Dogs have a wide range of emotions but its us humans who translate them to human emotions witch they are not.
The old thinking of "only humans can have emotion X, pain Y or logic processing capacity to do Z because humans are more developed". Humans are actually backward-developed and lost control over many aspects of communication, subliminal, subconscious signs which only a few learn to read anymore. And don't care about those basic aspects of clear interspecies communication.
Dogs possess the same emotions as humans, the same discomforts, enjoyments. Envy, greed, hate, curiosity, enjoyment, disliking, love, respect, carelessness, happiness, fear, discomfort and lots more. Individually, just not in a prejudging way of thinking, conditioning through negative events in the past aside.
Humans don't possess a prejudgement and risk assessment in their childhood, up until they begin to combine not only experience and command based ways to their goals, but technical reflections with abstract projections through science-based analysis, which dogs can't use due to the missing scientific understanding. We just can't teach them this sort of mathematical and abstract analysis, even if they would be capable to understand quite a few things.
A dog doesn't know that a car weights 1,5 to 2,5 tons, there are no ways to teach a dog exact metrics as example. As such they just analyze what they understand: noise, vibrations, smell, movement, effects on things, appearance. Some dogs abstract from this that a car might be dangerous, some see it as harmless, as it doesn't show a threat to them directly. And hopefully those never experience a collision which would surely enough let Pavlov's classical conditioning do its work, but might end deadly.
Yes, canids can love. No, they won't make the morning coffee or care for your morning routine, they are quite egocentric in that behalf.
They can actually communicate ways better than we humans could with other humans that speak different languages. They need only a few days to find ways to communicate clearly with humans of all languages and even understand specific languages very well, just not scientifically analyzed (no grammars, but words and strings).
As such we don't have to search "patterns in their behaviors", they do the exact same and are masters of manipulation if a human is not careful, as their goal is still based on egocentric profit. But also related with respect, careful handling, knowing the physical differences of humans and dogs and so on.
The funny thing I see each other day is, that humans are in many cases the exact same. Staying together to not have to bear loneliness, while telling their partner humans just lies of attraction, love, whatever, while they are often incapable of feeling those. Keeping multiple partners and telling each one that they really love
just them. They feel better in a relationship out of a self worthiness stance. They are often able to forget the partner after a few weeks and don't care much about the loss after splitting up, as their goal lays in finding another one removing that "loneliness".
Many are even less emotionally loving than you can experience from dogs. Less emotionally bound, caring for, willing to sacrifice life time for the other one and so on. There's no "higher" human love standard, neither an universal scale for "love" or relationships.
No idea how anyone could ever conclude that dogs are not able for love, for being a boy- or girlfriend, for dependence and emotion based connections if even most humans absolutely fail on this terms and nobody tells them that their "love" is a bad joke of selfish decisions.
But as the remaining "human partner" standards and ways of life are absolutely variable, handling your dog like a human relationship, talking with them, caring for them, going on travels with them (as stress free as possible for the animals) and so on is not a bad aspect in my opinion. It's one of many variable ways how humans could have a relationship.
jk
