At the time I got Lucille, this was the central struggle with Michael: How much distance to maintain, how much closeness? What was the right amount of either? If Michael strayed too far from my orbit, I’d panic with need for him—can’t live without him, can’t get fed without him, can’t function. And yet if he got too close, assumed a certain level of commitment or permanence in my life, I’d be flooded with dread—he’s too much, he’s overwhelming, he’ll consume me. What was missing in this equation, of course, was some central seed of faith, an understanding that the right balance between self-care and caring from others was achievable, a certainty that my needs could be met.
Lucille, I suppose, landed directly into the center of all that confusion: she became an emblem of my wish for an emotional sure thing, a relationship that would, in fact, be enough, a connection with another being that would be so vital and exclusive, no one else could have access to it. This is why I was so profoundly possessive of her, so jealous of her affection. She was the one creature on the planet I loved without reservation, and I had to have all of her love in return, for the alternative, I believed, was to be left with nothing.
So we’d sit in the couples therapist’s office. “But she is yours,” Michael would say. “The dog adores you.”
I’d shake my head and try to hold back tears. I could believe this intellectually, but not at my core. I simply didn’t trust love—hers, anyone’s—enough to share it.
We saw the couple therapist together about half a dozen times before separating, and for a long time I wasn’t entirely clear about what had happened: Did the dog merely highlight preexisting conflicts, underscore differences in our respective needs and wants and degrees of commitment? Or did I do something truly insane? Did I up and leave my boyfriend for a dog?
SURROGATE DOG
ABOUT SIX MONTHS after she got her puppy, an irrepressible malamute named Oakley, my friend Grace had lunch with a friend on Newbury Street, a chic stretch of restaurants and shops in Boston’s Back Bay. Grace, who’s about as in love with her dog as a person can be, brought along some pictures of Oakley, and when she pulled them out of her purse to show them, her friend pulled back from the table ever so slightly. “Oh, Grace,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Retreating into the world of furry animals.”
Grace told me this story while we were walking in a stretch of conservation land about twenty minutes west of Boston. We’d stopped for a moment at the bank of a pond, and the dogs were engaged in a furious chase along the sand, darting up one side and tearing back, about as happy as dogs get. The sky was steely gray, the air and water calm, and we’d been out walking for about an hour, talking about dogs and the choices in life they help clarify. I remember that Grace stood there with her back to the reservoir and swept one arm out across the scenery. “Retreating?” she asked. “This is retreating?”
Grace and I are both the kind of people that others have in mind when they talk about the tendency among some humans to use dogs as surrogates, to “retreat” into the world of animals in order to bypass more problematic and complex human relationships. I can see the thinking behind this view: Grace and I are both single women who live alone, work out of our homes, invest extraordinary amounts of time and energy in our dogs. We are both prone to periods of isolation and withdrawal, people who might very well prefer lounging around at home with the dog to hanging out at some swank café on Newbury Street. Neither of us has kids. And me, I’ve left this seven-year relationship with a genuinely good man to spend most evenings holed up in my living room, the dog at my feet. So it’s not hard to see why we’d be looked at a bit warily: at least superficially, we appear to have made a rather deliberate set of choices—dogs instead of people, dogs instead of children, dogs instead of men.
And yet there we were, two women intimately engaged in conversation, sharing time and the natural world and our mutual love of animals. Grace, whom I met right around the time I separated from Michael, is a woman of uncommon intelligence and depth, and I doubt our paths even would have crossed had it not been for the dogs: we share the same dog trainer, went to the same dog camp in Vermont, fell into the whole dog world at roughly the same time. In the two years since we met, we’ve racked up countless hours together in those same woods, and our walks together have become one of the most sustaining aspects of my life, weekly shots to the soul of connection and laughter. We are very much on the same road out there, both of us going it alone in the world, trying to chart courses for ourselves that feel meaningful and true, and aware of the extent to which both our dogs and our friendship with each other have factored into that effort. Like she said, This is a retreat?
As a culture, we’re a bit schizophrenic when it comes to loving dogs, both accepting and suspect. On the positive side, keeping a pet—particularly a dog—can grant you a stamp of normalcy, give you a casual but handy entree into the social world. A well-known study by New York psychologist Randall Lockwood suggests, almost without exception, that people in the company of a dog are more likely to be regarded by others as friendlier, happier, more relaxed, and less threatening than people who are dogless; in an oft-cited study on the social effects of keeping a dog, British zoologist Peter Messent found that dog walkers in public parks and gardens had higher numbers of positive interactions and more extensive conversations with others than people who were either on their own or with small children.
And yet some fine line exists between “normal” love for a dog and “excessive love.” Care for the dog too much—dote on the dog, spend too much time with the dog, get too attached to the dog—and you get branded as something very different: you’re eccentric, or antisocial; you get laughed at. In his book, In the Company of Animals, James Serpell traces part of what he sees as the cultural denigration of pet keeping to the popular press, which seems to devote as much space to pet-human relationships as it does to people’s sex lives, with the bulk of the coverage designed to highlight the extremes to which today’s pet owner goes. There are stories about pet cemeteries and pet summer camps; stories about the modern accessorized dog, with his gold choke chain and Burberry raincoat and special-ordered, hydrant-shaped birthday cake; stories about excess. A classic example, the kind of story the media love to laugh at: Countess Carlotta Liebenstein, an eccentric German noblewoman, who left an estate valued at $80 million to a German shepherd dog called Gunther. The overt message here is clear—people who love animals are wacky—but behind it is a more covert and subtle one, a belief, as Serpell describes it, “that pets are no more than substitutes for so-called ‘normal’ human relationships.”
In fact, very little evidence exists to suggest that people with deep attachments to their animals are any “weirder” than people who are less attached, or that they’re focusing an unhealthy degree of social energy on their pets. If anything, dogs tend to widen, rather than narrow, one’s social world. “Morgen finds it easier than I ever did to go up to strangers and introduce himself,” says Bill, of his three-year-old dachshund. Single and in his fifties, Bill has lived in a high-rise condo in Washington, D.C., for more than ten years. Pre-dog, he hardly knew any of his neighbors; now he knows dozens of them, Morgen having wagged his way into a vastly expanded circle. Pre-dog, Bill led an active social life; today it’s doubled: he chairs his condo association’s pet committee; his friends’ children, who love Morgen, make regular “play dates” with him and the dog; several of the acquaintanceships he’s made through Morgen have blossomed into close friendships, particularly with other dog owners.
This is a classic story: dog gets owner out of house, tugs him or her toward new people, expands the human pack. Lisa, a school administrator who owns a small black dachshund mix named Franny, first met Mimi, a social worker who owns a small black miniature poodle named Marty, through a dog group; their dogs became playmates, the women became intimates; when Mimi became pregnant eighteen months later, Lisa became her labor coach. Jonathan, who owns the basenji named Toby, met his current lover, a veterinarian n
amed Mike, through the dog. Dog love became human love, colliding at key points (on their third date Mike turned to him and said, “Jonathan, I really love being with you, but I’ve gotta ask you to stop bringing me Toby’s stool samples.”). Like Bill’s dachshund, Jonathan’s dog gave him a sense of belonging in the world. “I walk with this whole network of people who own dogs,” he says, “and I’ve found this really wonderful community. We all walk our dogs in the morning and the evening, and sometimes I see them in other places, and we call each other by our dogs’ names: ‘Oh, there’s Toby’s father, there’s Astro’s father.’”
Such stories confirm what researchers have documented many times over: dogs are excellent social lubricants, and they tend to attract relatively social people. Psychologists at the University of Oklahoma have found that people with affectionate attitudes toward their dogs have proportionately affectionate attitudes toward people; British researchers have reported that people who interact frequently with their dogs have a higher desire for affiliation with other people than non-dog owners; a California study reported that elderly pet owners were more self-sufficient, dependable, helpful, optimistic, and socially confident than non-pet owners.
I suppose the key in human-dog relationships—at least as others see them—is degree. Certainly the world feels like a more comfortable, social place to me when I have Lucille by my side: passersby smile, sometimes stopping to ask a dog question or two; I tend to feel more relaxed and less anonymous when she’s with me, and also more approachable, my four-legged ice-breaker at the end of the leash. And yet I’m also aware of that fine line, that question of excess, that view of what’s “normal” and what’s not. The dog clearly does not occupy a secondary or neatly comparmentalized role in my life, so little seeds of doubt periodically crop up inside: I seem to love this dog too much; is this a problem?
On Christmas Day two years ago, I showed up at my aunt’s house for the afternoon, Lucille in tow along with a big bag of Lucille’s stuff: a blanket for her to lie on, a couple of chew toys, a big old rawhide bone for her to gnaw while we ate Christmas dinner. I felt a little silly lugging in all that gear—it felt like the canine version of a diaper bag—so I kind of tucked the bag under my arm, then walked into the living room and looked around.
Christmas is a lonely time for me, particularly since my parents’ deaths. What is family? Who in the world do I really feel connected to? All those dark existential holiday questions bubble up, and they do so with particular intensity in the aftermath of those losses. I’ve spent every Christmas since childhood with my aunt and her family, but it’s not a group I see much of between holidays, and I remember standing at the entrance to the living room feeling orphaned in the truest sense, as though I were about to spend Christmas with a large group of people who didn’t really know me very well. So I hovered for a minute, and then homed in on my cousin Suzanne and her husband Bill, who’d gotten a puppy right around the time I got Lucille, a standard poodle named Pepper.
Oh, good, I thought. Common ground. We said hello and exchanged brief pleasantries, and then I asked Bill, “So how’s Pepper?”
Dogs are one of the few subjects I can get truly gabby about, so I think I hoped we’d launch into dog talk from there, trade stories about training and behavior problems and care and feeding. But Bill paused just slightly and said, “Oh … um, she’s fine. She’s turned into a really sweet dog.” Then he gave me a kind of blank look, as if to say, “Next question?” and I remember being struck by a sense of acute awkwardness, standing there with my dog and my dog gear and my dog question. Here I am: dog, dog, dog.
Suzanne and Bill, both physicians, have two young daughters, and they lead very busy lives, and although I’m sure they’re very attached to Pepper and are pleased that they got her, she does not occupy a primary role in their world. By contrast, I’d spent the whole day absorbed in my dog—we’d gone for a three-hour hike in the woods that morning, and I’d carted her along with me to Christmas dinner as though she were my daughter or my date, and I felt hugely exposed for a second, as though I was revealing some fundamental difference between me and other people: woman with dog versus man with family. Woman with tiny narrow life versus man with big full life. Woman with bizarre priorities versus man with normal priorities. What’s wrong with this picture?
This brand of self-consciousness can hit people who love their dogs deeply, even when they’re together with like-minded dog devotees. I was hanging out at a park recently with a woman named Catherine, who owns a yellow Lab named Bailey, and a teenage girl named Katie, who owns a golden retriever-Lab mix named Sadie. At one point Catherine pulled out a little container of treats from her knapsack, then turned to the dogs, who were milling around the picnic table where we sat, and said, “Okay! Who wants a snicky-snack? Would anyone like a nice snicky-snack?” Her voice was squeaky and high, as though she were addressing a flock of schoolchildren, and hearing herself, she looked at Katie and me and rolled her eyes. “Oh my God,” she said. “What is wrong with me?” We just laughed: happens all the time.
And it does happen all the time. Like a lot of dog lovers, I have about fifty different terms of endearment for Lucille—sweet pea, and Miss Pea, and pea pod, and peanut, and Miss Peanut—and every once in a while I’ll hear myself in the house cooing at her in an overenthused soprano, “Oh, hello, you sweet, sweet pea! Are you the sweetest pea there ever was?” and I’ll just pray my neighbors can’t overhear me, I sound like such a goon. Or I’ll be making her dinner, and I’ll catch myself imploring her to eat as though she’s a toddler—“I have a delicious supper for you, Miss Pea! Have a bite of this delicious supper!”—and I’ll shake my head: Good Lord, I have gone off the deep end at last. I’m alone with the dog, and I’m alone with her a lot, and so the question of substitution looms large and often: What am I doing here? Is she a surrogate for other relationships? Should I be investing all this energy elsewhere?
Should: that’s the key question, the same one that generated the sense of exposure I felt at Christmas. Should I be living this kind of life or some other kind of life? Should I follow a more traditional path, pursue more traditional goals, let go of that leash and follow not the dog but, like my cousin and her husband, a life that includes marriage, kids, a home with actual people in it? And if I don’t follow that path, does that mean there’s something wrong with me?
I have been pondering these questions almost since the day I got Lucille, and I’ll no doubt continue to wrestle with them over time. On bad days, days where I’m lonely and my world feels small and unproductive and gray, I lean toward the pathologizing view, look around and see myself as some sort of reclusive, dog-obsessed misfit, too fearful and damaged to lead a “real” life. But other times I’m less sure of that. Alongside the seeds of doubt, I felt cropping up at Christmas, there was also a small seed of certainty: this dog is an enormous solace to me, a constant companion and witness to my daily life, a being I have come to feel closer to in many ways than members of my own family. She represents a choice, a style of living and loving that may not be conventional but that is valid in its own right, if only because it’s my own.
A month or so before we began to separate, and several months before we went into couples therapy, Michael and I spent a week together in Vermont, where we had one of the worst fights we’ve ever had. We were walking with Lucille through a piece of conservation land in the Green Mountains, and we’d stopped at a hillside that overlooked a wide, lush vista: trees, farmland, a sparkling jewel of a lake in the distance. For reasons I can’t recall, I was in a snippy mood, snippy and mean-spirited, and I started to babble about this question of surrogacy, about how annoying I found the implication that dogs are somehow low-rent versions of children, poor substitutes for people who aren’t noble enough or brave enough or somehow normal enough to have kids.
And then I blurted it out: “The fact of the matter is,” I said, “I don’t want kids.”
Michael and I had talked about children over
the years in the same noncommittal way we’d talked about marriage: a kind of maybe-someday way that didn’t open the door very wide but never entirely shut it, either. In other words, I’d never said anything that declarative about children, and I was aware that my comment was barbed and thoughtless even as I said it. There: don’t want ’em; case closed.
Michael didn’t respond at the time—he just sort of shot me a look—but later that day something triggered his anger, and he exploded at me. We were inside by then, in the house we’d rented for the week, and he brought up that comment—so simple and flip on my part—and he was (justifiably) furious: there I was, in his view, making this major statement about the future all on my own, with no concern for his desires; there I was, shutting him out; there I was, telling him in essence, “It’s me and the dog, not me and you, and certainly not me and you and our future children.” Michael, who would very much like to have a wife and a family, stood up at one point and said, “Listen, let’s just finish up the week and then go back to Boston, and then you go your way and I’ll go mine.” Michael had never said anything quite that declarative, either, and I remember that I stood there and felt partly relieved but mostly terrified.
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