A Requiem For "Enjoy Your Cats"

Or, a tribute to my friend Perry

On December 4, 2025, I lost someone very close to me. A friend of 13 years, he was by my side as I settled into established adulthood through my 30s and into my 40s. Our lives together were filled with peace and affection, and I’m better for having known him.

I’m referring to my cat Perry (shown above on February 2, 2018.) And I’m referring to him as someone, a term usually reserved for a person, rather than something, because I’ve felt his loss in a way that is similar to losing a person. As he’s the first pet I’ve lost as an adult, I’ve frankly been shocked by the similarity.

It was while contemplating this recently that the 2021 take US Vice President JD Vance had on a subset of cat owners suddenly popped into my head. In a Fox News interview, Vance referred to “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” His was perhaps the most widely disseminated example of a genre of animus directed at anyone, particularly women, who divert from a “traditional” life course. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll distill the genre down to a three-word taunt: “Enjoy your cats.”

In this telling of things, cats are the last refuge of the damned. Damned because they perverted the course of nature by being unable to marry and procreate and are thus faced with a future devoid of love. The best that can be hoped for are scraps of affection offered up by “lesser” beings.

And really, the logic behind “enjoy your cats” makes sense if you are unaware or outright approve of the way that love is used as a tool of social control. That control starts with the dictate to “find” love in the same way you might find the best deal on a new car. But it’s when the “search” for love yields results that the real control begins.

Continue to play by society’s rules – marry, have kids, and never, ever rock the boat in any way – and a lifetime of love and security will be your reward. Step out of line and break those rules – by not being “man” or “woman” enough, by having the temerity to no longer call the slop you’ve been fed prime rib – then poof, love is gone. You have no one to blame but yourself. Enjoy your cats.

My dear Perry taught me a much more expansive and essential lesson about love. It started with the fact that it was never Perry’s “job” to love me. There were no vows taken, no romantic getaways to the Caribbean. He didn’t take care of me when I had Covid, never listened to my problems, never cleaned up around the house. He never gave me advice or helped pay the bills. And in true cat fashion, affection was always on his terms.

Yet my love grew incredibly strong. I think this happened for two reasons. First, daily acts of devotion have a way of compounding over years to create a deep, abiding love for the object of that devotion. Cleaning his litter, attending to his diet, and greeting him at the door on arriving home from work were some of those daily acts.

Second, interactions with the living world around us are nothing short of communion with the universe itself. My 13-year communion with the branch of the universe I called Perry gradually allowed me to receive a crystal-clear transmission of the eternal, unmovable, and ever-present love coded into life itself.

Of course, humans are also a part of the universe and that eternal love is transmitted through us, as well. The difference is that the signal has a much higher chance of getting distorted when transmitted from human to human, since that signal must travel through the interference of our agendas, our egos, our complex societies and relationships, and the plain old fact that we psychologically trigger each other constantly.

All this reveals the cardinal problem of the belief system of the “enjoy your cats” crowd. When a romantic partner and family are held up as the sole legitimate wellspring of love, you wind up living in the land of perpetual signal distortion. That distorted human-to-human signal tells us love is a scarce resource reserved for the worthy, and it must be contained behind an iron curtain of legal and financial commitments to truly “count.”

The distortion is also on full display any time take-what-you-can-get relationship advice makes an appearance. As in, stick with him, even if the rest of your life will be consumed by man-child management. Or stick with her, even though you get the sense that you’re nothing but a blank slate upon which she’s writing her hopes and dreams (and a prop for her Instagram to boot.)

Perry showed me that life is offering us so much more than the small-minded love and its attendant fear and hostility that “enjoy your cats” represents. I knew this in my head during his life; that knowledge has now been committed to my heart and soul after his death. For that gift he gave me, I dedicate to him this brief requiem to that ridiculous phrase:

“A lifetime of mediocre lovers will never match the wisdom of one dead cat.”

I love you, Perry. Until we meet again.