How to Convince Your Reluctant Partner to Get Cats

A battle long in the making.

Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

I love cats. I am an unashamed cat lady. However, my partner has not always been on board, and owning cats is a joint project by necessity.

If you’re like me, you’ve always been totally convinced that only a cat (or better yet, several cats) would make your life complete. However, when I was persuading my other half to consider getting a cat, he was not 100% on board. He’d always been more of a dog person.

Notice I used the past tense there.

I was a determined future cat mom, though, and I knew what I had to do:

1. Find out what specifically he objected to about cats
2. Figure out why his objections didn’t apply to cats
3. Pick out the cats
4. Make him fall in love with our future cats

Step 1: the objections.

Photo by Evan Wise on Unsplash

There were a heck of a lot of objections.

“Cats are too small to cuddle. Cats aren’t loyal like dogs. Cats aren’t as affectionate as dogs. Cats don’t like to go for walks.” — My partner, two years ago.

Basically, it sounded like what he wanted was a dog and not a cat. Not rocket science, so far. It seemed like trying to persuade him otherwise might be a waste of time.

So I knew I had two ways to go about this. I could convince him that cats had their own set of unique charms (for example, how many times has a dog been able to sit in your lap purring? Not many).

Or…

I could find a cat that was like a dog. I put on my research hat and started to dig.

Step 2: the exceptions.

For several reasons, the time wasn’t right for us to adopt from a shelter (mostly because shelters insisted on indoor/outdoor access, and I didn’t feel comfortable potentially letting cats out close to a busy road). So…