This Golden Retriever Sleeps In Mom's Bed Every Night But Still Waits To Be Begged

Bedtime at Skylar's house comes with a ritual. The golden retriever sleeps in her mom's bed every single night, yet every night she plants her chin on the edge of the mattress, gazes up with big brown eyes and waits as if she has never once been invited. "My dog refuses to get in bed without permission," her mom, Dev, wrote.

Dev knows the drill by heart, and so, very clearly, does Skylar. "Skylar, you know you can come into the bed right?" Dev asked. The answer was a big open-mouthed grin from the floor, the look of a dog in absolutely no hurry to end a moment where everyone is paying attention to her.

The rules, it turns out, are very specific. "She won't come up before I pat the bed," Dev wrote, "but the routine is I must first beg, and then pat."

Then comes the twist. After all that begging and patting, Skylar finally hops up and walks right past the person who did all the work. "After all that you ditch me," Dev wrote. "And then of course, she chooses to cuddle dad first." Anyone whose dog has a favorite person knows exactly how that stings.

Dev has a theory about it, too. "Personally, I think she likes playing hard to get," she wrote, because Skylar "will always go to the person who wants her the least in that moment."

The permission rule also comes with a couple of handy loopholes. "If her paws are muddy or I’m washing the sheets, then she will hop on no problem though," Dev shared over on @skylars.the.limit. One commenter, Benni, backed her up: "Muddy paws = VIP bed pass, everyone knows the rules." Another fan decided Skylar is simply "one polite lady."

Luckily for Dev, the hard-to-get act never lasts long. "Eventually, she always comes to cuddle with me," she wrote, "and then we usually fall asleep together." Every night, after all that ceremony, Dev ends up with her real live teddy bear right where she belongs.