Learning to Love (And Live With) a Pet Person

What happens when you ask the love of your life when their pets might die?

Illustration by Jess Smart Smiley

It was a humid summer morning two years ago when I rolled over in bed and groggily asked my new girlfriend when exactly she thought her cats might die.

Yes, I am something that pet owners everywhere cannot believe exists. I am not a pet person.

This is not something pet lovers can accept easily. No, they want answers. “But how are you not a pet person? Is it a problem with your brain? Or do you not have a soul?” They don’t actually say that last part, but I can tell it’s what they’re thinking. “Didn’t you have pets growing up?” they demand with a pitying frown, as if I grew up without running water.

I wasn’t raised in some sort of house of horrors, just in a New York City apartment, by a Bronx-born father who never had pets of his own, and a mother reared in rural Ireland in the 1950s, the kind of place where families might have cats and dogs, but certainly did not let them inside their homes, and most certainly didn’t let them sleep in their beds, or lic…