How I Met My New Best Friends at the Dog Park
Older adults are feeling lonelier than ever, but the secret to finding your community at midlife just might come on a leash
Not so long ago, I was just another middle-aged suburban dad without much of a social life. I had a few old friends from college that I kept in touch with, and a handful of married friends that my wife and I saw at dinner parties every month or two, but that was about it.
I’m not atypical. According to a University of Michigan poll published last December, more than a third of Americans between the ages of 50 and 80 feel lonely. I know that social isolation can age you, and having friends actually makes you healthier. But I’m a busy guy. Who has time to make new friends? Certainly not me.
But that was last year. Today, I have around 30 close friends that I see every day. And most of them know more about me than my therapist.
What changed in a handful of months? Simple. I adopted a dog.
Her name is Addie, short for Addison. She’s a shelter dog, a mix of Lab and Belgian Shepherd, and the friendliest, lovingest dog who ever lived. She’s also alarmingly smart. So smart that my wife and I are worried that if we’re not careful, she’ll talk us into a timeshare.
Our main reason for getting Addie is we’re both over 50 and way too sedentary. A dog, we reasoned, would get us out of the house and moving our middle-aged bodies. And that’s exactly what happened. But more than that, Addie got me to the dog park just a few blocks from our house. It’s a huge open field where dogs can run leashless, and their owners can wait on the sidelines and look at their phones.
Or at least that’s what I thought would happen. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Dogs are the ultimate conversation starters
The worst part of trying to make new friends as an adult is the small talk. Walking up to a complete stranger and asking them random questions just feels forced and weird. “Sure is a lot of rain we’re having lately, huh? Anyway, what do you do for a living?” Blergh.
But dogs are an excuse to talk to someone without the usual social awkwardness. Because people love talking about their dogs. They love answering questions, and sharing intimate details about everything from training to breeds to poop schedules.
It’s not the same with kids. When I watched my son play at the park as a toddler, other parents wouldn’t ask probing questions about him. That would’ve been creepy. Can you imagine walking up to another parent, pointing to his or her child, and asking, “Is he a biter?” Or, “Does he have a little Irish in him? His coloring is so interesting.” They’d call the freaking cops on you!
But those intimate questions aren’t just allowed in a dog park, they’re encouraged.
There’s a dog named Jackson who frequents the park with his owner Carl, a 45-year old civil engineer. Jackson is a Great Dane, and despite his Cujo-like bark, he’s a big sweetheart. He’s also a drooler. When he's in full play mode, he covers literally everything in his path in foamy white saliva, and that includes every other dog in the park.
This has provided endless fodder for conversation among the dog park parents. Carl has stopped apologizing—at this point, he says, “you all know what Jackson is bringing to the party.” The rest of us just laugh about it, and make jokes about the tsunami of saliva that Jackson generates. It’s become our shared inside joke, one that’s bonded us all together.
Dog owners are beautifully weird and wonderful people
Eventually, you’re going to run out of dog topics. And that’s when things really get interesting.
A dog park is a fascinating cross-section of humanity. Dog owners don’t tend to look a certain way, or come from similar age demographics or socioeconomic backgrounds or political leanings, or have anything in common other than their love for cohabitating with canines.
Since becoming a regular at the dog park, I’ve befriended college students, three widowers, a doctor, a veteran, new parents, empty-nester parents, a horror film screenwriter, a police detective, and a retired university professor from London who’s always dressed like he’s heading to a black tie ball.
That last one may be my favorite human at the dog park. His name is Marcus, and the first time I met him, as he escorted his twin Pinschers, he was dressed in a black suit, red scarf, red bowtie, panama hat, and dress shoes that practically glistened. The next time we met, he was in a similar outfit, this time with a green scarf and bowler hat. Then the day after that, an equally unorthodox-for-the-dog-park outfit.
After a few days of dog talk, he suddenly opened up about his teaching career in London, the long road that brought him to the U.S., and his feelings about living in an American city where “grown adults dress like middle school boys.” (I’m pretty sure he’s talking about me, a 50-year-old man who wears shorts in winter.)
My other favorite dog park human is Debbie. She’s in her 80s and has lived in our suburb most of her life. She’s always at the park with at least three dogs, which are only occasionally hers. She dog-sits for everyone in town, and besides dogs, her biggest source of happiness is gossip.
“Walk with me,” she told me after just my third time meeting her. With her three dogs in tow, she gave me a tour of the neighborhood, pointing out houses and sharing juicy intel.
“That’s where Ms. Davidson lives,” Debbie tells me. “She’s divorced and…” (in a conspiratorial whisper) “… an alcoholic. But she’s a lovely lady, and her Border Collie is cute as pie. Now, that green house there, that’s a whole other story. They have a teenage son named Carl, and let me tell you, Carl goes looking for trouble.”
I’m not sure what I expected my life to look like at 50, but I certainly didn’t expect to become besties with a woman three decades older than me, with a constant entourage of dogs (a replacement for her “dead husbands,” as she likes to say), willing to tell me the dirty secrets of all of my neighbors.
Dog friendships are the easiest to maintain
The main reason dog park friendships are the best is because they’re low commitment.
Making friends in the non-dog world is exhausting. You have to make plans. Then you have to show up for those plans, and stay there for the duration. It’s dinner, it’s coffee, it’s a farmer’s market, whatever. You’re with this person for the long haul. You can’t be mid-conversation and say, “OK, I’m good. See you later!”
But that’s exactly what happens at the dog park. You get to spend time with these people for as long as you feel comfortable. Is that five minutes? No problem. Is it an hour or more? Sure, that’s doable. If at any point you’re done with the conversation, you can just glance at your watch and say, “Oh shoot, I have a Zoom meeting for work. See you tomorrow?”
It’s not weird to see someone several days in a row. Or every day for months. Because our dogs always have to go outside. They always have to pee. They always have to run. So you get constant exposure to these people, for only as long as you want, and you slowly build a relationship with them.
Just the other day, a guy named Frederick showed up at the park with his new baby girl, strapped to his chest in a BabyBjörn. His dog, a French bulldog named Batman, was annoyed at no longer being the center of attention, and after a few minutes of watching the humans make a fuss over the infant, he decided enough was enough and trotted back towards home.
That’s what Batman does. He stays at the park for as long as it’s tolerable, and then when he’s had enough, he ditches his owner and walks himself home, his leash dragging behind him. It’s the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen.
Marcus, the retired British professor, decided that the baby's arrival meant we should all have a toast with champagne. “I shall return,” he announced with a dramatic flourish, flinging his scarf behind him like a cape and leading his dogs towards his estate. As we watched him leave, Debbie leaned towards me and whispered, “You know, he’s a raging alcoholic.”
These are my friends. And I feel grateful to have them. Are they the friends I expected to have at midlife? Absolutely not. They don’t look like me, they don’t talk or think like me, and we have almost no shared interests or life experiences, other than that we’re all dog parents. But I feel closer to them than any other circle of friends I’ve ever had. That’s a pretty remarkable thing to stumble upon, especially at this point in life, when I was pretty sure I was done meeting new people.
Life never fails to surprise.