Why I've been thinking about getting a dog (and what's stopping me)

Three months ago I started stopping every time I passed a dog on the street. Not pausing to admire, exactly — stopping. Fully. Mid-stride, mid-thought, whatever I was in the middle of. A small terrier outside a greengrocer on a Wednesday morning. A grey standard poodle waiting patiently outside the pharmacy, elegant and bored. A retriever puppy on a lead being walked by a person who looked entirely unprepared for the amount of retriever puppy they had taken on.

I stop and I look at them and I feel a warmth in my chest that is, quite honestly, disproportionate to the situation. The dogs don't seem to mind. Some of them wag at me. Some of them look through me in that serene, slightly imperial way dogs sometimes do. All of them make me feel something that I've started to suspect is a message from myself that I should probably take seriously.

I am clearly trying to tell myself something.

The dog that started it

There was one particular morning in April — cold still, the kind of April that hasn't committed to being spring yet — when I was walking back from the supermarket with a bag on each arm and I passed a small café I like. Outside the café, tied to one of those little post-and-hoop things, was a brown spaniel. Not a puppy — a proper adult dog, with a long wavy coat and a beard situation going on and these absolutely catastrophic, liquidly soft eyes.

I stopped. Put my bags down. Crouched down. The spaniel, in a moment of either excellent timing or profound intuition, walked over and sat directly on my foot. Not next to my foot. On it. And then, in the next few minutes while I stroked its ear and it looked up at me with an expression of complete benevolent trust, it fell asleep.

I want to be honest: I briefly considered just staying there forever. I considered it quite seriously. My flat key was in my pocket. There was nothing technically preventing me from simply sitting down on the pavement next to this café and spending the morning like that. Of course I didn't. But the impulse was real and it told me something.

I walked home carrying my bags and thinking about it and that afternoon I looked up whether my flat allows pets. (It doesn't say no, which is different from yes, but it's at least not an outright no.) And then I went down a small rabbit hole of adorable dogs content that I emerged from forty-five minutes later feeling wistful and conflicted and entirely certain that I want a dog, someday, somehow.

The honest case for having one

I live alone, which I genuinely love most of the time and find profoundly complicated about ten percent of the time. The particular kind of alone that's difficult isn't loneliness, exactly — it's more the absence of something warm to come home to. A presence that doesn't require management or reciprocation or the maintenance that most relationships involve. Something that's just — glad to see you. Without condition or context or history. The same gladness on a good day as on a terrible one.

I've also been thinking about routine. I am, constitutionally, not great at external structure. I work from home, I set my own hours, I film when I feel like filming and sometimes the creative freedom is wonderful and sometimes it means I've made three cups of tea and it's suddenly two in the afternoon and I've achieved very little. A dog would impose a shape on the day. Morning walk. Evening walk. Feeding times that don't slide. Scheduled departures that require actual shoes and actual outdoors, regardless of whether I feel like it. I've read enough to know that for people with anxiety or a tendency toward low-grade inertia, the forced structure of dog ownership is often medicinal. Not a cure, obviously. Just: a shape to the day that you didn't have to generate yourself.

Want of a thing tells you something about what you're missing. It's worth listening to.

The honest case against

This is where I try to be fair to the situation rather than just rhapsodising about soft ears and wagging tails.

I travel. Not constantly, not with a rucksack and a one-way ticket, but enough — the occasional trip to see family, the odd week away, the possibility of longer stretches as whatever this is builds into something that might require me to be somewhere else. A dog doesn't travel with you to the airport. A dog needs someone, reliably, who is there. I'd need to build that network first, and right now, in my small flat in a city where my roots are still reasonably shallow, I'd be scrambling.

There's also the practical honesty of vet bills. Of the fact that an elderly dog with health complications can cost more per year than the rent. Of the decade-plus commitment that is different in character from any other commitment I'm currently making. A dog is not a plant or a journal habit or a new morning routine — it's a living creature whose entire existence will be shaped by the specific quality and consistency of my care, and I take that seriously enough to not pretend the stakes aren't real.

And the flat. The honestly-quite-small flat. A medium or large dog in my square footage would be, I think, unkind to the dog. A small one might be fine. But I'd want to know before I committed, not realise afterwards.

What I've been doing instead

I've been dog-sitting.

A friend of mine has a golden retriever — two years old, enormous, gentle, with a head like a small ottoman — and she's needed someone to take him for two or three mornings in a row a few times this summer while she's been visiting her parents. I volunteered, both because I love her and because I wanted to understand what the day-to-day reality was before I convinced myself it was all spaniel-on-foot moments and nothing else.

The morning I walked him at dawn — it was a Wednesday, pale light, damp grass, the kind of early morning where the park is almost empty except for other dog walkers who acknowledge each other with nods like members of a quiet club — I had one of those moments of simple, uncomplicated pleasure that I want to write down before I forget the texture of it. He stopped at every single interesting smell with complete commitment. Not in a hurry. Not performing the walk. He was fully present in each smell as if it were its own world to be explored, and then he moved on to the next one, and I walked alongside him at his pace and stopped when he stopped and looked at the same patch of ground he was looking at with zero idea of what he was detecting and felt strangely at peace.

Where I've landed for now

Not yet. That's where I've landed. Not yet, but genuinely, seriously, I mean it, eventually.

I want to have more stability first — the kind of stability that isn't just financial (though that too) but structural. A routine that already has a shape. Roots in a place deep enough that I'd have people around me who could help during the travel problem. A flat situation that's more clearly right for a dog than mine currently is. I want to come to it ready, not arrive at it impulsively and spend the first year feeling guilty about every trip I have to figure out.

But here's what this whole few months of stopping on pavements and staring at dogs and dog-sitting at dawn has taught me: the wanting of the thing is telling me something real about what I'm missing. Not the dog specifically — or not only the dog — but the warmth of it. The companionship that doesn't require performance. The forced structure that would pull me out the door every morning regardless of mood or motivation. The thing to come home to.

Those are real needs. Knowing that is useful even before I'm ready to meet them via actual spaniel.

I've been circling this subject in my journal for a few months now. Not just the dog question — though that is genuinely, specifically what I mean when I say I've been thinking about it — but the broader habit of admitting to myself that I want things. Simple things. Things that aren't particularly impressive or ambitious or difficult to articulate.

I want a dog. I want something warm and living in my flat. I want the enforced morning walks and the reason to leave the house and the uncomplicated joy of something that is just — glad. I want to come home to something other than silence, even comfortable silence. These are not complicated desires. They don't require a great deal of self-analysis to arrive at. And yet I spent three months walking past dogs on the street and feeling that warmth in my chest without fully letting myself name what it was pointing toward.

There's something about this particular era of my life — the new-creator, still-figuring-it-out, living-alone-in-a-city summer — that makes me want to be more honest about the small wants. Not just the ambitions, the things I'm building toward that sound good when I articulate them. But the domestic, ordinary, slightly embarrassing stuff. The wanting of a dog. The wanting of a second plant on the windowsill. The wanting of someone to cook dinner for occasionally.

None of these are urgent. None of them are available to me right now in quite the form I want them. But admitting them — to myself, in a journal, and apparently now in this post — feels like the correct move. Like something that keeps you honest about the kind of life you're actually trying to build, as opposed to the kind that looks good on a mood board.

For now: the dog-sitting. The stop-and-hello on the pavement. The continued, entirely reasonable hope that at some point in the not-too-distant future I will have figured out the flat situation and the travel situation and I will walk into a rescue centre and meet the specific creature who was apparently waiting for exactly me, and take them home, and let them sleep on my foot.