A Love Like No Other

This was the year that my partner Tim and I went from being a couple to being a family, though perhaps not in the way you’d expect. After three years of packing up a bag and driving to another part of the city to spend time together, I finally moved into his apartment, where what was once his space slowly became our space.

When I moved, however, I didn’t come alone but rather as a package deal: I brought with me my two cats, Benny and Jet, who, at the time, were clueless about what, exactly, was going on. For them, it was not just a new apartment but an entirely new world—one of foreign scents and as-yet-undrawn boundaries. In a way, it was a new world for Tim as well, one dictated by the complex, often inscrutable attitudes of felines.

Before the move, I found myself wondering how it would all go—less for my sake than for Tim’s. I hoped he would come to like the cats, that he’d adjust, and that maybe, over time, the three of them would settle into something resembling coexistence. What I didn’t expect was that he would become, in his own way, a genuine cat person.

From the start, Tim was enthusiastic about the prospect of living with pets, though by his own admission he was unsure how the cats were going to react to him or how he’d orient himself around them. Anyone who’s ever spent time around a cat knows that there is no shortcut to winning them over. In fact, one does not win over the love of a cat so much as earns it: it is a slow, deliberate effort, and also one that you cannot want too desperately, for cats can sense that as well. Dogs, at least broadly speaking, might be more straightforward in this way: a warm attitude and a healthy dose of snacks will likely get you in their good graces within a few days. Cats demand forbearance in the courting stage of the relationship.

And yet, slowly, something shifted. What began as a kind of mutual observation—Tim learning their rhythms, the cats assessing his presence—turned first into familiarity, then into trust. Tim met them at their level, never forcing an interaction but encouraging their curiosity and demonstrating immense patience. A passing pet as they crossed each other in the hallway made much more progress than a direct approach ever would have. I imagine something in his calm presence must’ve drawn them to him, too. After all, his stillness has been a source of comfort for me over the years. 

Gradually, the trust between man and animal morphed into mutual affection, expressed in the subtle, particular ways that cats allow. One of them might join us on the couch while watching TV, maybe even walking over my lap to nestle in between us. They’ve since also developed a penchant for hovering in the kitchen whenever Tim (who is the resident chef) is throwing something together, knowing they’ll likely be the first to get a sample.

I’m not sure if their quickly formed friendship is more a testament to my cats’ flexibility or my partners’ good instincts. Perhaps it’s a bit of the two. I must credit Tim for being so wonderfully observant, as getting each of the cats to warm to him certainly required distinct approaches. Between the two, their personalities could not be more different from one another. Jet, whom I’ve had since college, is the clear alpha. He has long black fur, golden eyes, and a face shaped like a wizened dragon. He’s about the size of a medium dog to boot. He suffers no fools, and if he doesn’t care for you, you will most certainly know. More than one of my previous roommates learned this the hard way, which is to say in the form of surprise ankle bites while walking from one room to the next.

Still, he is fiercely loyal to those he loves, and I consider myself grateful to be at the top of that list. I like to joke that he’s my bodyguard, trailing behind me from office to kitchen, napping only when I’ve come to a standstill and he’s sure that I’m safe. He’ll even curl up on the bath mat when I’m soaking in the tub, rising only when he hears the water drain, smart enough to know that his security shift has been a success at that point. While he doesn’t like to be pet too much and has never been a lap cat, his love language is one of mutual respect and proximity. He wants to exist beside you and know that you are both at peace.

Benny, on the other hand, is a basket case. He is the anxiety-ridden yin to Jet’s overconfident yang. I adopted Benny from a local shelter during the pandemic, thinking it might be nice for Jet to have a companion, and what he got instead was a skittish runt of a younger brother. At the time, I had done tons of research on cat behavior, and I anticipated it would take a few weeks for Benny to fully assimilate into the home with Jet. This was a gross miscalculation. It took much longer than that for him to even come out from behind the toilet in the spare bathroom where I first introduced him to the new space, and it took the better part of a year before he felt comfortable enough to venture throughout the full expanse of my apartment—and for Jet not to take random swipes at him when he did.

Perhaps as a mix of nature and nurture, it is nearly impossible to get Benny to come out of his shell. Among the (very long) list of things he does not like are: 1) anything that is significantly taller than him and 2) anything that makes an audible sound, so you can imagine that not spooking him comes as a real challenge. But, I’m happy to report, Tim has risen to the challenge in the most incredible way.

It’s worth noting that this didn’t come from experience. Tim didn’t grow up with pets in the same way that I did. His childhood experience with them might best be described as unconventional. Once, he and his brother had a bearded dragon named Tiki—an enormous thing, to hear them tell it. Like all reptiles, Tiki needed a source of heat to keep his body warm, for which the hills of Los Angeles made a fitting home. Where things went awry, however, is when their father let him outside in the yard and then one day proceeded to forget about him. Tiki was never seen again, allegedly crawling away from the house and into the unknown.

There was also a brief stint when Tim’s family adopted a dog—or, more accurately, a time when their father brought one home while their mother was out of town, after she had expressly forbidden them from doing so. The canine in question was Boo, a mostly white pitbull who was sharp and fiercely protective. The boys instantly fell in love with her and she with them. When their mother returned home, however, it was made clear that Boo was not welcome to stay. Part of this decision was cultural: their mother is from Taiwan, where pets are rarely kept in the household and certainly not treated with the same closeness as literal family members in the way that Americans tend to.

Ultimately, Boo was sent away to live with a family who owns a farm. This, at least, was not the euphemistic explanation that children are often sold when their beloved animal passes away. Boo really did go to be on a farm, where her new owners would occasionally share updates about how she was doing. Such news, though, could do little to soften the heartbreak the boys felt at losing their puppy. It grew to be a source of resentment within the family, blame and finger-pointing hurled every which way. Had one parent listened to the other, they never would’ve been in this position to begin with. Had the other relented and accepted how happy the children were, then maybe the five of them could’ve coexisted peacefully, but now it was too late to ever really know.

Currently, the four of us are a few months into living under one roof, and by all accounts, everyone is existing harmoniously together—except for the moments when Benny takes a swipe at Jet and then Jet pummels him with three times the force, but they’re siblings now, and I’m not sure it can be helped. Plus, if anyone has to be the bad cop and break up the fight, it’s become Tim’s job to do so, luckily for me.

Seeing the way that Tim has embraced each of their idiosyncrasies and met them at their respective levels (both literally and figuratively) has been the most unexpected joy of living together. He is a therapist, so probably it comes as little surprise that he has a very calm and patient presence, but even still, learning the language of a cat can be a tedious and thankless journey—you can do everything right and still not get the behavioral outcome you’re hoping for. And yet Tim has superseded all expectations—both his and mine, and maybe even the cats’ as well. He’s been fully invested in gaining their trust, in proving that he’s a safe space, and it has melted my heart even more than I thought was possible.

In a way, seeing the gentleness with which he cares for them feels like an extension of the way he cares for me. It’s as if a new dimension of his tenderness has been revealed to me, one that I may not have known was there if not for the cats. Merging our lives under one roof has opened my eyes to how love is so often an unspoken force. That is, love can look like chatting about our respective days over dinner, but it can also look like reading on separate ends of the couch, existing in comfortable silence together—with a cat or two on the blanket between us, of course.

“Sometimes I think I’m happiest when I watch Tim and Jet taste-testing a new chicken recipe in the kitchen together, or when he and Benny are playing with their favorite feather toy, racing around the bedroom, mussing up the sheets.”

It is an honor to be loved by anyone, be it human or animal, because love is an intentional investment of energy and attention. That I should be at the receiving end of that effort from another being is the most special thing I can imagine, and I do not take it for granted. I cherish my little family and all its implicit understandings. Sometimes I think I’m happiest when I’m watching Tim and Jet taste-test a new chicken recipe in the kitchen together or when he and Benny are playing with their favorite feather toy, racing around the bedroom, mussing up the sheets. That those I love can love each other feels like a priceless gift of which I will forever be trying to deserve. And now, on the evenings when the cats seek Tim out for snuggles instead of me, I could only ever be happy about it, never offended.