Q Dear Miss Abigail:
How can I find a woman strange enough to love someone like me?
Signed,
Seeking Strange
A Dear Seeking:
I’m a bit worried that you don’t believe that a “normal” woman could love you, and that saddens me. But then again, I know quite a few people that think anyone crazy enough to love them would have to be strange.
The following excerpt discusss those who are unapproachable, which I sense you feel you are. You might want to either seek out a similarly so-called “deep” woman and work from there, or change your ways and start believing in yourself and others. Someone, strange or not-so-strange, will come to love you. Hang in there!
1897: Unapproachable People
There is a prevalent idea that people who are distant and unapproachable in demeanor are immensely valuable when their intimacy is once obtained.
Hard to get acquainted with, is supposed by many to be synonymous with “deep,” “cultivated” and “worthy,” when applied to character.
So far as personal observation and experience goes, I have proven this idea to be utterly without foundation.
A haughty exterior more frequently hides an empty head and heart than any profound quality.
“She is very deep; you will find her worth cultivating,” was said to me once of an “unapproachable” woman whose “keep-off-the-grass” attitude had repelled me at first meeting.
I devoted myself to a search for her hidden worth; but after many months I found her to be like one of those sterile New England farmlets where a fresh crop of stones appears as soon as the old ones are uprooted.
Who does not recall a pounded thumb and wasted temper in his youth, trying to break the shell of a tough walnut, only to find a dried and shriveled meat within?
As we advance in life we save our thumbs, and our tempers by choosing the yielding almond and pecan and letting the doubtful walnut alone.
Life is too short to waste it in such a difficult and often disappointing achievement. . . .
Buried worth may well lie for a time beneath a disagreeable and repellant exterior with the very young; but when people have jolted over the rought road of life a goodly number of years, the ore of worth comes to the surface, if it exists; for true worth is always mixed with unselfishness, and does not permit us to thoughtlessly wound or repel one another. There is an extreme diffidence or shyness which frequently afflicts worthy people, but this is easily distinguished for the “unapproachable” quality.
Nothing delights the “distant woman” more than to hear herself spoken of as “very hard to get acquainted with.”
She knows that her nature is meagre, and she is delighted to think she is hiding her own barrenness so successfully from observers behind a haughty exterior.
Oysters steamed in their shells are a great delicacy; but when one shell remains persistently closed it is a foolish waste of time and appetite to struggle with it. Toss it aside with the empty shells, and satisfy hunger with those which readily yield to the warm steam. Were there but one bivalve to be had it would be different, and the stubborn shell may only hold a shriveled oyster at best.
The inaccessible man says he does not wish to waste his affability on people he may never meet a second time. He wants to find out that people are worth while before he meets them half-way.
Is human kindness, then, a matter of bargain and sale? Are we never to be agreeable to people until we learn that they can repay us in some way?
Source: Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. Men, Women and Emotions. Chicago: W. B. Conkey Company, 1897.
~ pp. 205-8 ~