How the Dog Park Helped Me Fetch New Friends

There’s a dog named Jackson that 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 bow tie, 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 Evanston 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 Evanston, 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 [in a conspiratorial whisper] and 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 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 farmers 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 toward 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, flinging his scarf behind him and leading his dogs toward his estate. As we watched him leave, Debbie leaned toward 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.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.