3 Reasons Why You Should Write More Love Letters
Photo by cottonbro studio
Not everyone in our digital age gets to both write and receive love letters. Throughout my three-year relationship with my now husband, I took one of my hobbies, letter-writing, and turned it into an expression of love. While our long-distance relationship consisted primarily of video calls and constant texting rather than snail mail, and I am thankful for the gift of these technologies, the 30-odd letters I wrote to my husband are something that I am so grateful I took time to invest in.
The love letter. I don’t think there has ever been a true love letter that was not full of vulnerability and a baring of one’s soul, coupled with a desire to have the feelings described reciprocated. The letters of famous historical people are of use to us now as primary source materials that provide a glimpse of the intricacies of their relationships. In literature, authors such as Jane Austen have used them liberally as plot devices (did you know that both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility first began as epistolary novels?). Today, love letters seem to be a thing of the past ─ one does not expect to wander into work and hear that her colleague just received an anonymous letter from a secret admirer.
But should love letters remain in the past? Ought we let their magic rest in novels and historical sources? Or, perhaps love letter-writing is irreplaceable? I propose three reasons why it is.
01 | It reveals a truth about the writer.
I am currently a final-year history student, and I always cheer when we study and analyze a letter, especially one between lovers or spouses, as a historical source. I find that they reveal much about the writers’ characters, their relationship, and contemporary society and culture.
For example, if you read the love letters that King Henry VIII of England wrote to Anne Boleyn between 1527-8, you can see the tenderness of Henry’s love in phrases such as henceforward my heart shall be dedicated to you alone. I wish my person was so too.
However, if you remember that Henry was still married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, until 1533, his words, “I would you were in mine arms, or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you,” take on a completely different light in terms of his character and approach to the exclusivity and endurance of marriage.
In the same way, an honest love letter will reveal more about you than you realize, both to you and the recipient (and maybe a history student in 500 years’ time!). Perhaps that sounds terrifying — but if you have nothing to hide, then a love letter is a wonderful tool for your man to get to know you better.
02 | It helps us express ourselves.
Secondly, a love letter can “speak” for us when we cannot find the right words to speak out loud ourselves. After fourteen years of journaling, and many years of writing letters to friends and family, I find it easy to express my emotions and thoughts in writing, but I have at times struggled to express those sentiments vocally.
I’ve grown a lot in this area since meeting my husband, but spoken words still don’t come easily to me. However, I am a firm believer that romance and expression of one’s emotions are vital to a healthy relationship, so to have the ability to pour myself out on paper to my beloved to share the dreams I have for our future, my favorite memories we have experienced, and describe what I feel when I look into his eyes is priceless to me.
One famous example of letting the written love letter speak for one is in Persuasion when Captain Wentworth, obviously unable to speak these words himself to Anne Elliot, writes: I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope… Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.
Wentworth’s letter is the turning point of the novel — the declaration of love finally clarifies to Anne that their past romance has indeed been resurrected and that her feelings are reciprocated.
03 | It’s a gift to your future self.
Thirdly, a handwritten love letter is a treasured item that can be read and reread over the years. It transports the reader back to the stage of love and relationship you were in when you penned it. I cry reading the card my husband wrote to me for our first Christmas, when we were in the throes of Covid cancellations and lockdowns and had been dating for just three months.
Even though there was a lot of uncertainty about the future, the love that he obviously already felt for me shines brightly from the words he wrote, and to be transported back to those early days of dating feels magical, since it feels that we left that stage of our relationship so long ago now.
For my husband’s 26th birthday, while we were engaged, I wrote him 26 love letters. They ranged from postcards to long epistles to quotes from our favorite authors, and I know that we will read and reread them and be reminded of our engagement days and the difficult circumstances we experienced during those years and how our love only grew stronger through them.
Another letter I write every year is a Valentine’s Day love letter, and then I keep it sealed and give it to my husband the next year to read. I can’t wait to have many more love letters to treasure and to reread over the next sixty or more years!
Every love letter physically embodies a memory — gift your future self with many lovely memories. Now that I have convinced you of the absolute importance of love letters, what if writing a love letter is something that you have never done and have no idea where to start with? Let me give you some advice.
So how do you begin?
If writing love letters is not something either you or your man have ever done, and you either feel self-conscious about handing him one, or you’d like to receive one from him, suggest it as a joint activity as part of a date. I have always been more into letter writing than my husband, but last New Year’s Eve we started a new tradition and wrote love letters that we then read out loud to each other. The letters were not long, but the experience of reading them out loud and then exchanging them on the brink of a brand-new year was a very special one that I now know I want to repeat every year.
What will make a love letter precious to the recipient is the fact that it is from you. If you write a simple and short letter, why not make it unique by choosing the letter-paper carefully, by crafting your own envelope using an old map or atlas, or by painting a simple watercolor flower on the card you write in? It doesn’t need to be fancy, and you don’t have to be artsy — it will be made precious to your man by the fact that you put in the effort, just for him.
Finally, and probably most importantly, start short and sweet. Don’t expect to write a beautifully complex and exalted epistle the first time you try. It is much better to write something simple but genuine and authentic than to adopt an overdone and stilted tone or even worse, copy text from Google.
Here are some ideas to start you off: focus on describing one thing you love about him, share a Bible verse that has been focal to you personally and that applies to your relationship, reminisce about a favorite date or experience you shared, or write about a dream for the future that you have discussed before and why it means so much to you.
In short…
I hope that I have managed to convince you that, while increasingly uncommon in our digital age, love letter-writing is not extinct and that it is a worthwhile pursuit as another way to show your boyfriend, fiancé, or husband how much you love him. A love letter tenderly captures and encapsulates the emotions of the moment in which it is written, and the sheer beauty of that cannot be replicated.
