I always thought of myself as more of a cat person. Non-cat people may see cats as aloof and impersonal; I saw them as independent and self-possessed. That was the pet for me: cool, unattached, implacable.

It’s not that I didn’t like dogs. It’s just that they need so much. They always reminded me of bad boyfriends: demanding of your every ounce of attention, then visibly pouting when they don’t get it. No, thank you, I’ll stick with cats. A pet whose need for me was not radiating from its eyeballs every time we made eye contact.

I had also never really connected with a dog. We had a sweet little mutt named Teddy when I was growing up, who my parents adopted for me, I think, in hopes of quelling my demands for a horse (didn’t work). Once I realized I couldn’t ride Teddy like a pony, he was pretty much dead to me. Well, that’s harsh, but suffice to say, he was not the favored pet in the house. Poor dog languished in the side yard, tended to by my parents in turn and ignored by me.

Decades later, after my dad died, Mom and I drove to San Diego to visit my godmother, Sally. It was there, in the emptiness and grief that comes after you complete the checklist of grim practicalities after a death, that Sally’s beautiful retriever Maggie was an unexpected comfort. Good natured and exuberant, but also gentle and sweet, she and I became good friends for the days we spent there. It was the first time I’d experienced on a very small scale why people who love dogs, really, really love dogs. For all the soft sweetness cats had provided over the years, they did not have the empathy that can be perceived in dogs. While this may be fully the work of eager anthropomorphism, you can feel like a dog understands you, connects with you. But I was in no position to have a dog, so I didn’t think about it again. For almost ten years.

When I moved to Brooklyn, I had been pet-free for more than 15 years. I had gotten used to the lack of fur on everything, to not having to deal with anyone else’s regular biologic eliminations, to not being responsible for any other living creature’s well-being. But I started kicking around the idea of possibly getting a cat. In fact, the only thing holding me back was that I didn’t have a discreet place in my apartment to tuck a litterbox. I thought passingly of a dog, especially seeing how many of my Brooklyn neighbors kept dogs of all sizes. But then I remembered that canine needfulness, which reminded me too much of my most recent romantic cataclysm and firmly decided that a dog would be out of the question.

Then I met Ant. I was struck instantly by how well suited we were, how easy we were together, and realized that he and I may turn into something more serious than either of us intended. But there was a catch.

“I hate cats,” he said, taking the hard line.

“You haven’t met the right cat then,” I said, which is my standard response to all haters of cats.

“Maybe,” he said. “But until I do, I’m not a fan.”

“Fair enough,” I said and began a small inward conversation with myself about whether or not I liked him enough to give up on ever having a cat again.

But for all he doesn’t care for cats, Ant loves dogs. And as we got to know each other more and more, as our relationship became more and more serious, my minor disappointment about not having a cat was replaced by this idea of having a dog—with Ant, caring for it together. Suddenly dog ownership seemed less onerous. I held in my mind’s eye an image of him and some little mutt curled up on the bed, asleep, waiting for me to join them, the pup in the middle. As I fell more and more in love with him, this image came to feel more and more real. It began to feel inevitable.

We shacked up at the end of last summer and started circling around the question of adopting a dog. I got cold feet and always had a new excuse to put it off every couple months: we just moved, let’s get settled; oh, now winter will be here any second, that’d be a really annoying time to housebreak a dog; we have to get through the holidays before we do anything; let’s wait till spring. I know that Ant began to uncomplainingly despair that he’d ever have a dog again.

I’m not sure what finally pushed me over the edge, but the edge came definitively when I started following a half-dozen pet rescue organizations on Instagram, shooting off posts of impossible puppies and big old dogs to Ant—knowing we couldn’t have either, since our landlord stipulated small dogs only and we didn’t have the wherewithal to take in a puppy, regardless of their undeniable adorableness.

Ant was still skeptical, not sure it would actually happen, no matter how badly he wanted it to happen. But he was patient, waiting for me to make the move on the dog. He even offered to adopt a cat instead. By then, though, that image had snagged in my head: him and a little dog snoozing together, waiting for me. I knew it would happen. There would be no cat, not right now. A dog would come first.

After frustrating weeks of submitting adoption applications that were ignored, we finally got through the process with Pupstarz Rescue and things moved with alarming swiftness all of a sudden. They sent us a blurry picture of a little dog sitting in the backseat of a car with a look on his face that said, Ima fuck your shit up. They told us his name was Spruce and that he needed to be fostered. “You have one week to decide to keep him,” they said.

Fostering wasn’t what we had in mind and we spent a couple of days agonizing over the decision, alternately in the pro and con columns; one minute we’d be all for it and the next we’d start to worry about “Spruce” being a canine terrorist who barked incessantly, pissed on the furniture and antagonized every creature he met.

“Okay,” Ant said. “Let’s do it. But we cannot call him Spruce.”

“Agree,” I said. “That is the worst name a dog ever had.”

“Let’s call him Bruce for now,” Ant said.

“Perfect. We’ll change it to something else later if we adopt him,” I said.

“If,” Ant emphasized.

“Exactly: If,” I concurred.

We went to a weirdly deserted neighborhood in west Midtown at 8 in the morning on June 8 with a leash, a dog carrier and a towel, as instructed. We found a big white van from which rescue volunteers were dispensing dogs and cats, puppies and kittens. Yelps and tiny meows and barks and whines were the only sound on the empty street in the warm bright morning. We stood there patiently waiting for them to produce “Spruce” from the van, to step forward and meet our fate with what we figured would be the destructor of our peaceful and normally tidy home.

Then there he was: scrawny, black and white and brown, ears perky, eyes big and worried. As soon as I saw Ant gather him up in his arms, I knew we were keeping him, even if we pretended for the next couple of days that we were on the fence. I think neither of us wanted to get too attached to the notion of having him forever, worried that something would go wrong and he’d be taken from us. Maybe the landlord would change her mind. Maybe the rescue would demand him back for some reason. Maybe, god forbid, he was sickly and died prematurely. Ant and I are both people whose imaginations tend to trend to the worst-case scenarios. We battled against it in our respective ways as we fell in love with that little dog.

Bruce has been with us almost five weeks now and I am utterly mystified as to how we ever lived without him. My heart is so full of love and worry and concern and affection for him it drops me into tearful puddles on the regular. Every day I leave the house for work, I can’t wait to get back home just to watch his tail wag manically when I walk in the door. How I ever spent my mornings without his snuffling grinning face as my alarm clock, I’ll never know.

But the best part has been watching Ant also fall in love with him. I see all of my own feelings clearly reflected in him, see his tenderness and love for Bruce, and it becomes overwhelming. It guts me in the most delightful way, undercutting all my stubborn cynicism, all my cultivated coolness, all the detachment that I had, ironically, become so attached to. Bruce turns us both to mush. Together we are a mush family of three.

And every night when I go to bed, I see my dog and my partner, snuggled together, half asleep and waiting for me to join them.