There’s a fine line between nice and weak (a line that I don’t care to walk, personally). And nice guys usually get lumped in with weak guys. It’s unfortunate really and I thought that it might make more sense coming from someone who wanted the bad boys before marrying a nice guy.

Niceness is relative, a bit. It’s also not something that I’ve ever really valued. As mentioned before, it’s always fallen a little to close for comfort to weakness, and that’s something I don’t tolerate. Before my marriage I never thought of kindness as an attribute that I wanted in a mate.

I thought I wanted adventure. I wanted adventure that was uninhibited. I wanted my hair in the wind, my toes in the sand, water, or sky. I wanted freedom and the beauty that comes with being free. I thought that adventure was the opposite of safety, but I was wrong.

Safety scared me so much more than heartache. Nice guys could provide me “security” and “safety.” But these words were terrifying. I didn’t want a life that revolved around what was convenient or planned. I craved this wandering so deeply that I did what anyone would think to in my situation; I found something wild. The problem with what is wild is that it will never want to be tame.

I don’t really subscribe to the idea that we should live without regrets. There are plenty of things I regret. This regret trains me to improve. I regret those wild beings. I regret believing, or even hoping that the life I envisioned for us would ever have been satisfactory to them. I regret the wasted time.

In the name of adventure, I broke my bones, my soul, my being. In the name of adventure, I laid down my life. In the name of adventure, I sacrificed who I was. In effort to never play it on the safe side, to never be accused of being boring, to never be bored, I gave exactly what it was I was hoping to gain–a carefree, blissful life.

This is not a story about a girl who stopped chasing adventure in the name of safety, it’s about a girl who found adventure in safety.

Back then, I thought that the adventure of life came from those people, but now I know, it came from me. Being with someone who makes me feel safe allows me to express the adventure that I am. No one had to place the wildness in my soul; I just had to realize that it has always been there.

I didn’t need someone who would invent our latest exhibitions, I just needed someone who would follow me to whatever end of the earth I chose to go to.