The Unexpected Social Life of Having a Dog In Your Twenties

Let’s be honest: making new friends in your twenties is rough, to put it mildly.

When you are younger, meeting new people is almost unavoidable. You are placed in classrooms with twenty-something other people your age. You go to summer camp. You join a sports team or some other extracurricular. You do not have to be particularly outgoing or strategic about any of it. There were so many opportunities to meet new people.

Then you graduate, everyone moves on, and the built-in social infrastructure of school disappears almost overnight. Suddenly you're thrust into a world of exhausting 9-to-5s and crowded bars where you have to yell over bad music just to learn someone's name.

Nobody really prepares you for that.

You still have friends, of course. Maybe you keep the people you grew up with or your college friends. Maybe you get lucky and make friends at work. But meeting entirely new people becomes harder, especially when everyone seems to be entering a slightly different version of adulthood at the same time.

Some people get married and gradually inherit a whole new social orbit through their partner’s friends, siblings, and other couples. Some become parents, and suddenly there are playgrounds, daycare pickup lines, Mommy and Me classes, school events, birthday parties, and playdates.

And if you are single, do not have children, no longer have school placing you beside new people every day, and are not especially interested in making a crowded bar your primary source of community, you start to realize just how few places adulthood gives you to regularly meet new people.

I did not get a dog because I wanted to make friends. That would have been an insane amount of responsibility to take on for networking purposes.

But some of the best friendships in my life now exist because I happened to have a dog in my twenties.

Psychologists have known for a long time that friendship has less to do with fate than we sometimes like to think.

Proximity matters. Repeated exposure matters. Familiarity matters.

Social psychologists sometimes refer to this as the propinquity effect: we are more likely to form relationships with people whose lives regularly overlap with ours. The more often we see someone, the more opportunities there are for recognition to become conversation, conversation to become familiarity, and familiarity to become something more.

School is practically designed around this.

You see the same people every day. You share experiences. There is always something happening around you to talk about. Nobody has to walk into a classroom and announce that they are currently accepting applications for a new best friend.

Adult life is much less generous with those conditions.

My dog, oddly enough, brought some of them back.

Suddenly, I was outside at roughly the same times every day. I started going to dog parks and places I probably never would have visited alone. I saw the same people again and again. At first, we knew each other’s dogs’ names before we knew each other’s.

And dogs make talking to strangers remarkably easy.

You do not need an opening line when one dog is trying to steal another dog’s ball or rolling around in a mud puddle. You ask how old their dog is. They ask what breed yours is. You laugh about something ridiculous one of them is doing. The next time you see each other, you say hi. Eventually, you start talking about things that have absolutely nothing to do with dogs.

Looking at my life today, some of the people I talk to and spend the most time with are friends I met entirely because of my dog.

We still have dog park runs and playdates, but somewhere along the way those turned into Galentine’s parties, brunches, birthdays, coffee dates, movie nights, and ordinary afternoons spent hanging out, sometimes with the dogs and sometimes without them.

Our dogs were simply the bridge that put us in each other’s path often enough to find out we actually liked being there.

Maybe that is what I find so interesting about it. I spent years assuming that making friends as an adult required putting yourself out there in some big, deliberate way. Joining groups. Going to events. Walking into rooms full of strangers and somehow being brave enough to start talking.

Instead, some of the most important people in my life entered it while I was standing around a dog park in leggings, holding a leash and a tennis ball.

My dog did not magically make adulthood more social. He just gave me something adulthood had quietly taken away: a reason to keep showing up in the same places, around the same people, long enough for strangers to stop feeling like strangers.

And apparently, sometimes that is all friendship needs.