The Life and Times of Adventure Girl and Safety Guy

Thirteen years ago, against all odds, I, Adventure Girl, married Safety Guy.
 
While I’d spent college summers marching through occupied South African townships, Safety Guy had been meticulously crafting the planet’s safest dorm loft. The looming threat of collapsing onto his dresser thwarted, he could lay awake worrying about other things.
 
We had to be a match made in heaven, because—on this planet—we lived in different worlds. For our grad school internships I worked with an inner-city church and Safety Guy served a Presbyterian congregation in remote rural Georgia.
 
Nothing says safety like Presbyterian. And remote. And rural.
 
One evening, Safety Guy phoned me. After a brief chat, though, he was eager to hang up. A thunderstorm was brewing and he didn’t want to get struck by lightning through the phone.
 
Click.
 
Clearly, this was not the man for me. 
 
My resolve was confirmed a few weeks later when, under clearer skies, Safety Guy rang again. Considering bringing his canoe to school in the fall, he’d gotten his knickers in a twist about whether or not he needed to purchase canoe liability insurance.  
 
Canoe liability insurance.
 
That’s all I’m saying.
 
Despite it all, I’d come to find Safety Guy’s quirky sense of fiscal responsibility and unfaltering circumspection altogether endearing.
 
We began dating in the fall. Soon after, I found him prostrate on the floor of his dorm room. Knowing there was no way the loft could have collapsed, I inquired, “What’s wrong?”
 
Safety Guy explained he’d been experiencing waves of anxiety imagining the seemingly inevitable future which involved me, a minivan, and children’s car seats. 
 

Clearly he was suffering from the ever-menacing pre-traumatic stress disorder. Confident I wouldn’t catch it, I moved in closer.
 
“Slow down, mister,” I cautioned authoritatively, “We’re just dating!”
 
Once I’d gotten his blood pressure back down to…high…I reassured him, “I’ll just ride my scooter with the kids slung to my back like an African mother anyway.”
 
That’s when his eyes spun around like a slot machine calculating the cost of teeny tiny pink and blue motorcycle helmets.
 
Did I mention, match made in heaven?
 
Safety Guy proposed to me beside the Delaware River with a wooden decoy ring.
 
That’s right, I said decoy ring.
 
I’d told him I didn’t want him to waste a lot of money on some dumb ring. What he offered me looked like the brambly twigs that are left over when all the grapes on the bunch have been eaten. Before I was fully able to process the fact that the man I loved had just given me produce scraps as the symbol of his undying affection, I’d said yes.
 
No sooner had I agreed than Safety Guy was dragging me away from river’s edge, wanting to be a comfortable distance from the water when he unveiled the real ring. Naturally, he didn’t want it to accidentally spring out of its container, fly through the air, bounce off the pavement, roll down the embankment, sink into the water and burrow into the slimy riverbed as he suspected it might.
 
That probably happens all the time.
 
Married thirteen years, we now live one block from a University campus. Last weekend, after our precious little liabilities were tucked away in bed, Safety Guy heard a noise on the porch. Leaping over an ottoman in a single bound, he grabbed a metal chair with which he was prepared to defend his family and property.
 
Peeking out the window, I glimpsed a gaggle of forbidding sorority girls in flip flops. They’d obviously been given the wrong address for the night’s party. Terrified by my wild-eyed furniture-wielder, the whole sisterhood made a mad dash back toward campus.
 
“You’ll be safe there!” I bellowed down the block. 
 
Safety Guy shouted after them, “Just stay away from the lofts!”

That’s when I realized that the beauty of being married to Safety Guy is…being kept safe. He’s the adventure I wouldn’t trade for the world.

Margot Starbuck is a writer and speaker living in Durham, North Carolina.  Margot's work has most recently appeared in Today's Christian Woman, Fine Homebuilding, and Focus on the Family.  Her first book, The Girl In The Orange Dress: Searching For a Father Who Does Not Fail, with InterVarsity Press, is due out in 2009.  Learn more at www.MargotStarbuck.com.