by Joseph Peterson
These days, love letters are becoming relics of the analog era, lost to the high-speed connectivity of digital-age DMs, emails and text messages.
Taking the time to slow down enough to write a love letter by hand, say, in a Valentine’s Day card, can be one of the more thoughtful gifts to give the ones we love.
Indeed, as famous love letters that have endured throughout the ages have shown, they are more than just a performative expression of affection; they are the physical evidence — a manifestation — of what we notice about those we love.
What Is a Love Letter, Anyway?
“A real love letter is made of insight, understanding and compassion. Otherwise, it’s not a love letter. A true love letter can produce a transformation in the other person, and therefore in the world. But before it produces a transformation in the other person, it has to produce a transformation within us.
Some letters may take the whole of our lifetime to write.” That’s a high bar-setting definition from the famed “father of mindfulness” Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk and peace activist, on what a love letter is, or at least what it ought to strive to be.
Of course, not all famed love letters throughout history reach this vaunted state. Many are deliciously scandalous and racy or comfortingly dull with the shared details of life, as Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov writes to his wife Vera. “Tomorrow, I’ll write you about all kinds of everyday things.” They can even be full of sorrow or downright funny.
What they share in common is that they are genuine feelings of the heart that found their way to a lover in the form of an intimate letter, a lofty poem or a flowery sonnet of adoration. The takeaway here is that while the form may change, the function of a love letter remains essentially the same: authenticity.
Alexandra Rickman, a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist in Westminster, says that sending and receiving love letters, especially in this digital age, can be a creative, heartfelt way to satisfy the emotional need to be seen, understood and appreciated.
“That somebody can see a quality in me and appreciate it as a unique thing that I am, and that I offer, that’s such a nice feeling,” Rickman says, embodying the perspective of the recipient.
It’s The Effort That Counts
There’s no getting around it. It takes genuine curiosity to get to the level of detailed knowledge about someone else. Then, whether they say it in a poem conforming to a tightly metered verse or a free-flowing stream of consciousness that wanders from thought to thought, an impactful expression of love is only the result of a fair bit of effort.
This gesture can and should include taking time to write a message by hand, according to Rickman. A love note sent via text becomes instantly hard to find in the forever scroll of the conversation thread, and it doesn’t carry the same emotional weight that an intentional, tangible letter possesses.
“A [handwritten] letter is something that people will keep in a keepsake box,” she says. “When you look at your loved one’s handwriting, it has a different emotional experience to it. It’s proof that they were thinking of you by taking the time and effort to write down their feelings.”
Writing a love letter like that can feel a little vulnerable, a natural side effect when touching on thoughts that matter. The key is to express it anyway, Rickman says, and call attention to those feelings of self-consciousness in the letter itself. “Say you wrote something that sounded super cheesy and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous.’ Then you would say, ‘That last line that I just wrote makes me worry that was too cheesy, but I know that you’ll know my intention was good.’”
There’s a great example of this sentiment in the oft-cited love letters between English writer Virginia Woolf and English author and garden designer Vita Sackville-West. Their correspondence positively trembles with the vulnerability of desire. In one, Sackville-West chooses to reveal her raw feelings and name them plainly:
“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple, desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that.”
Shall I Compare Thee to a Poem’s … Pentameter?
Love letters can take many forms throughout the phases of relationships and become treasured artifacts that showcase carefully preserved emotions. Even the style of expression can also be performative without necessarily cheapening it. After all, there’s a reason why many mimic or draw inspiration from William Shakespeare’s sonnets and other more artificed linguistic structures.
“If most English Renaissance sonnets are 14 lines of iambic pentameter, then that means an author only has 140 syllables to work with,” says McDaniel College Associate Professor of English Paul Zajac. “When you factor in a rigid rhyme scheme, that makes for a lot of constraint on what you can say and how you can say it.”
Zajac teaches courses that examine Shakespeare’s influence on modern society, literature and pop culture. He observes that while the form of the sonnet in Shakespeare’s day was meant more for an audience than a personal letter would be, the form “does assert the timelessness of the experience and expression of love,” he says, particularly Shakespeare’s ubiquitous Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” which is likely already in many a Hallmark card.
The sonnets provide a sturdy backbone on which to hang our feelings and spark creativity through self-imposed limitations. They’re also suitable for the writer of these ornate expressions of love. “I think — and Renaissance writers would agree — that experiencing and expressing love often forces us outside of our comfort zone.
If experimenting with a type of writing or formal, flowery language pushes someone outside their comfort zone, then that can be a good thing!” Zejac says, invoking English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” “The poem is, among other things, a challenge that the speaker sets for herself about how much love she can cram into a single sonnet,” he says.
A Labor of Love
What is it about a handwritten love letter that seems to shine more brightly even in the era of LED screens? To learn from Rickman, it invites the writer to slow down, to intentionally and mindfully see the object of their affection, hold the thought, and work to express it. The fact that it’s hard to do and a little scary is intrinsic to the process and a refinement of the outcome.
Zajac points out that Shakespeare, once again, can help the eager heart feel seen in its struggle to write a love letter by remembering the unexpectedly lovestruck protagonist in “Much Ado About Nothing.” “It shows Benedick struggling to write love poetry to his beloved Beatrice,” he notes. “As he says, ‘I was not born under a rhyming planet.’ I think a lot of people trying to write a love poem might sympathize.”
