This phrase, to be honest, is very odd on first reading. What does it mean?

I remember when my friends and I first heard it but didn’t know what it meant, so we joked about it . . . some of us even had fairly inappropriate theories! (use your imagination)

I first started hearing this phrase, in English, years ago when hanging with my Thai/American friends. None of us knew what it meant or where it came from, or why it was only said in English. It wasn’t until a few years later when I was in Thailand that I decided to ask around. It turns out this phrase has a very deep meaning when it comes to Thai culture.

In Thai culture, when you love someone, you are generally expected to join their ‘family’. Not just immediate and extended family, but also their closest friends too. You can’t love someone if you tell her to lock the cat (or dog) up in another room because of your allergies!

This phrase is starting to make sense now, right?

‘Love me love my dog’ means that if you love a person, you need to also love everything about them too. You need to love her/his parents, enjoy being around her/his friends, etc. Or if a close friend of yours has a new girlfriend, that girl then automatically becomes a close friend of yours as well. Or so Thai culture goes . . .

Where does this phrase come from? I honestly have no idea, but by googling around I’ve also found equivalents to it in other languages including French and Spanish. It seems to be at least 40 years old, too, if not even older. It isn’t that common of a phrase in Thailand, and I’m not sure where they learned this phrase from, but I do hear it spoken by Thais in English a few times every year. And they’ll understand it much faster than any farang 😉