I'm 38 and I'm single, and I'm having my most intense and gratifying relationship with a dog. But we all learn about love in different ways, and this way happens to be mine.

Me, I walk along and feel quietly defensive, a recluse in the Land of We. That's quite the loaded word, 'we.

Before you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and start tinkering with the budget.

Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture's primary mode of communication, a radical change because images work so differently than words: They're immediate, they hit you at levels way beneath intellect, they come fast and furious.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Dogs possess a quality that's rare among humans -- the ability to make you feel valued just by being you -- and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn't care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I'd led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight.

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.