As I get older and most of my friends now live in their own apartments, an interesting – and occasionally troubling – trend has begun to emerge. Their clothes are covered in fur, they have scratches crawling up their arms and their Facebook pages are suddenly overwhelmed with pictures of fuzzy cuteness: seemingly overnight, they’ve morphed into full-fledged cat ladies.

I grew up around tons of animals (including a goat – don’t ask), and owned five cats and four dogs at separate times before I got to college. So when someone asks me the life or death question of choosing between the two, I usually waver between the pros and cons for each before deciding my adorably dumb golden retrievers (whose love I never have to work for) are just slightly preferably to my standoffish, princessy cats.

One point I will always argue against cats is that they usually want you to leave them the hell alone until they feel like coming to you – you need to work for their love. As long as you feed them, or probably even if you didn’t, dogs will love you till the cows come home.

But having a dog is not only much more expensive than a cat, it’s incredibly time-consuming – particularly if it’s a puppy, which needs constant attention and training. In a tiny apartment, or on a college student’s budget, owning a cat seems much more plausible, especially because they’re so self-sufficient. And so, hordes of my female friends have decided a preferable alternative to their absence of a boyfriend is heading to the MSPCA and bringing home a furry, meowing friend. (Although isn’t the first step to full-blown catlady-town getting a cat in the absence of sex? Soon enough you’ll own 12 and spend all day watching Intervention. Just a warning…)

Anyway, a few days ago I was at a friend’s house and uploaded a cute picture I took of her kitten, Reggie, sleeping in my shoe. Then a few minutes later, I noticed she had tagged Reggie on Facebook. Yes, you read that right: She created a Facebook for her own cat.

The same thing happened a couple of years ago, when I lived in an apartment where there were two brother and sister cats, Mercedes and Benz. (They came with those names; my roommates were not that sadistic.) One day, all of us suddenly got friend requests from “Benz Cat,” whose interests included sleeping all day and hanging out with Mercedes. For the rest of the semester, it was a mystery to everyone how Benz grew opposable thumbs just long enough to create a Facebook page (or who was crazy enough to do it without fessing up).

“I would love to be a cat,” one of my friends recently said. “All they do is eat, sleep and purr.” Maybe that’s part of the obsession with cats – besides the fact that they’re pretty cute (and often hilarious), they can also be enviably chill. Who else just sleeps and snacks all day (besides stoners)? I mean, what a good life.

I began to understand the transition into a cat lady my middler year, when my roommates in the apartment I was subletting in decided to get a five-week-old kitten, Cosmo. While my roommates spent all day at work, my classes ended around 1, so I spent all day coddling the kitten and taking embarrassing pictures and videos of his every move. I’m pretty sure if you turned my Photobooth pictures from that semester into a flipbook you could watch him grow like a cartoon.

Yet in reality, Cosmo was awful; he ended up turning into a giant, skin-scratching, lamp-destroying, ankle-biting monster. But somehow, although it seems crazy to me in retrospect, I loved him unconditionally (and a little obsessively) regardless.

When I went abroad in the spring, whenever I was by myself in the apartment I felt such a strange sense of loneliness that seemed to have no relation to living in a foreign country. And as I was looking through the prior semester’s pictures, I realized it was because I was used to hanging out with my cat all day. I had spent literally no time alone the entire four months, because he was always around. How lame is that?

As for Cosmo, one of the girls I lived with took him with her when she moved into a new apartment, where he scratched her new roommate so badly she was in the hospital for three days. (Yes, three. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said he sucked.)

I have visitation rights that I use frequently, and try to love Cosmo despite the biting. I guess having a cat is sort of what motherhood feels like, which is why people can get so obsessive about it – even when your kid is a total douchebag, you can’t help but love him anyway (and maybe sometimes want to take pictures of him dressed in ridiculous outfits).

I may not be a full-fledged cat lady anymore, but I think it’s safe to say most people are just a few steps away from relapsing.

– Rachel Zarrell can be reached at [email protected].