Peaceful Wolverine I have learned to reserve myself when it comes to other people — to hold a poker face, to wait until I’ve experienced a bit of them before I start to share anything. I know I am not alone in this. We social animals need the company of others of our kind and, without contradiction, those interactions are also the source of almost all of our distresses, insecurities, and other forms of anxiety.
Young children are uninhibited in their interactions. No filters, no moments of reflection before the blurted interruption, no creeping dread that they are being misinterpreted and judged. What changes as we age? Is it in the brain structure, the neurochemistry, the hormonal anatomy?
I don’t believe so. I think those changes increase our awareness, hand-in-hand with experience, but the idea that social awkwardness is a result of physical immaturity doesn’t hold water. There are just too many counter-examples. Let’s talk for a moment about that physical development and the many attempts to nail it down, make it clear, draw lines between infant, child, adolescent, young adult, and the fully grown.
We humans are prone to black-and-white forms of reasoning. It seems a provably natural impulse (in the sense that no one needs to be taught to do so) to divide the world around us starkly. These simple definitions are easier to hold than the mixed, messy reality.
That’s why psychologists and neuroscientists have, literally from the moment those professions were invented, tried so hard to come up with universal definitional frameworks. Those simple proposed frameworks have failed, and that includes the idea that we reach some stage of completeness. Perhaps at 18, perhaps at 20, oh look, it could be 25… and it isn’t. The lines we draw are bureaucratically necessary and unsupportable under examination.
You cannot assume the maturity of a 60-year-old. You may easily be surprised by the dignity and caution of a 10-year-old. I have been impressed and intimidated by people much younger than myself, and I’ve been disgusted and contemptuous of many who are much older.
Do I digress? Possibly. Certainly I ramble. Here’s my point in a nutshell: There is no inner child, just as there is no inner adult. There is only you, and what you’ve learned about how unsafe the world is.
Adulthood is a pretence. It’s a culturally agreed pantomime we must learn to use to protect ourselves. Politeness is a tool, a baseline for every situation, even though every situation is different. Start generic, and if things go smoothly you can loosen up a little — maybe try a joke or an anecdote, see how that’s received, et cetera.
We haven’t “lost” our delight, our emotionality, our enthusiasm, our distress, our childishness. It is all still there. It does not require expert intervention or rediscovery to emerge. It requires only safety.
What, uh, what does this have to do with dogs?
Firstly, let’s acknowledge that not everyone feels safe with dogs. Yes, it is fine if you choose your own alternative. Some kind of baby… thing.
But come on. PUPPIES, amiright?
Let’s picture a bank manager. The example is right there, packaged and perfect: George Banks, Mary Poppins (1964). A strict, disciplined, no-nonsense father whose entire personality is the insecure emulation of his employers’ expressed values — hypocritical ones, as the kite-flying scene at the end shows.
Hand that man a puppy and he really only has two choices: Continue faking being a sociopath, which he’ll probably do if he’s at work, or drop the facade and make silly noises and laugh and cuddle the little creature, which he’ll do if no one is watching.
People like to say that in these situations, the puppy “reached” an inner child. Again, that can’t literally be true. Not because the thing it points at isn’t real, but because the picture is wrong. The inner child model says there is a small, true self in there somewhere, walled off, and the adult is a separate entity standing guard over it, and with the right therapy or the right golden retriever you can go in and visit. That gives you two people. There is only one. The bank manager was not visited by his younger self. He is his younger self, and has been the whole time, and he has a suit.
Nobody grows up in the way we talk about growing up. What we do is learn the act. Reserved, measured, unimpressed. Adult. Mature. The act is good, and we get so fluent in it that we mistake fluency for transformation. But fluency in a performance is not a change of species. Ask any actor who has done the same play for a year.
The puppy works because it cannot do anything with what it sees. It will not repeat the noise you made to anyone. It cannot think less of you. It is not competing with you for the job, the room, or the last word. It will not remember your awkwardness at the next meeting. The guard did not drop because you forgot you had one. It dropped because there was nothing to guard against. The reserve was never a wall. It was insurance, and insurance is the thing you stop paying for when the risk goes away.
I am not advising anyone to drop the guard. Please do not drop the guard. Other humans are not puppies; most of them can do something with what they see. Keep your private life private, keep your opinions on your coworker’s marriage to yourself, and at no point should you greet a new acquaintance by licking their face and then enthusiastically investigating their booty. For one thing, your sense of smell isn’t strong enough to appreciate the last meal someone had on exit. Dogs can do that. Dogs also eat shit off the sidewalk. We are taking one lesson from the dog, not the full curriculum.
The lesson is about affect. Just affect. Expression, body language, and the first three seconds of an interaction.
When a happy, well-cared-for dog sees you come through the door, it is just glad, just delighted to see you. It shows you it is glad, and it does this before it has established whether you brought anything. It costs the dog nothing, which is why the dog can afford to do it every single time, and it is why you walk in already liking the dog. The dog has not disclosed anything. It has not made itself vulnerable in any way that matters. It has simply declined to pretend that your arrival is a matter of indifference.
Most adults pretend exactly that. We’ve been taught that enthusiasm is a weakness, that being visibly pleased to see someone hands them leverage, that the dignified thing is to be found already occupied and to look up slowly.
There is a version of that which is true: Needy eagerness is dependent, reads as asking for something, and people back away from it. But gladness that wants nothing is a different animal. You can be delighted that someone showed up and still keep every secret you have. One is a signal. The other is a surrender. The dog is only sending the signal.
People sometimes say that dogs are the way they are because we bred them that way, as though that settles something. It settles more than they think, just not in the direction they mean, because the breeding didn’t have strict, internationally agreed upon controls and standards. They’ve lived in association with us for ten or fifteen thousand years, possibly even longer, and for most of that time nobody was running an experiment. People kept the dogs they wanted around and didn’t keep the ones they didn’t, and they did it one household at a time, for reasons they mostly couldn’t have articulated. Plenty of that was work: Herding, guarding, pulling, ratting. But the dogs that made it from the yard to the hearth to the foot of the bed to, in many houses including mine, the pillow — that was a preference, expressed over hundreds of generations. The friendly dog is what you get when a very large number of humans vote with their affection and nobody counts the ballots.
It is the least deliberate opinion poll in history and it has at least one solid finding: It feels good when someone is happy to see you. We like it from a dog and we like it from each other, and we are often too dignified to say so, which is why we’ve outsourced it to a species that doesn’t concern itself with dignity.
I’ll admit the reason this needs saying at all, at least for me. While it’s not a label I place on myself, I have “been told” that I am socially awkward in a way the cultural zeitgeist would call autistic. A bit like the recent television Sherlock played by Benderdash Cumberditch, minus the part where he inexplicably calls it sociopathy.
I was, for my entire childhood, baffled by the guffaws of laughter from my mother and other women when they saw each other in the supermarket or on the sidewalk. All it took was a glimpse and they were howling as if they’d just heard their favourite joke. “Oh my goodness!” they’d yell, loud enough to startle child me, “I didn’t think I’d SEE YOU HERE!”
… To be honest, I’m still not sure why the hell that’s so hilarious. The point is the enthusiasm! They were thrilled to see each other, and that means a lot.
People like me, and there are plenty, do not pick up these skills by osmosis. I had to be told, and then I read book after book, and then I had to practise it, deliberately, the way other people practise a golf swing, and it worked, which is the thing I actually hope readers take from this. It is a skill. It is a small one. Some of you have had it since birth and have never thought about it. Some of you, like me, are only now hearing it said plainly.
So here it is, said plainly. Seek people out. When you find them, be glad and let it show. Help them feel as safe as we do with our pets. You do not have to tell them anything, exchange numbers, commit to hanging out, or betroth your children.
You do not have to lick anyone or make happy sneezes over and over while walking in a tight circle.
You only have to stop pretending that their walking into the room is nothing to you. Because it isn’t, is it? And the dog has known that about you for a very long time.