How getting a dog made me less lonely but more reclusive.

After several years of being single and working from home I realized I was lonely. I didn’t have a spouse, both of my parents had passed away and I have no children. I was craving a family of my own. So I decided to get a puppy. I am a huge animal lover and knew that having a dog takes a lot of time and commitment. I didn’t want to be one of those people who left their dog alone all day while they went to work, which has been proven to be difficult for dogs and against their pack animal nature. Being alone is one thing a dog never does in the wild and the hardest thing to train a dog to be able to handle well.  Luckily being self employed and working from home I was able to stay home with my puppy, Sadie, while I raised her into a healthy adult dog.
 
What I didn’t expect was that having a dog would make me much more of a social recluse than I had already become. I used to work in coffee shops on my laptop, just to be around other humans. Ordering a coffee from the barista was an important part of my socialization. Now if I leave the house Sadie gives me one of those starving and abandoned dog looks, so I stopped going to cafes to work. And then I stopped going to the theatre, because how could I enjoy a movie while Sadie was home alone, sad and lonely? I stopped going out to eat for the same reason. And after two years it dawned on me that while Sadie did in fact give me a sense of family that I had been missing, I was  now spending too much time without human conversation and companionship in any capacity and ultimately this was not healthy for me.
 
I had to get over leaving Sadie alone so I could rejoin human society, but how? Doggie daycare was too expensive for me. My solution? I got Sadie a puppy. It was love at first site. Daisy and Sadie play together all the time, they sleep together, wrestle. I can now leave them at home on a Friday night without feeling guilty and I have been able to rejoin the world of humans once again.