Nobody goes to therapy planning to reveal their deepest emotional wounds through a story about their Labrador. According to the therapists who sit across from pet owners every week, though, that’s exactly what happens.

New York-based psychotherapist Natalie Buchwald, founder and clinical director of Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, told Newsweek that the way her clients talk about their pets usually tells her more than how they talk about their partners. “Pet relationships are unguarded in a way that human relationships rarely are,” she said, “and that’s what makes them clinically useful.”

She hears the same sentence on a near-weekly basis. “My dog is the only one who doesn’t judge me,” Buchwald said. “It tells me everything about what that person is missing in their human relationships. The pet isn’t just a comfort object. It’s a mirror.”

London-based psychotherapist Nino Sopromadze finds that word, “judge,” worth pausing on. “It can point to an experience of judgment in their life, whether from others or internal,” she told Newsweek. “What may be missing is the experience of being accepted as they are. It suggests that being seen by others may feel risky.”

The numbers back up what therapists observe in their offices. A survey of 2,000 U.S. dog owners conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Link AKC found that over half cite unconditional love as the greatest benefit of pet ownership, and 81 percent talk to their dog the way they’d talk to a close friend. More telling: 80 percent said a partner not liking their pet would be a dealbreaker.

Your Partner Sucks Compared to Your Dog

That last stat is a big one. For many people, the pet relationship has become the emotional standard against which human relationships get measured—and sometimes found lacking.

“People who are avoidant with humans are sometimes securely attached to their animals, and that tells me the capacity for connection is there,” Buchwald said. “It’s just not safe enough for them to express it with other people yet.”

A global survey of over 30,000 pet owners by Mars and Calm found that 58 percent prefer to spend time with their pets over partners, family, or friends when stressed. Sopromadze doesn’t treat that as an automatic warning sign, but she does think it’s worth examining. “If it starts to replace a relationship, it may be worth noticing what that bond is providing in terms of comfort or ease, and what might feel less available in the relationship with a partner,” she told Newsweek.

The joke version of this—”I like my dog more than my husband”—gets tossed around constantly. Sopromadze says don’t dismiss it entirely. “A pet can offer a space where vulnerability feels easier to access and less exposed,” she said. “For some men, if emotional openness hasn’t always been encouraged in relationships, that can feel more accessible than being vulnerable with a partner.”

Pets don’t interrupt, don’t withdraw, and don’t keep score. For a lot of people, that reliability starts to feel like the emotional baseline they wish they could find with another human. Whether that’s a comfort or a diagnosis depends on what you do with the information.