‘We Met at the Dog Park’: How 3 Couples Found Love Through Their Pups

It’s a romantic fantasy that sounds almost too heartwarming to be true: Can you really meet the love of your life at the dog park? 

For single pet parents, it’s a tantalizing prospect. If you’re a regular at your local patch of green, you probably run into a repeating cast of familiar faces. Who’s to say one of them couldn’t be your soulmate? You’ve already determined that everyone there is a dog person, which is a good place to start. And if your dogs already get along by the time you hit it off? Even better. 

Do a quick search online, and you’ll find threads and comments and posts galore about how lucky singles met their significant others at the dog park. Still, in a world full of situationships and dating apps and ghosting, it can be hard to believe these kinds of meet-cutes actually happen outside of rom-coms.

Nevertheless, I am a hopeless romantic, and so I called up a few online posters who said they’d met their spouses online to find out what ignited the spark.

Cristina and Justin

The city: Los Angeles, California
The year: 2013

Despite having gone to the same high school, Christina Vericella, a 37-year-old wellness coach and yoga and meditation instructor, and Justin Greenberg, a 38-year-old precious metals broker, really met at the dog park in their twenties — in a moment that sounds like something straight out of a storybook.

“I saw him coming over the hill, and he immediately saw me, and he just started walking over,” Vericella recalls. She still remembers what he was wearing, a rust-red shirt that brought out the honey tones in his hazel eyes. “It was just such a romantic moment,” she says now. “It was kismet … He looked at me and said, ‘Did you go to Beverly Hills High School?’”

As the two began catching up, Vericella’s mother quietly backed away to give them space. But when Greenberg asked for Vericella’s phone number, she hesitated. She’d just returned from living in Italy and wasn’t sure she was ready to start a new relationship. 

“Let’s just have a nice date and talk,” Greenberg had said. And then, they wound up texting all night. 

Greenberg showed up with flowers for their first date, and when they went out for dinner, they closed down the restaurant. He suggested they grab dessert at The Ivy, where, once again, they stayed until closing. But this time, they had company from one other guest — a certain notorious director.

“Quentin Tarantino was there with some other producers,” Vericella recalls. “We didn’t recognize him at first, but we heard him talking about The Hateful Eight.” Only in LA.

All of that might sound wildly romantic, but the true green-flag moment came when Greenberg dropped Vericella off at her parents’ house after the date and came inside to say hello to her dog, a Shetland Sheepdog named Oliver. “He did not love a lot of people, but he loved Justin,” Vericella says. “I remember him putting his paw in his lap and moving very close to him. It was like a sign for both of us: Oliver gave us the OK.’” The couple began officially dating a week later and have been together ever since. 

While Vericella lived with Oliver and her family dog, another Sheltie named Charlie, Justin had two pups of his own — an Aussie named Penny, who was around one year old when they met, and a Poodle mix named Lambchop, who was 10. Vericella especially cherishes memories of time spent outside with all four dogs, especially when they spent their days at the beach in Malibu.

“We would picnic and hang out and have lunch, and, I’m not even kidding, stay maybe three, four or five hours sometimes and just enjoy walking up and down the beach,” she recalls. Penny loved to play in the ocean; the others were too scared to go near the water.

All four dogs have since passed, and so far, Vericella and Greenberg have not been able to think about bringing home any new family members. They’ve begun to feel more open to it this year, and whenever they make that choice, they want to be even more careful to treasure every moment together.

“No matter how much you do that,” Vericella says, “it’s still gut-wrenching.” Still, she will always be grateful to those four special dogs for changing her and Greenberg’s lives forever. “If it weren'’ for them, if they didn’t get us to go outside, we would not be together today.”

Jamie and Tom

The city: Chicago, Illinois
The year: 2012

It started out as a joke. 

When Jamie Quinn, 40, and her husband, Tom, 46, first met, they were both frequent visitors at the same dog park. “Our dogs became friends first, and then we ended up sparking a conversation,” Jamie recalls. Her dog, Benny, was a one-year-old Labrador, and Tom’s was a one-year-old mixed breed. After watching the pups play together several times, Tom had cheekily suggested chauffeuring them to the dog bar for a one-on-one hang.

“So, we exchanged phone numbers,” Jamie says. “... And then, once we went to meet, he was like, ‘Don’t bring the dogs.’”

Jamie works in sales, while Tom is a multimedia manager. It turned out, they lived just two blocks away from each other. Over time, the two came to discover that their dynamic mimicked their dogs, who were like “yin and yang” — perfect complements.

“Benny was really wild, kind of out of control, and [Dublin] was really shy,” Jamie says. Just how wild was Benny? As Jamie recalls, “He would be on the countertop when we got home from the bar or something, and we’re just like, ‘This dog is insane.’” 

Benny brought Dublin out of his shell, and Dublin helped bring Benny down to earth. “It was really kind of sweet how they became really close with one another,” Jamie says. And though she wouldn’t necessarily call her husband timid, he is the more subdued one in the relationship. 

“My mom would always say to me, ‘Anyone who can handle you and that dog is a keeper,’” Jamie says.

As time went on, the newly formed pack of four adopted a cherished weekend ritual: Every morning on the weekends, Jamie and Tom would grab their coffees and bring the dogs to the Chicago lakefront. Benny and Dublin loved to play in nature and swim in the water, and in those moments, Jamie appreciated being able to share it all with someone who loves animals as much as she does.

Although Benny and Dublin have both passed away, Jamie still cherishes the memories they shared — including the important role they played in her and Tom’s marriage. As she puts it, “The dogs brought us together.”

Kacie and Adam

The city: Durango, Colorado
The year: 2013

You know it’s meant to be when your dogs come from the same shelter. 

It was one thing when Kacie and Adam Larson started bumping into one another at the one dog park in town with their dogs, Eddie and Ellie. But then, they started spotting one another in other places, like on hikes. It turned out, both of their dogs were just under a year old, and both had come from La Plata County Humane Society.

“Eddie and Ellie were instantly friends and kind of gravitated towards each other and loved playing with each other,” Kacie recalls. “So naturally, Adam and I just started talking.”

They spotted one another around town on numerous occasions, but Kacie says that one fateful moment from a hike still stands out: “I can totally remember, he was coming down, and I was just starting going up, and we just crossed paths. Instantly, Eddie and Ellie greeted each other and started playing. I remember at that moment, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh. What is going on here?’” 

Around the third or fourth time they ran into one another, Adam asked Kacie for her number. They wound up getting dinner, and as Kacie puts it, “We’ve been inseparable since that first date.”

Kacie, 34, owns a branding and graphic design studio called Westerly Design Co., and Adam, 43, works as a geotechnical engineer. They met when Kacie was wrapping up her junior year of college, and when they moved in together, they and their two dogs shared a studio apartment. That was no small feat, considering Eddie is a Border Collie mix and Ellie is a Pointer mix, but despite the close quarters, Kacie recalls, “Everything went really smoothly.” It helped that Eddie and Ellie had already bonded just as much as their parents.

“They’re a lot older now, but I still have memories of them like playing together, running around the studio apartment, and napping together in their crate,” Kacie says “They really were just best friends.”

Ellie is now 13 years old and Eddie turns 13 this month. And now that their parents have upgraded to a bigger space, they’ve also welcomed a few more roommates — a “wiry little scrappy Terrier” named Willow and a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Pip. Looking back, Kacie believes that Eddie and Ellie helped shape the early days of her and Adam’s relationship. 

“Had we not had them, we might not have done a lot of the things that we did together,” she says, citing outdoorsy activities like car camping and weekend travels. “Even today, they inspire us to get out and take a breather. … to get outside and unplug from my phone and be in the moment. They’re always a reminder of what's important.”