How to Talk to a Hunter

I found "How to Talk to a Hunter" a story that most people could relate to. The narrator, who although is smart, is stuck in a messy relationship with a cheating boyfriend because she is so overcome by her emotional involvement in it. Although many people may read the story and say "Why doesn't she just leave? He is the wrong guy for her, and she should just see that. It's so obvious," in the same situation they may do the same thing. Although the narrator knows that the hunter is a a bad boyfriend who cheats on her with so many women that his answering machine has "as high as fifteen" messages from them, she is so emotionally trapped in the situation that she sort of overlooks the hunter's many flaws and keeps taking him back. She realizes that she is completely unlike the hunter, which makes it hard for her to relate to what he is doing, but she stays with him none the less, trapped in this emotionally trying relationship, because she is so transfixed by his "bad boy complex". She compares herself to Janie Coyote, one of the hunters many women, that is so like the hunter, that you think the narrator would realize that Janie Coyote is the right woman for the hunter, and leave him for another man, who is more like her. Instead she stays in a relationship that makes her more and more like her dog that she leaves outside "chained and lonely and cold," who she wonders "if he knows enough to stay in his doghouse." This is a foreshadowing of the future of her relationship with the hunter, because she will just end up stuck in a relationship where she will become depressed and lonely as the hunter continues to cheat and treat her poorly, regarding her as just another woman, and not a woman who is special enough to commit to. Like the dog, she will not stay in her "doghouse," or out of the relationship with the hunter. Instead she continues to "stand outside", making herself vulnerable to the harsh elements of this toxic relationship, much like the dog who lets the intense elements of nature get the best of him instead of staying inside the doghouse, where he would be safer and warmer.