizen science project Dognition, which aims to help us understand the dog-human relationship.
According to the survey, 82 percent of people would feel more confident approaching an attractive person if they had their dog with them. See Wednesday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Family section for more.