The Bankhead Gleaner, September 30, 2024.

50 x 50: Although I Love Him

Sep 30, 2024

A busy advice columnist with a helping hand

Dorothy Dix was the undisputed queen of the syndicated newspaper advice columnists for about a quarter of a century. Her reign began a hundred years ago and lasted until she died in 1951. The column continued — the brand was strong — for some considerable time after she quit the quick, though not (obviously) with Miss Dix at the helm; not unless she was gripping the rudder with ectoplasmic paws. There were, however, many other Grub street dispensers of common sense to the bewildered who preceded her, or were her contemporaries, if not her rivals: as noted, Dorothy stood alone. Frances MacDonald counselled and reassured the lovelorn in a column called “Are You Single?” and Patricia King did the same in “Advice to the Perplexed.” Readers could consult Lauretta Joy on romantic quandaries, as well as on comme il faut methods of eating peas; she did etiquette as well as romance. Doris Blake, Lois Kent, Helen Worth, Laura Jean Libbey: these were but a few of the sagacious and forgotten romance wrangles and manners mavens — many, many — who fielded queries, whether locally or nationally or internationally, in the first half of the 20th-century, before the advent of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren and Joyce Brothers and Miss Manners and — may her memory be a blessing — Dr. Ruth. I was not surprised when I set to work — as always, dear reader, selflessly and entirely on your behalf — on this latest addition to my 50 X 50 project to find myself keeping company with these, and still more, advice columnists.

Here are the rules that govern the game (if you know this already, skip to the next paragraph). I choose a commonplace phrase that seems tested and seaworthy and launch it via the search engine of the digital archive, newspapers.com. Once the good ship Whatever-the-Phrase has been out in the waters a while, I haul it back to dry dock, scrape off whatever barnacles have attached to the hull, examine them carefully, sort them, and then present to you the fifty that most snag my interest. My plan is to eventually come up with fifty of these lists of fifty. (What can I say, I have time on my hands.) In the present instance, for entry number 3, the phrase deployed was “Although I love him…”

Nothing is more inimical to the concept of unconditional love than a qualifying conjunction like “but” or “although.” If you set out to find how writers over the last, say, 150 years have used “although I love him,” you’ll note that the reasons for their hedging; for their reluctant expressions of doubt or caution that shadow and enfeeble affections that were pure and unalloyed until, say, yesterday, change but little with time. In 1890, as in 1923, as in 1963, something unpardonable was said or done, or some quirk that was at first endearing is starting to grate, or this morning there was a new bread man at the door and the cut of his jib was, well, persuasive. And so on, leading to the picking up of pen and paper and a worried, hurried note along the lines of, “Although I love him deeply, I am beginning to wonder if…”

From the several thousand examples of this hesitation waltz that my search disclosed, I have selected my fifty favourites and arranged them into ten line stanzas, five all told. This is to say that each and every one of these fifty lines was preceded by the phrase, “Although I love him.” With perhaps two exceptions, all were disgorged from the belly of an advice column, and all would have been contained within the question posed by, “Troubled in Topeka,” or “Muddled in Montana,” or — well, you get the idea. The art, as always, is by my AI collaborator, Artist. All choices concerning race and gender are Artist’s; I confine my prompts to period and setting. Thanks for reading, best, BR

P.S. I did, of course, also search out “Although I love her,” but it wasn’t nearly so productive. This, I think, we can safely attribute to women being in the vast majority of advice petitioners, just as they are advice purveyors.