Quiche Moraine

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a number of conversations with my male friends about them being called “safe,” or in one case, a “safety blanket.” Don’t know what I’m talking about? Celebrate.

This is the phenomenon in which a (generally young) woman dismisses her behavior around a guy as “Oh, that’s just so-and-so. He’s safe.” It always sounds like it’s meant to be a compliment, but there’s very little like it to bring out the bitter in a guy even decades after the fact. It took explaining the concept of “safe” to the wife of one of these friends for me to really figure out why.

The second wife asked me one day why I never wrote poems like that for her, and she was mostly right. I rarely did. I didn’t want to tell her that she was such a critical reader I didn’t feel free to experiment and take risks with my poetry. More importantly, performing on demand for such a critical audience would have felt like a chore. I didn’t think that she would appreciate it if I didn’t have it “just right” and original. (Writing love poems as a metaphor for marital sex?)